Playing through every game in UFO 50

I figured I'd start a little diary for my UFO 50 playthrough, which I'm now four streams into. I've been streaming it on my twitch channel the last couple of weeks after receiving it as a gift from a friend, and I've been enjoying the hell out of it - each game so far has been really fun and I'm eager at this point to play through every single one of them. So, I think a playthrough topic is in order.

I was interested in this game when I first heard of it, because I love NES-era gaming (see: my topic about my favorite 100 NES games), I love this style of game, and I'm pretty broad in my tastes and good at a wide variety of stuff, so nothing in this compilation is likely to turn me COMPLETELY off. Therefore, I decided I'd play through the games chronologically and really try to give every single one of them a fair shot before moving on - I won't force myself to beat each game before moving on but I will give each game a truly earnest chance before setting them aside, as opposed to just jumping into one for two minutes and then quitting out and trying another. Each of these games have pretty cryptic gameplay mechanics that they don't explain right away, and the scope of a game isn't apparent at the start of play, so I want to make sure I'm really giving it a fair shake.

As of writing the start of this, btw, I'm 12 games into the collection - a decent chunk but still a lot to go. I'm kinda recapping with a little bit of hindsight here on what I've played so far.

STREAM 1

Barbuta

Going chronologically ultimately put me up against Barbuta first, and I can see why, for a lot of people, this would be a really big mistake to start with. Barbuta is a game that commits to its old-school jank, and it is not shy about it. My commitment to at least *trying* to earnestly beat every game was really shaken here - I played this for a couple of minutes and wasn't really too sure I wanted to continue.

But I stuck with it, and I'm glad I did, because it was rewarding in the end. Although making progress felt slow and frustrating at first, every time I started the game over I started to chip away at it a little bit - figuring out which routes I could take, figuring out which routes I could NOT take. I went down the right path and got some treasure chests and got stuck for quite a bit not knowing how to get anywhere, but it wasn't long before I found a fake wall that led to a parasol. Didn't know what it did at first, but eventually I reasoned that maybe it protected me from the acid drops and that I could climb up a ladder blocked by one - indeed! That let me get back to the shop after long last and finally buy the pin, which opened up a lot for me. It took me probably three game overs to get to this point but I soldiered on, exploring the southeast corner once I knew how to get the pin and parasol, which eventually led to the rod; soon after that, I realized there was a room I inexplicably missed that had a hint about looking for things out of the ordinary, and following that advice immediately showed me an acid pit that could be jumped into to get a necklace that makes some platforms move, and I also found the B/A room which I pretty quickly realized could be used to solve the A/B room by taking the implied path shown in the B/A room, in reverse. Easy!

With the key, I had the choice to go through the key door, so I did, which ended up skipping a really large portion of the map in the NW and NE corners, as well as a couple other things that I never quite figured out. Oh well! I went straight to the boss with full eggs in tow, with an invisible floor before the final boss that I only figured out because there was literally no other way to go, including backwards, so I had to, after reassurance from my chat that it was fine.

Sadly, I did not get the cherry on my first clear because I took a single hit on the final boss, which is frustrating. It sucks to have to play all that way just to get one shot at the final boss damageless - it's not that hard, but alas, I will have to clear the game again for the cherry.

It ended up taking me a little less than 2 hours, and it was a really rewarding experience. Even though the game is really slow, it's not that long, so it's not so bad, and finding secrets and gradually making progress with each play was really fun. I thought I was going to hate this game and I ended up enjoying it. This is why I'm sticking with each game!

Bug Hunter

I IMMEDIATELY fell in love with Bug Hunter in a way I did not with Barbuta. Barbuta took some labor to truly start to love, but Bug Hunter was immediately my shit. You have a list of actions like a hand of cards that you can take to move around a grid and shoot down monsters, and you need to shoot enough of them before time runs out. I'm surprised that I can't immediately think of a game that's particularly similar to this one - I was mostly tapping into my Into the Breach expertise for this one, but that's not quite a good comparison. I really like the push and pull in this one between using attacks, moving to a better position to attack, and being able to collect energy cubes in order to buy new actions; the fact that you can blow up energy cubes and use them as a weapon themselves is amazing too, leading to some really big-brain tactical play.

