Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 39

 

A screenshot of the UFO 50 Main game selection menu with all of the cartridge icons dusted off/played. The scan-lined pixel art display is backed by a red and burgundy checkerboard. 9 of the carts are cherry red, three of them are golden yellow, and the remaining 38 are the default blue.

[Look at you, designer. You're a mess after all that intestinal spilling about your early failures to get back on the proverbial horse. Woefully behind on blogging, and not playing nearly enough UFO 50, which this project is ostensibly all about...]

    Apologies for the disruption; ol' day 39 here might just have to be a short high level check-in about how things are progressing.

With Campanella thoroughly coffeed out, I've been turning to its sequel a bit. I've gotta say, Campanella 2 makes a heck of a lot more sense when your UFO piloting skills aren't costing you any hit points just travelling between locations in these big levels! I'm still working out what most of the items do though trial-and-error, and the fuel management game is... interesting.
There seems to be a lot of mechanical weight placed on the timing and order you collect stars in, and there may be some tricky advantages to getting as much done on foot as possible. Problem is, in tiny Minish Cap mode, Pilot's sister Isabelle can't shoot up or down, and she's incapable of jumping like she can in the side-scrolling interior levels without risking a surprisingly short fatal fall. 
I wouldn't call a design detail or choice like this some sort of deal breaker per se, but but there's an important-feeling lack of verisimilitude that this introduces. It's much later in the fictional chronology of the collection, but imagine if Mini & Max restricted your abilities based on what scale you were currently occupying. I can't help but dream of a version of Campanella 2 where the fly-about levels were designed to accommodate the same moveset as the platforming ones. The feeling of existing at two different visible scales would be so strong!

    Perhaps because of the nearly identical coffee secret modus, I've also been trying to get back into WarpTank one level at a time. The farther I get with this one, the more I enjoy its lightly clashing tones and suspect it's going to remain a favorite. I'm likely to write more about both of the titles above, so perhaps it's time to take WarpTank off this "Block Koala diet" it's been on.

Incidentally, the dream of cherry-ing or even gold-ing all the games by the end of the fifty day span is well and truly dead at this point, but taking a look at my little secret menu garden, perhaps a more sensible and achievable goal would look something like:

"Have all the gifts collected by the end of day fifty?"

Screenshot of the hidden Garden inside the main menus of the video game UFO 50. A charming pixel art diorama of a three story house sitting on a little grassy plot of land. It features a tree, a pond, a wooden fence, and a smattering of collectable decorative and functional sprites, like a tire swing, hot tub, and watering can. The house is cut away to reveal it's pink PigDog occupant and various bits of collectable furniture like a couch, television, and toilet.

[<= Day 38] - [Fifty Days of UFO 50] - [Day 40 =>]

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