Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 33

    UFO 50 is really making me want a Steam Deck. Anecdotally, the games are such a perfect fit for a handheld platform that many people with high anticipation picked up the hardware as a sort of "christening purchase" for it; feels like I've seen a fair bit of "my brand new Steam Deck is great for playing UFO 50" on social media, (though to be fair, I mostly follow games journalists and indie game devs).

As the owner of a Miyoo Mini Plus, I can certainly attest to handhelds feeling like a natural fit for exploring games of the past, (or just games that feel a little like games of the past). Part of it must be the small screen making things look nice and crisp. Many old games were originally played on what would be considered pretty small televisions by today's standards. And without the help of a real-time signal processing device like a Retro-TINK, the pixel art of yesteryear looks very strange to me when rendered in gigantic, crisp 4K.
I would say that in many cases, the average intended playtime of video games has also been going up, such that a single player game released in the 80s or 90s is likely to fit into a plane ride or commute in ways that many massive open worlds or RPGs of today might not.

Where was I going with this again? I guess the current loop of sitting at a workstation and alt+tabbing between UFO 50, a blog, and Krita is making me wonder what it would be like to play this at the park or something.

Anyway, I'm experiencing in real time that this topic of hand-held-ness doesn't directly connect to anything I've got going on today, so...

I've been pondering Capsules.

WarpTank is supposedly about "severing all ties to Capsule World." You enter capsules on the station to warp to what I assume are their counterparts on Capsule World, where you destroy a device that's connected to the capsule you use to return to the station.

Mooncat begins with what I interpret to be the "running eggplant" protagonist navigating a dream of what might be the surface of Capsule World long ago, when the capsules were whole.
You can see a few near the beginning laying on their sides in earthen depressions.
Then, when you navigate the same environment is what I presume to be the present, the same capsules are cracked and completely overgrown. Incidentally, the locale is now overrun with a number of exotic life forms that were not present before, leading me to believe that the capsules were the source of this life.

These weird cross-game connections are fascinating. I've explored Mooncat much more thoroughly than WarpTank at this point, so I'm going to try and keep an open mind about which game I think narratively takes place prior to the other...

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