Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 9

At just under one fifth of the total blogging project length, I've finally managed to lay hands on half of the games in UFO 50. At this rate, I'll have played some of every game before the halfway mark! This seems like a decent point to do a little check-in; a little round-up of how I'm feeling about the games thus far.
    Before I try something goofy like stack ranking my first 25 games, it's worth pointing out that the screenshot above is probably just as informative as anything I'm about to write below:

• The list of icons is filtered and sorted by the games I've spent the most time in.
• (though it should be noted that I'm often hanging out inside a game while writing, editing, eating, etc.)
• The gold cartridges represent games that have been beaten.
• (finished by some internal metric like "got past the final level")
• The cherry cartridges represent games that have been completed.
• (finished the hard way, by some challenging criteria like "without continuing")

[You're imagining a version of that game grid where all of the icons are gold or red, and it's unnecessary; this isn't some NES Remix challenge anthology to be beaten, it's a vast body of varied work.]

I was half-joking about the stack ranking thing before, but it might actually be an interesting exercise when combined with an excuse to talk about where I'm at with some games. This will also be a good time to touch on games I've technically been playing but not really blogging about thus far.

#25 - Campanella 3

I've certainly played less engaging corridor shooters, but something about this being the endpoint of the Campanella series instead of some standalone experiment in pseudo-3D scrolling rubs me the wrong way. It reminds me of Sonic 3D Blast or something, but as I suggested entry before last, this may be completely intentional commentary on the part of the "UFO 50 Recovery Team."

#24 - The Big Bell Race

Having gotten the cherry, I don't see myself revisiting this one unless some local co-op opportunity arises. A trifle, but the reason being baked into the meta-fiction of it being developed in two weeks is still cute.

#23 - Onion Delivery

When I get back to this one, I'm going to have to learn to drive much faster, because a demo recording I just saw looping made it clear that much like the Campanella UFOs, you've got a lot finer control over the squirrely beast than my early fumblings might indicate.

#22 - Pilot Quest

I'm not that big of an idle game player, but the fact that there sort of is one in here still cracks me up. I think It's going to be satisfying to be done with this one, but it also feels like the kind of game Derek Yu would hide some stuff in... I'm going to be mildly upset if I need to mess with my Windows System clock or something.

#21 - Planet Zoldath

And here's where I realize that I didn't clock this as the origin of the Campanella UFO and Pilot when I set out to examine the whole arc that UFO Soft took its name from in the meta-fiction; very embarrassing given the subtitle of Pilot Quest is "Return to Zoldath"!
I might just be out of my Toejam & Earl depth here, but I didn't know you could drop an item when I tried to play it before, so it's possible I'll wind up liking this a bit more down the road.

#20 - Bug Hunter

Absolutely terrifying roguelite depth; they should have sent an engineer, because I am simply not ready to figure out all the rules and strategies packed into this thing yet.

#19 - Star Waspir

This might deserve to be higher on my personal list, but one of the key factors I'm grading against is how much time I'm thinking about spending mastering a game beyond just struggling to cherry the cart. This might also be a rough measure of how much I think about about a game while I'm not playing it, and beyond being generally curious about why I never got into shmups, this seems like something I'd stop messing with if I managed to lock in and beat it.

#18 - Ninpek

There's something really loose and un-ninja-like about how this feels, despite its interesting respawn mechanics. I could use a bit more infinite running and autoscrolling experience, but something tells me I'll ultimately enjoy Velgress more.

#17 - Velgress

Still working out the base rules and hazards here, but getting a very early impression that the heroine and pace of vertical traversal are up my alley and deserve a much closer look.

#16 - Paint Chase

This might be as close as I've ever been to appreciating a maze game, thanks to it not being about avoiding enemies. On-the-fly routing isn't my strongest suit, but it feels like the right objective focus for something that would have cleaned up in the arcade if it had existed alongside other Pac-Man-likes.

#15 - Magic Garden

I keep coming back to this one even though I'm pretty terrible at it. I've learned there's a jump button my brain will tell me to use after I've died. Magic Garden would rank a lot lower if it wasn't for the tantalizing sense that optimal scoring strategies are lurking just out of sight, if only I could catch a glimpse around my own fat hubris.

#14 - Fist Hell

I feel bad ranking this so low for now, because it looks and feels like a very good brawler, but it's a genre that I tend to bounce off of due to my lack of fighting game fundamentals. Still, the mobility options put a lot of similar games to shame, so perhaps I'll get the hang of it eventually.

