Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 23

    A while back, I experimentally set the CRT Effect setting in UFO 50's options to "Soft," and haven't looked back. This isn't really the time or place to get into it, but my desire for a really high quality upscaler with fancy filters and processing like the Retro-TINK 4k seems to be rising...

To have any hope at all of completing initial "first blush" explorations on all fifty games before the project's halfway point, I gotta get blowin'! (Off the digital dust and pixelated cobwebs, of course.)

Rail Heist (1-2P, Platform, Strategy) "The most infamous train robbers in the west pull off a series of daring heists."

    The written tone and immediate mention of angels and demons makes it very clear this is set in the same "gothic west" world of Lonestar that Grimstone does. Sure enough, the woman in the lead position of my party in that game is here to help with getaways in Rail Heist, so I guess now I know where she gets her reputation from! Mister Blue is the kind of horse that gives off big Babe the ox vibes, and this makes me wonder if I'm going to run into some Johnny Appleseed and Paul Bunyan analogues over in that RPG...

The real time and turn based hybrid design is super original and interesting, and there's some really fun Super Mario Bros. 2/Doki Doki Panic vibes going on. Looking forward to perfecting times and testing if I'm right about angel/devil stars hinging on sparing/killing guards respectively, but these first looks are just supposed to be a taste.

Valbrace (1P, Adventure, RPG) "No Knight has ever survived the journey into Gnothrok keep. What makes you think you'll be any different?"

    If Rail Heist feels like some turn based elements seeping into a real time platformer, this feels like some real time Punch-Out! combat finding its way into a turn based dungeon crawler.
There's so much going on here! The spellcasting system is some sort of directional input glyph monstrosity that somewhat punishes experimentation, since failing to cast a spell uses a little bit of mana. Thankfully, mana regenerates just by walking around, but I'm getting the impression that time spent moving steadily spawns more wandering monsters.
The early bats and slimes aren't very hard to deal with, but I got absolutely smoked by a mimic when first encountering one.

It's going to take a bit of exploration, (both literal and figurative) to work out what I should be doing here. I can extinguish the torches and re-light them using a spark spell I stumbled across; to what end? why is the diagonal dodge input so hard to execute, and does it have any invincibility frames?

[Having fun? Have you forgotten how much of this time has been sunk into Pilot Quest? The sooner you cherry the beast the sooner you can put Nozzlo behind you...]

"Used the clock features of the LX-III to generate resources even when the game was closed."

Eff this guy in particular!

[<= Day 22] - [Fifty Days of UFO 50] - [Day 24 =>]

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