Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 14

    Sticking with this project is becoming pretty challenging. Sure, fifty days is a long time, but the current point of friction is specifically that other cool games just keep on releasing. I'd love to take a UFO 50 break and binge on other stuff, but the next blog entry can't randomly be about Zelda or indie horror! No wonder I played so much freaking Night Manor instead of blowing the pixel cobwebs off any of these 20 remaining titles; apparently, I've got an undiagnosed case of the October spookies!

[Twenty games seems like quite a lot to have grayed out at this late stage. What's it going to take to get that menu fully lit up?]

Alright, as an exercise, I'm going to use the sort function to randomize the main menu, and the first five unopened games in the order are gonna get played. The catch is, I only get a single life or continue before having to move on. "Game Over" means try something new. First impression gauntlet go!

Rakshasa (1P, Platform) "Even death won't stop Jangi from avenging the destruction of his village by demons!"

Opening cutscenes filled with demons of hell set the stage and calibrate me for the physical and spiritual task at hand...
This senseless brutality will not go unpunished! The heroic village chief is cut down and I'm given control...
Of his ghost?
I can move the spirit around in the air above his body, cool. There's some sort of blue wisp orbiting the screen around a little golden mandala; friend or foe? I guide the spirit into the blue wisp, only to discover that it is indeed an enemy obstacle; whoops.
GAME OVER. I could not have invented a funnier start to this challenge if I'd scripted it. 

Mortol II (1-2P, Adventure, Platform) "How many will have to sacrifice their lives to save Mortolia yet again?"

There's no way I'm going to drink deeply of this one prior to playing more of the first Mortol, but I'm stoked to see the supposedly darker original vision take what appears to be the a shape that vaguely resembles Legacy of the Wizard, an NES game that I never owned, only rented or played at other kid's houses and thus looms large as being one of the games that I wasn't equipped to comprehend the scope of at the time.
The subtitle of Mortol II: The Confederacy of Nilpis is sort of sending me into fits of giggling prior to even starting, so I'm probably a bit on the caffienated side...
This a rich design tapestry compared to the sacrificial gimmick of Mortol. I burned through something like 30 lives just limit testing the mechanics and answering various inane mechanical questions:

  • Can more than one ninja portol be active at once?
  • Do gunner ammo refills run out?
  • Can you stand on the ammo boxes?
  • Are engineer pipes always vertical?
This is going to be a fascinating and stressful one after exploring enough to have concrete personal goals like "unlock the yellow platforms in 20 lives or less."

Pingolf (1-2P, Sport) "Each year the best golfers in the galaxy show up to compete at the UFO Invitational."

There are at least two golf-themed games that I've seen in this collection so far. The other was more like a top-down golf RPG and this would be more traditional if it wasn't a side-scroller that let you "dunk" the ball after hitting it. The LX Console briefly takes hold and inspires me to input "DUNK-BALL" ...Invalid code! Those harebrained shots in the dark are never gonna result in my finding a secret.
I have no idea whether the five selectable characters handle differently, but the vibes are telling me "yeah, baby!" This spirit of awesomeness immediately left my body as it exploded due to swing meter overcharging. How was I to know it wasn't going to bounce back and allow me to dial in a specific power level? It's cool to see the recurring character Alpha in the leaderboards, which makes me wonder whether that's just UFO 50 meta-flavor or if she's playable.

Before I stroked my way out of the tournament, I noticed that one of the levels didn't have background music like the others. I need to deactivate the secret-hunting part of my brain and move on...

Vainger (1P, Adventure, Platform) "The Vainger returns to Io and finds itself betrayed. The enemy must be found and eradicated."

Okay, this is just a full-on metroidvania or search-action title with Metal Storm gravity flipping mechanics.

I'll, uh - return to this in just a bit...

[That's it? Poor Disks of Lorderon or Lords of Diskonia or whatever it's called! You may think things like "four out of five ain't bad," or "the project's not even half over," but you've got another think coming...
And yes, that is the original turn of phrase, hard K and C sounds that border each other are bound to merge over time!]


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