Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 21

A mere ten games remain unopened at this point. I really need to rip the band-aid off and take at least a cursory look at everything before the twenty-five day halfway mark on this project. I keep hoping that the scope of this thing will somehow feel smaller once there aren't any more "what on earth even is this" titles looming...

Waldorf's Journey (1-2P, Arcade, Platform) "Waldorf didn't go looking for adventure. He was just trying to enjoy a nice nap..."

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this yet. There's something very "flash-game-coded" about it, but as someone that never drank that deeply from the NewGrounds watering holes in the 90s, I'm struggling to back that impression up with any substantial references. A UFO 50 meta-animating force is starting to take shape though; this game is haunted by GOLF, of all things. Waldorf is as much another golf ball as he might be some sort of Flappy-Angry-Walrus-Icarus.

It sure felt like the kind of game that would have an ending revealing that the walrus protagonist was dreaming the whole time. One short dip in the water later, and it's revealed as the entire premise; no need to master the jump strength and carefully manage that flappy fish energy or tool usage. Of course the walrus is dreaming of leaping and gliding around the heavens!

It's tempting to wonder aloud what the puffins do or why I changed the weather to make things harder on myself, but I'm making an effort not to let the mysterious game design DNA of Waldorf's Journey bother me too much before moving on, here.

Hot Foot (1-P, Sport) "It's time to grab your beanbags and settle your differences on the hot foot court!"

It's fun to imagine this as being based on a competitive gym activity experienced by one of the, (real or imagined) developers as a kid. Beanbags would be pretty dangerous if not explicitly aimed below the waist, so it's kind of plausible? Of course, the video-gamification has super moves and is clearly a sort of 2v2 offshoot of Bushido Ball structurally. Hot Foot is going to be very hard for me to get into compared to Bushido Ball.

The main problem is the controls.
This design is absolutely begging for there to be at least one additional face button! Your hold-to-shoot shoot input is massively overloaded with context-laden tap actions that feel incredibly awkward at first. Further practice may prevent me from switching characters when I'm trying to pick something up, but this is the first time that I've felt like UFO 50 strained against one of its retro console design limitations. I'm reminded of when fighting games as we know them started to crystallize, and attempts to back-port things like TMNT Tournament Fighters needed extremely contrived inputs to function on an 8-button pad. I feel like if Hot Foot was an NES game, an 80s designer would have tried to hijack the Start or Select button, maybe assign something to A + B? Make no mistake, those would also be pretty terrible control compromises. Hot Foot only stands out because up to this point, every UFO 50 game has been so cleverly designed to make the lack of face buttons feel natural.

Divers (1P, RPG) "Control Dylan, Orlok, and Thyme as they explore the watery depths."

Prior to launching this game, the description immediately made me think of The Lost Vikings, except the RPG tag indicated more of a "Narrative Party." That intuition proved to be correct, but unlike the decidedly Final Fantasy-esque Grimstone, this game is pulling from some number of RPG conventions I'm unfamiliar with. Its fictional release date is almost two years prior to Grimstone's, and the history blurb on that game makes it clear that it was started right around when Divers shipped. The implications seems to be that after completing their first role playing game, the team immediately started making another easier to pick up, more narrative-heavy RPG.

I wish I had more experience with the types of games that Divers must be influenced by, perhaps on the Commodore and PC-98. We had a Commodore 64, but I always gravitated to various arcade ports and shooter-y things, not early D&D-inspired titles. 

This first taste of Divers was brutal. I find guessing wildly at a game's structure based tiny context clues and design intuition fun, but I have to imagine a TON of players are going to bounce off this one initially. It's going to take a lot of experimentation to figure out the damage types and enemy capabilities. My first encounter with a school of piranhas was... bloody educational.

[<= Day 20] - [Fifty Days of UFO 50] - [Day 22 =>]

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