Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 37

    When I first played Campanella way back on Day 7, it was such a struggle just to keep the UFO from running into walls, let alone earn enough lives to make it past World B. The controls are good and responsive enough that it was clear this was my fault, but BOY did it take some time to get where I am now with the game. In my most recent run, I deftly collected all forty steaming mugs of coffee and defeated the final boss with over thirty extra lives to spare!

The way Campanella handles feels so precise and buttery smooth once you internalize the muscle memory for how much thrust you need. Without this excellent gamefeel, there wouldn't be nearly so much heft to the UFO Soft fiction of this being the title that really solidified their status as a game studio; not just some department inside of LX Systems, Inc.
Being the eventual inspiration for the studio name is load bearing, in the lore sense, so I can tell an effort was made to make you feel the impact of this game across the rest of the collection. That feeling can take many forms, from sprites originating here, to there being five sequels and spinoffs, to the coffee collectable mechanic directly appearing in WarpTank, to it just being one of the most fun games to master and speedrun. If I do wind up re-stack-ranking all fifty games, Campanella is sure to shoot up in my personal rankings, (no promises though, I got a lot of that "list energy" out of my system in that extended Golf joke!)

Along this winding road to mastery, I had a great time trying to make sense of all the weird props and themes in Campanella; It's like you're trying to escape a giant cosmic carnival. The somewhat generic early Kirby inspired tilesets give way to carousel and ferris-wheel challenges. There's increasingly haunted funhouse settings, with grinning jack-in-the-box obstacles and cabinets that fling their dishes at you once in passing. You make your way through a roadside diner area complete with a cooking vegetable kitchen boss! I'm reminded of really lavish late-NES nonsense like Panic Restaurant.

    This is gonna seem really obvious to anyone that's played a Derek Yu game like Spelunky, or indeed those of you playing UFO 50 alongside me, but holy crap there are so many secrets just littering this thing! Hidden warp zones for skipping levels? Sure thing, but you better believe I didn't notice the subtle visual cue for those until I happened to leave the game idling on the very first stage...

You see, before hitting any buttons, each level starts with your flying saucer tucked away in a safe little bubble. This prevents you from dying to gravity immediately if you happen not to quickly spot where on the screen you teleported in. It also lets you assess the state of enemy and moving block cycles before taking a deep breath and starting your run.
In this particular case, I was just planning on hanging out and listening to the music loop while writing and editing content just like this...

By the time I alt-tabbed back to the game, I was greeted by a feline face I'd never seen before! This shadowy sprite of a black cat with white markings just kinda pops up eventually. I think I felt my heart skip a beat back there; that look is genuinely unsettling, like you happen to be a particularly juicy mouse sitting on the opposite side of the screen.

I wonder whose kitty this is pixel art of, and whether it's just an Easter egg or connected to any other deeper secrets...

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