#13 - Avianos

There's more than enough going on here to throw off my initial attempts to figure out what a decent strategy even looks like, but good lord is Avianos ambitious! Lots of board game design influences in the devotion system, and I love the theme of sentient birds looking to their dinosaur ancestors for guidance and power.
For a strategy game with auto-battler combat resolutions, I suspect the simple unit stances offer more tactical utility than it seems at first blush. 

#12 - OverBold

I don't really have enough dirt on this to know what I'm talking about, but the ability to greedily wager yourself into higher difficulty brackets from the jump is interesting enough to put OverBold above a few other titles I haven't properly explored yet.

#11 - Attactics

This is probably going to rise in my personal rankings the more I try to wrap my noodle around the real-time nature of the thing. The depth and pacing is so much higher than similar lane-based games like Plants vs, Zombies that it initially knocked me for a loop, but I haven't actually returned to the base game since being exposed to a hidden turn-based variant that I got to through the Terminal...

#10 - Kick Club

Only just now am I reading the description and picking up on the theme that you're a soccer kid beating up on anthropomorphized balls and gear from other sports. The unhinged Mega Man and Rescue Rangers vibes are working their magic even though I'm not historically a big Bubble Bobble guy.
I'm stoked to return to this one because the demo recording loops showed me that I missed the fact that you can charge up your kicks!

#9 - Campanella 2

It's going to be a while before this game's preliminary position gets called into question, because I'm absolutely going to play a lot more Campanella before I get around to exploring this further.

#8 - Mortol

The platformer format of this immediately appeals to me more than Lemmings ever managed to, even if the resulting plane full of spare doods is a huge jerk for not simply dropping you where you need to go. That weird bit of themeing leaves me wondering if the design originally required a lot more retracing of your steps, and maybe an investigation of Mortol II will retroactively shed some light on this given the fiction implies some creative friction between designer Benedikt Chun and director Gerry Smolski.
Mortol may slide down my personal rankings quite a bit if later level designs don't rise to meet the gonzo potential of the core premise.

#7 - Devilition

This kind of "picture the chain reaction logic" puzzle feels new to me. I'm sure there are genre analogues out there I simply haven't played, but it's like some ultra-permissive and meditative take on Pipe Dream? There's a timer, but it looks like it's just there for achievements or bragging rights.
Even though all I've got is a single failed run, I can see myself losing a lot of time staring at this little puritanical hell grid.

#6 - Campanella

I'm not even that deep in yet, but the slick and risky feel of the controls is doing that thing where I'm thinking about how to get a handle on UFO piloting even when I'm focused on other games or tasks.

#5 - Barbuta

Despite being a sluggish test of patience, I keep being drawn back to this mysterious castle. My routing slowly gets better with every run, and each secret allows me to save just a little more CASH. I've managed to liberate the castle a couple of times, but there's still rooms I've never seen and the potential to find some terminal codes or who-knows-what in there.

#4 - Mooncat

This is currently the game haunting my daydreams whenever I think about how control schemes are a lens through which everything about playing a game must pass. A mere five minutes of play has positioned Mooncat as a profound, science-fiction-level neurological question about an alien being picking up a controller and not understanding how to make Super Mario do jack fucking shit.
The (probably?) superficial connections to Barbuta only pique my interest further. A prime example of something that can probably only exist at this level of polish ensconced in the larger context of UFO 50.

#3 - Night Manor

Genuinely pretty creepy for a pixel art point-and-click adventure, and feels like it's from a lost era where PC-98 games like Snatcher and Policenauts had more influence before the mighty CD-ROM arrived. I took the bad end way out last time I played, but feel like I was very close to confronting the main stalker enemy, so I definitely wanna cherry this one.

#2 - WarpTank

I still haven't tracked down either of the "bosses" that I suspect are referenced in the challenges, but once I get my teeth into this one, I suspect there will be no rest until every little steaming mug of hidden coffee has been found!

#1 - Bushido Ball

This should come as no surprise, given my last entry was all about it. Despite not having a local competitor with which to spar, this tiny six-character fighting game has captured my heart.
There's just something about how the evocative the character of the game manages to be despite all the minimalism; Only four directions and two buttons, but a wealth of tactical options and approaches to controlling space.

    While casting about for some sort of closing statement or paragraph, I stumbled into the Profile menu and just discovered that there is a "Mood" setting and you can set it to "Infinity" and the game selection music changes and... what even is UFO 50, INFINITY is right, my brain is blasting off again!