Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 25


Only three more games remain un-played! The grand blogging project is half over as of today, so it would be an... auspicious post upon which to have finally laid hands on every single UFO 50 title...

CombatAnts (1-2P, Strategy) "The evil red ants have taken your land! Fight back and defend your queen!"

    Playing this game unlocked a memory of something I haven't thought about in years...
Starcraft was a formative game for me, sort of in all the wrong ways. Digging into why is far beyond the scope of these initial explorations, but basically I'd forgotten about the very first mod I ever made; a custom 1v1 PvP SimAnt map. The little green food balls in CombatAnts took me back to playing SimAnt on the Super NES using the mouse that came with Mario Paint. Vivid recollections of designing and scripting a caste birthrate control system using a lurker unit trapped in a triangular corner of the map came flooding back.

I'm not sure if these memories made me predisposed to dislike the design of this incarnation per se, but for whatever reason I consistently failed to retain which directional inputs mapped to which commands. I found myself mashing buttons when in melee combat with enemy red ants, simply because you could skew the combat results by mashing in SimAnt on Super Nintendo. Before trying CombatAnts in earnest I should probably look that up and see what other players think, because I can't be alone; fervently tapping buttons for no benefit could be one of the worst habits for your hands, like a kid swearing that mashing increases the odds of a PokeBall catching due to confirmation bias.

Quibble Race (1-3P, Strategy, Simulation) "In the seedy world of quibble racing, sometimes it takes shady tactiucs to get ahead."

    Right off the bat, having played so many other UFO 50 games, seeing familiar mainstays like Pilot from Planet Zoldath, Brazz from Hyper Contender, and Alpha from Velgress made me smile. The "recovery team" has done such a cracking good job of seasoning these little references and (sometimes literal) Easter eggs into games to create a cohesive, creative omelet.

I don't think I've ever played a sports betting video game before this. There must be a Mario Party minigame that's effectively just players picking something to bet on and then witnessing some totally random results, given how many pure RNG choice games have existed in there over the years, right? I know horse racing sims have historically been popular in Japan, but I suspect those involve plenty of deterministic and skillful play, like making smart breeding choices and piloting jockeys efficiently.

This is a bit of a head scratcher from where I'm sitting; the themes and gambling don't really appeal to me at all, but I appreciate the degree to which the mechanics lambaste intergalactic sports gambling as a completely corrupt sham

Cyber Owls (1P, Platform, Shooter, Strategy) "A superweapon threatens to destroy the world, and it's up to the Cyber Owls to save the day!"

    The final game I had yet to dust off, but also the final game UFO Soft released in the 80s fiction of the company. After playing this thing for all of _ minutes,  I had to put it down because I couldn't stop laughing.

Not that the game is funny per se, it's got a sense of humor to be sure, but I have to admit that I was laughing AT the game a bit more than WITH it; at least, on the surface!
You see, the "UFO 50 Recovery Team" is almost certainly in on the joke. Just two different missions and rescues in, the list of things that Cyber Owls is arguably poking a bit of fun at is longer than I would have expected:

  • Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles also-ran imitators of the 90's
    • (like Street Sharks, Biker Mice From Mars, and Battletoads)
  • 80's action movies and spy thrillers
  • Roguelike interpretations of other real time genres
  • Licensed console platformers with infinitely spawning deluges of enemies
  • Metal Gear Solid
  • Western superhero team-up media that owes everything to Eastern Sentai tropes
    • (but feel like the creators' reach exceeds their grasp of the genre)
  • "Perspective shmups" like Space Harrier and Wild Guns
  • Just video games in general when they try to be so many genres that none of the parts seem focused-on enough to carry the whole
And all that is really just scratching the surface of this weirdly bloated multi-genre title, considering I still haven't played half of what I suspect is lurking in here. I kind of hate Cyber Owls, in a way that I think might be completely intentional. It feels like this was where a large number of game prototypes that didn't get made into "full" UFO 50 titles went to get hot glued and sanded together.
Seems sort of fitting that UFO Soft's swan song be a jumbled mess of radical owls with fictional cross media tie-ins.
(July, 1989) "We launched our latest game alongside an original comic book series."

[<= Day 24] - [Fifty Days of UFO 50] - [Day 26 =>]

 

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