Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 7

The only reason this project is still going; the only reason I'm still blogging about UFO 50 days later is just how impressive and unique it is as an aggregate body of work. Larger collections of smaller games like Wario Ware or Mario Party only get to feel as strong as their weakest minigame links, given the meta-structure will routinely force you play them. Here, you're free to play the hell out of the games that speak to you and ignore the rest. The comparative freedom of this structure risks allowing the player to be daunted or overwhelmed by freedom of choice and difficulty, but gains so many introspective elements in the process that I'm still struggling to make myself stop trying to master Barbuta or Bushido Ball and open up other games.

[One of the reasons you're doing this is to create a sense of obligation that pushes you to actually FOCUS on something for once.]

Finding a "North Star" to guide me into a session of exploration instead of yet another comfortable attempt to gold or cherry a game I already know has been difficult, but uncovering details about the fictional UFO Soft has been consistently satisfying.
    They weren't always called that, by the way; these imaginary developers used to be employees at LX Systems, the company that manufactured these mysteriously 16:9 monitor-laden computing consoles. Presumably the LX-I isn't the model pictured alongside the slogan "Play Forever" when you start up UFO-50, because at that point it wouldn't have come with controllers or a bay in which to store them. The LX must have been intended to be a business and productivity platform, because Thorson Petter "almost got fired" for developing Barbuta on company time. Later models of the LX came with video game controllers, and I have yet to see the mouse or keyboard peripherals that it must have had, so it follows that the platform succeeded because of, and became known for, video games.
Petter didn't get fired because his little platformer was successful.

Campanella (August, 1985) "A surprise success that inspired our rebrand to UFO Soft. It was later packaged with the LX-III."

They made sixteen games prior to this, but it's clear that this was the breakout title that really blew up, causing the video games division of LX Systems to become UFO Soft. As a result, references to Campanella-style spacecraft and the cartoon character Pilot that guided it are all over the collection from this point forward.

Indeed, having played it out of order, I found the existence of the hidden mug-o-coffee collectables in WarpTank to be oddly comment-worthy, but now I see that they're simply direct mechanical references to Campanella. So why the coffee originally? The description says "And don't forget to stop for coffee!" but if I had to guess, one of the UFO Soft developer personas was simply a worshipper of the bean.

This thrust-based control scheme takes a bit of getting used to. My initial impression was one of your typical Moon Lander but zippy like a greased ferret. The more time I spend practicing, the clearer it is that despite my early fumblings, you've actually got an incredible amount of precise control. I'm pretty far from mastering it, but the wealth of little dexterity challenges strewn about reward lots of points and extra lives that let you practice even further into these 50 stages.

The Big Bell Race (October, 1985) "Built in just two weeks, this 2P offshoot of the Campanella series was also sold with the LX-III."

It feels good to gold a cartridge on the very first try!
This is probably one of the smallest games in the collection, so it makes sense to give it a bit of fictional history that neatly explains the scope.

Now that I've got my flying saucer sea legs, I'm enjoying the process of zipping around these single-screen tracks much more than I ever did one of the inspirations for this spinoff, R.C. Pro-Am.

Campanella 2 (October, 1987) "The game's protagonist was switched from Pilot to Isabell at Joy Akebi's suggestion."

And here I am agreeing with the fictional creative decisions of a made up developer, but this sequel injects so many Blaster Master and roguelike twists to the saucer-flying mechanics that a change of protagonist really does thematically make sense.
    The limitation didn't really hit me before this, but doubling back confirms that the original Campanella was also limited by a fuel gauge, it just topped up so consistently in the regular course of play that it was never the thing that killed me. It would be pretty wild if a mechanic like this was retroactively added back into the "earlier" game in a series, but the titles of UFO 50 could have been developed in any order, despite the imagined chronology!

I suspect I'll be compelled to try and finish the first game before properly digging into this one, because I'm getting hung up on miniscule design details, like your inability to shoot in four directions when outside your ship, despite being able to when inside a platforming level.

Campanella 3 (June, 1989) "The final entry in the Campanella series. It features three dimensional scrolling."

I've only dipped a toe into this one, but it's wholly remarkable that UFO 50 can contain a simulated throwback microcosm of the effects of sequelization like this. While I don't quite feel "ready" to dig into all the things Campanella 2 is doing differently, I'm looking forward to figuring it out. As a nascent fan of the original, (that I only started playing a few hours ago) I actively found myself disliking Campanella 3. They've managed to turn me into a snobby purist about something entirely fabricated, likely in order to comment on this exact phenomenon!

Technology marched on and inspired popular games to evolve in risky directions. For every successful introduction of 3D elements to a beloved series, there are scores of unpopular experiments, many of which feel less precise and satisfying than their 2D progenitors, just like this. 
It'll be fascinating to see if new versions of the old "sequelitis" arguments will spin up inside of the UFO 50 fandom about who had more fun with the different titles in this series.

Pilot Quest (November, 1988) "Used the clock features of the LX-III to generate resources even when the game was closed."

The other direct Campanella spinoff, which feels out of place not only because it represents a relatively modern idle game that fictionally predates Cookie Clicker by 25 years, but because it sort of works in the context of the larger collection. On it's own, this is a pretty unremarkable series of farming/resource loops bolted onto a timed Zelda-like exploration thingy. The Startropics-esque use of yo-yos as a weapon certainly got a smile out of me, at least. 

[The less that's said about how much time you've wasted whacking that moon crystal the better.]