On my first playthrough I beat the first level easily because I got a Bombard action, which hits all raised areas, and one of the monsters was one that creates raised platforms... so they all died every time I used the action. Sadly, this meant I hadn't really properly learned the mechanics of the game yet, and level 2 overwhelmed me pretty quick - at one point I decided to see what would happen if I let an egg hatch, and uh... well, I found out that that's an instant game over. Oops! I wasn't winning anyway though. The guys that are invincible if they have adjacent guys are really rough and I let them overrun me far too quickly.

But, I felt like I had a pretty good strategy going forward. Try to prevent evolution for as long as possible, centralize my position and stay on higher ground if I can, go about 50/25/25 on having attacks/movement/collect. Having more attacks seemed critical to stay ahead of the game - movement isn't a wincon, only attacking is. Having just enough options to get into a good position and hit everything from there felt like the winning play.

And, well, it was. I had one more game over because I was just testing if an energy cube blowing up on me killed me - yup! - but then on my third play, I thrived. 3 jobs was no big deal, and I got through 6 jobs and got my cherry with no problem. The timer ticking down to 9 days made it a little harder but I managed to stay ahead of it. 8 days was a lot though. I scraped through job 7, but job 8 took me out, and I feel like it would be hard to get much further than that, so with that, I feel like I've exhausted Bug Hunter. I've seen most of the modules, most of the enemies, and most of what this game has to offer as a result.

Took me about two hours to cherry this one. Like I said, I don't think this has a lot of staying power as far as me coming back to it much, because I don't feel like each playthrough will be too much better and I can't do much better than I did, but it was a great two hours.

STREAM 2

Barbuta and Bug Hunter took up the entirety of my first stream of the game since both games took about 2 hours for me to beat, but it was worth it to stick with both of them. The next stream had me playing through a bit more variety.

Ninpek

I don't have a whole lot to say about Ninpek! It's fun, but there isn't much to it. As an autoscroller, it didn't feel like I had much control over the pacing of the game, though it certainly isn't slow - there's so much going on that I was basically unable to read twitch chat the entire time. I died a couple of times before I even understood that I had lives to begin with. On my third or fourth attempt, I think, I got quite late into the game before the laser pigs made me lose like four or five lives in a row and I died as I got to the final boss, but I knew that I'd get it on my next playthrough and I did. I finished off lap 2 easily after that for a quick cherry - this one only took me about half an hour. Not a very hard game, reasonably fun, I probably won't return to it all that much.

Im curious if you ever learned that walking off of high ground onto a bug will instant kill it (and nullify any on-death effects), made me value movement much more than I had previously. You can also push them into holes by walking into them

I was never brave enough to try and step on the ones that leave pits.

Gonna follow your twitch and catch some of these live hopefully (though I'll skip paying attention to ones I've barely played)

Tag

WazzupGenius00 posted...

Im curious if you ever learned that walking off of high ground onto a bug will instant kill it (and nullify any on-death effects), made me value movement much more than I had previously. You can also push them into holes by walking into them

Yeah I never figured this out lol

I gotta catch up in my writeups to my actual progress!

Paint Chase

This is the first game to really surprise me - I didn't expect a Pac-Man game with Splatoon mechanics! Very cool.

Easily the most difficult game up to this point, on my first play I lost at like level 7 and thought I'd never be able to beat this game, but I gave it another try and I... did. It came down to developing a good set of principles; focus on killing enemies instead of painting the floor, always try to route towards the spawn points at the moment enemies come out, and get to the items at the right time and try to let them get painted over for another use.

Later on I developed another tactic; focus on painting unpainted floors, instead of enemy-painted ones. It's not like Splatoon, it doesn't matter if the enemy has territory, only that you do. Therefore I figured it's kind of like the WWII plane diagram where you put armor on the places on the plane that weren't hit, because those didn't survive. In this case, I paint floors that are unpainted because those are the places enemies aren't going - they won't paint over those floors. But ones painted by the enemy are likely to be painted over again!

Once I figured that out, the game wasn't too bad - I didn't lose that many lives and I ended up not even needing an hour to finish this one off. The goal was 555 points and I only ended with 524, which was rough - I felt really close and a couple of levels I could have done a lot better one.

