Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 24


Five unopened games remain. Time to marathon some first impressions before crossing the halfway mark on this blogging project...

Elfazar's Hat (1-2P, Arcade, Shooter) "Elfazar is hailed as a great magician, but his captive animals are ready to strike back!"

    When I say that this is "just" a new Pocky & Rocky spiritual successor, but starring an escaped stage rabbit and pigeon instead of a shrine maiden and tanuki, understand that's in a tone of utter delight, not derision.
The existence of Elfazar's Hat really felt like a surprise, thanks to a quirk of UFO 50's main menu attract mode; you see, because I've been spending so much time between games writing and editing blog entries, I've seen all of the fifty little snippets of games playing themselves looping. Because this game happens to be represented there by its between-level bonus stage and not its core gameplay, I figured this was going to be an isometric auto-scroller with lots of hopping and coin-collecting.
Turns out I've got some 8-way directional shooting and dodging in my future!

I only completed the first level before moving on, since there's four other games to investigate today, but I'm really looking forward to playing more.

Mini & Max (1P, Adventure, Platform) "Mini and her dog Max are locked in the storage room. Harness the magic of shrinking to escape!"

    Good lord! Conceptually, this game has it all: scale, platforming, sibling cruelty, adventure, time dilation, upgrades, talking animals, SMB2 ride-chucking, social commentary, trade-puzzles, cuteness, even MORE scale...

There's even a "great minds think alike" through line to the narrative where the UFO 50 Recovery Team was on the same page as Aggro Crab; both this and Another Crab's Treasure use the introduction of human detritus to a smaller scale ecosystem as an allegory for capitalism rapidly warping more agrarian societies.

Mini & Max truly is a delight. Inspirational, even, when you consider how it suggests a sort of alternate genre fusion history for platformers and adventure games of the early aughts. A version of reality where A Boy and his Blob sold millions of copies and Ghost Trick was super influential.

In fact, I lost so much time "just checking it out" that there's no way I'm going to get into those last three games before the big "two five" at this rate...

[<= Day 23] - [Fifty Days of UFO 50] - [Day 25 =>]

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