Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 19

I'm changing the "mood" of my UFO 50 main menu to blood red as a symbol that today, all the various cherry cartridges shall go un-played. May their simulated reddish plastic blend into the checkboard background, for this is another day of blowing digital cobwebs off untouched cartridges!

Lords of Diskonia (1-2P, Strategy) "War has come to land of disks, and the red and blue armies are on as collision course!"

This was a rather frustrating initial experience. The rules of launching disk-shaped units to deal damage are simple enough, but my dead angle reckoning in relation to the UFO 50 house resolution of 384x216 was initially abysmal. The zoom level is somewhat close-in for the distance and power of travel units are capable of; there's the freedom to pan around, even while dialing in your aim, but without some mock Mode-7 zoom trickery it's hard to take in the big picture, (and I can't blame the "UFO 50 Recovery Team," I wouldn't want to see that kind of mixel-looking dithering in this collection either!)
The early losses taught me a lot and all, but the little dotted line guide felt like a very imprecise way the judge the angles in a game that's all about caroming disk physics.

It's not exactly zero-sum, but something about the thin strategic layer and the turn-based nature didn't feel terribly well balanced to me, outside of the obvious unit/gold/turn symmetry. I'm sure with better positioning and choices, the battles will feel more tactical and less unfair or arbitrary. Increasing your damage through multiple bounces seems like the only way to pull ahead or come from behind; several early skirmishes came down to a complicated physics-based version of "you go, I go" trading the same amounts of damage back and forth.
I'm sure as they introduce more interesting unit types the gameplay will improve, but it wasn't a great first impression.

Hyper Contender (1-2P, Platform, Sport) "The daring, desperate, and indebted fight for money in the pits of phogon."

Terrible news everyone! There's a new Bushido Ball on the block...

I really should have figured that the platform fighter about knocking rings out of opponents instead of knocking your opponents out of the ring would be an immediate hit. Thanks to the two-button fantasy console limitation, the kits are extremely stripped down compared to something like Super Smash Bros. or Rivals of Aether. Apparently, I'll just leap at the chance to learn something that feels like a fighting game but doesn't have enough initial mechanical complexity to overwhelm me.
Yet more evidence that if I'd fallen into Street Fighter the way a lot of my peers did and had the built up muscle memory to mentally map six different buttons plus directional modifiers, I'd be a very different kind of gamer today.

I entered tournament mode with the very first character on the roster, the blade-wielding Elka, but got my ass handed to me by the very first AI contender playing Yogo that I held to my "zero continues bushido way" and declined the rematch.
    Like a salty little brother that just got cheesed out by what he assumes is a superior pick, I re-entered the tournament with Yogo and effortlessly breezed all the way to the final encounter on my very first try. Beginner's luck, or are boomerang spam and long range claw arm ring retrieval actually just overpowered?

"Only a fight against your own clone will satisfy their hunger for thrills!"

I didn't make it through the hilariously set-up mirror match against your clone, but for a second try this felt great. Bushido Ball has trained me well; I'll probably make short work of this title in the days to come!

Grimstone (1P, RPG) "Praise Biggan, the four of you survived the saloon fire. But somethin' tells me this story's just gettin' started..."

Well, predictably, this is... This is a lot.
The initial party selection is already like a narratively richer version of the first Final Fantasy! I'm not sure I'm actually ready to start the wild west NaPa RPG at this juncture.

[<= Day 18] - [Fifty Days of UFO 50] - [Day 20 =>]

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