Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 11

 

[Well, it's happened again. You've gotten lost so deeply in a single game that you ran out of time to properly research and write about any of the others...
    Fortunately, you left behind some notes about your time with Mooncat before creating that extremely detailed map of the castle in Barbuta. Unfortunately, they haven't really been edited or fleshed out into anything resembling a formal blog post.]

Good Lord Mooncat (March, 1985, 1-2P, Platform) "Jump and dash through forests, caves, and mountains, in search of the egg."

"Conceived as a spiritual sequel to Barbuta, Thorson Petter spent nearly two years perfecting it."
That's the most tantalizing and eye-opening history blurb yet!

In the LX Terminal, Mooncat has the system name "BAR2.UFO" just in case you needed even more evidence that it's the sequel to Barbuta than the History tab note.
Interestingly, the system name for Barbuta is "TRAP.UFO" as opposed to something like like "BARB" implying that the working title might have been something like "Trap Castle"

Catalogue the similarities and connections to Barbuta...
  • Golding this cart wound up being like an extended tutorial
    • "now you know how to play and what it takes to win"
    • In both games, the cherry represents something closer to the "actual" completion 
  • Yoshi-style eggs
  • Both the knight's helmet and the THING in Mooncat are eggplant-shaped
    • Given Spelunky, this could be a hint that these Thorson Petter led games are key to some larger, harder to find secret
  • The hopping skull spiders vaguely remind me of the green skulls
    • Does this imply "clear the room" mechaincs?
  • The controls themselves in Mooncat are equivalent to the initial slowness/stiffness of Barbuta
    • Intent may be to bounce you off and increse the odds that your first multi-hour game experience isn't one of these La-Mulana enigma platformers
  • That pressure plate ceiling trap in Barbuta that's meant to teach the egg system with a cruel joke also guides a new UFO 50 player out and away toward games with much tighter and more satisfying reward loops
Speaking of connections, the capsules... does this thing start on the "Capsule World/Planet" from WarpTank?!

GREAT GOOGLY MOOGLY the "hemispherical" control scheme!

    An alien-feeling, unintuitive mapping that will demonstrate your own capacity for adaptation if you stick with it for more than a few minutes. It's probable that my personal ability to mentally rebind buttons and map different control schemes is higher than usual; is it possible this would never feel natural to some players? It would be fascinating to put this in the hands of someone with no controller familiarity...

I can't help but imagine some extraterrestrial being playing Super Mario Bros. and finding the controls to be really unintuitive, then trying Mooncat and exclaiming, "now THIS feels intuitive!"

I've settled on settled on D-Pad Up and Y as my two inputs of choice; the ones that now feel like "home row" and automagically snap my brain into "Mooncat Mode." It feels like I just got a tiny taste of what differently-abled gamers must run into all the time when the accessibility doesn't line up but they overcome it by adopting a specific layout, loadout, or physical strategy.
  • Up/Down/Left/Right = Move Left
    • Double-tap to run/flip/slide (can midair?!)
  • X/A = Move Right
    • "
  • Move Left+Right = Jump
    • Jump in midair to slam (Slams can stun/bounce enemies?!)
    There have to be more eggs than the spoiled one at the end... What is the initial "timesprite" from the dream and is there some way to convey/preserve it? Maybe taking warp zones is bad if you're trying to find everything? At least one of them loops with itself, weirdly...


[Most of these notes are barely grokkable. You're going to have to get sucked into something that makes more linear sense and write about that soon...]

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