Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 42

    Rather than making a bunch of tired Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy jokes, I just got a much better idea! One of these days I'll learn that not everything needs to take the additional time to have some sort of catchy title attached, but how does "The Struggle Game Roundup" sound?

[With blog topics like these, it's obvious you're writing and editing too much and not playing enough...]

The plan is investigate a few of the UFO 50 titles that seem like I should be done and dusted with by this late stage in the project, and pick apart what barriers I'm encountering, whether they're issues with the games themselves or just things that expose some of my personal hang-ups.

Pixel art game diskette/cartridge featuring a little yellow car with a bulbous shape on the roof

Onion Delivery

With the deepest apologies to fictional programmer Chiffon Bola, I've been trying and failing to convince myself to take another bite of this particular vegetable...

  • My biggest internal point of comparison is Campanella, given both games confronted me with an initially difficult-to-control vehicle
    • Difference being I found the UFO gamefeel to be more fun and exciting than frustrating despite sucking at it just as hard
    • The time pressure here feels distinct; apparently I favor accuracy/fuel limitations 
  • External to the collection, my first Grand Theft Auto experience was the third one, so I'm not equipped with any nostalgia for the older top-down city driving games
What's The Salve? I probably need to push the speed higher so I'm forced to learn to control the car in a way that leads to success instead of my slow, disappointing early performances.

Pixel art game diskette/cartridge featuring a little yellow fish-shaped submarine with cartoon eyes

Porgy

This is an odd case where I like that game a lot and have been very successful within it, but now have mixed feelings about my gold cartridge seeming "earned" or "legitimate" that's interfering with my desire to finish it off...
  • Basically, I managed to defeat the final boss on the same frame I died, and got a weird bugged partial ending that I've been reluctant to dive back in and earn more legitimately
    • My initial reaction to this was documented back on Day 31
What's The Salve? This makes little rational sense, but my current Porgy feelings would be completely dissipated by starting all over again from scratch! This is an expression of some "restart gamer sickness" I've been suffering from for years, given the way I pick up beloved games I never finished and feel the need to restart them each time the urge to get back in strikes me.
Leaving just countless Bloodborne and Lunacid characters in my wake! Tt's a huge time management problem that picking up an old save feels so wrong to me, but I digress; that can't be the solution for Porgy.
For reasons I can't fully articulate, it isn't going to feel "right" to be to confront the final boss again until I've met the cherry requirement of finding all the powerups? Which is going to take a while unless I start looking things up, so perhaps this is a post-fifty-days-of project...

Pixel art game diskette/cartridge featuring a toothy warrior mugging in a sort of parody of the "SuperCell" style that's holding a sword and shield

Attactics

The very first LX Terminal code I ever found by paying too much attention to the intro animation to the entire collection whisked me away into a weird version of this game that I played for so long one sitting that the normal, realtime game now feels strange and upsetting to me?
  • I probably played the first couple of levels normally prior to seeing that turn-based mode, but my total playtime in the former just PALES in comparison to that single exhausing marathon run deep into the latter
  • Also, that icon of the warrior's face just seems so tired and beleaguered that I'm inclined to let him rest! (probably not a real factor)
What's The Salve? This is most likely just a matter of not putting that terminal code in ever again and getting used to the pace of the real game, but I've gotta be a huge outlier on this one, right? Noticing that code and figuring out where to put it before playing Attactics simply cannot be an intended or common experience.

Pixel art game diskette/cartridge featuring a cartoon walrus

Waldorf's Journey

Another strange case where that entire project of humorously rating the "Golfiness" of all 50 games sort of started with realizing that Waldorf's Journey is Golf. Why on earth would this make it harder to return to playing?
  • Well, it's placed an odd priority on the other golf games in the collection with less fancy ball control and powerups
    • Shouldn't I beat Golfaria before digging into dream walrus golf? It did "come out" earlier chronologically...
    • Isn't Pingolf a much more straightforward interpretation of golf, despite it "releasing" later in the chronology?
What's The Salve? And thus, my own brand of silliness proves to be my downfall as it becomes clear this is nothing more than some walrus-sized-waffling on my part.

I'm starting to suspect that once this project wraps up, I'm going to be craving a more "normal" relationship with UFO 50. Predictions on what that actually looks like can surely be deferred for another few days...

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