UFO 50

What an absolutely delightful project. Headed up by Derek Yu of Spelunky fame. (The perfect videogame) This is a collection of retro 8-bit inspired games. One thing that makes it special is that it’s framed like a lost media collection. The intro slides ‘tell’ the story of some guys opening a storage unit and finding a fictional 8-bit videogame system along with 50 disks for it. This collection covers most of the genres found on the NES, plus some unique mashups, and flavored with more modern design sensibilities. (Mostly) Notably lacking is anything like a Legend of Zelda. But you’ve got side scrollers, beat’em ups, strategy, sports, puzzles, rpgs, metroidvanias, bullet hells, etc. I found at least half of them to be good, and a handful were Really Good. Two or three are legitimately GREAT and deserve their own stand alone titles imo. I could spend all day talking about how many fantastically creative things are packed in here My favorites are: Mortol II - A side scrolling Lemmings-like where you have direct control of one lil guy at a time. You choose the class, and that determines what they can do with their action button. Shoot, turn into a stone platform, explode, etc. Sadly it only has one level, but it’s massive. It’s the perfect blend for me of puzzle, action and exploration as I found more and more clever ways to utilize the weird powers my lil guys had. You have 100 to beat the game, and it took me over a dozen tries to figure it out. Grimstone - A JRPG with a mini-game timing mechanic for combat. I can’t do JRPGs unless they have real-time combat gimmick. This one is nothing spectacular, but it did the trick to get me through the whole game. A big part of the charm is that the setting is a sort of Old West cowboy theme, but in hell. So you’re fighting demonic versions of old west tropes, and unraveling a mystery about the local god and devil. Valbrace - A First Person dungeon crawler with real time combat. Think Punch Out but with swords. I found this one compelling enough to actually print out a couple pages of graph paper, because in classic, old-school dungeon crawler fashion, you will be lost in minutes if you’re not drawing your own map. There are several floors to grind through, each with some unique mechanic, like poison slime floors that can be toggled from one configuration to another if you find the levers. The art -while being legit 8-bit- is really compelling, and the combat/magic system is surprisingly deep. Lords of Diskonia - This was my favorite of the bunch, and one I keep coming back to despite ‘beating’ it several times. There was a physical toy/semi-board game called Crossbows & Catapults in the 80’s where you used little plastic contraptions to fire disks at your opponents warriors and buildings. They re-released it kinda recently. I have very fond memories of this game because it has a perfect blend of strategy and real-time skill expression. You have to set up your troops and barriers in clever ways, and you have to aim and fire well. Lords of Diskonia captures this blend and expands on it in clever ways. The strategy layer is a randomized map with nodes that can contain gold, power up scrolls, mines, and Inns, where you recruit your units. You and your opponent can move two nodes each turn until your paths cross and then the combat begins. This is essentially shuffleboard with lots of extra mechanics. Each unit is a disc - one of three sizes. And has stats for how much damage they do when they hit another disk, how many hitpoints they have, and other attributes such as the ability to poison, shoot a projectile after their move, collect bonus gold from the board, etc