Fortunately, a patch seems to have changed the goal to 500, which feels weird - I feel like I HAD to get this many points just to survive! So I should have a retroactive cherry but the game isn't updating for me to reflect this and I don't know why. I'll have to hold off for now to see if the game gives me a cherry.

Anyway, pretty cool game. Very cool concept. I like that the last level pits you against an AI car and it makes me imagine that this game would be really fun to play 2-player.

Magic Garden

My first few plays of this puzzle game were rough. I didn't like it too much, mainly because you only have one life, so it feels really punishing to make a mistake and have to start all over from the beginning. I got frustrated by this one and quit early (but I came back to it later).

Mortol

Kind of a Lemmings-esque platformer where you sacrifice you little guys to create platforms and stuff, kind of cool. For some reason, I haven't been enjoying this one too much - because lives carry over from one level to the next, any time I waste a life I feel like I need to restart the whole level over to carry over as many guys as possible! That combined with a few frustrating situations (those big guys that chase you SUCK) and I kinda bounced off this game initially at 1-C. I've come back to it but bounced off of it again a couple more times. This game doesn't seem bad, but I haven't gotten into it yet and so far it's one of my least favorite games in the collection. I'll figure it out at some point!

Velgress

Despite my best attempts to not bounce off games early, Magic Garden and Mortol both kind of frustrated me, and I did end up passing on them temporarily, but I was kind of salty and frustrated and that bled over into my first playthrough of Velgress. I HATED this game at first - again, the one life thing was so frustrating! I kept dying early due to stupid mistakes and fumbling with the controls, and I kept playing it more and more rushed and making more and more stupid mistakes and not making progress because even one little mistake erases any progress you make. Again, I come back to this one later, but I was really hating these games for a bit.

Planet Zoldath

I finished off stream 2 with a little bit of Planet Zoldath, which at first I did not understand at all; my first playthrough I just walked around and tried to figure stuff out but I didn't end up making a whole lot of progress because I was just trading items and getting confused a lot. I got a hint I couldn't understand and died in a couple of unexpected ways - I ended up calling it a stream when a crystal blew up on me and killed me. I vowed to come back to this one and the others later, though.

STREAM 3

Well-rested after taking a break for a couple of days, I decided to pick the game back up and go back to the games I'd bounced off of and try to be a little bit more patient at tackling them.

Planet Zoldath (Part 2)

Coming back to Planet Zoldath, it became extremely clear right away what was actually going on in this game. It's based off of randomizers! Cool! Suddenly this is right up my alley. It wasn't obvious the first playthrough - I knew stuff was procedurally generated but that was about it. But the Zelda randomizer influence was a lot more obvious after a couple of plays - EVERYTHING is randomized. Which aliens have what traits, what trades are available, what resources even do, which obstacles you'll have to overcome to beat the game, etc. I was initially confused on a couple of my first plays because some aliens will stand there but NOT talk to you, and that was one of the ones that WOULD talk to me on the second play, so it took some experimenting to get the hang of it.

And get the hang of it I did. I ended up LOVING Planet Zoldath - the game is really short once you've seen everything there is to do, but it's still a lot of fun putting it all together and figuring out which items you need to get, in what order, to get all the resources you need to clear the game. I eventually put it together that you need to get the three map pieces, one of which you need to trade for, one of which you need to get through an overworld secret, and one of which you need to get by going into the dungeon behind the snail and completing the dungeon.

My first successful playthrough was half an hour or so because I spent a decent bit of time faffing about, but when I saw that the cherry goal was to win in 20 minutes, oh, it's ON. I love randomizer speedruns, and this is my element. So I got right into it, but unfortunately rng was bad on my first speedrun attempts - one of the resources I needed a lot of was way too scarce and forced me to spend too much time grinding and I only ended up finishing in about 21 minutes. But the second play went a lot smoother and I totally had the game figured out by that point and I cleared it in 16m 19s - I thought I was gunning for a sub-15 at one point and I'm sure I could get it with enough attempts. It is pretty rng-heavy but that's randomizer speedruns for you. I'd love to actually race this against someone, this is one of my fave games in the collection so far and I could see myself trying to master speedrunning it even though it's a pretty simple puzzle game at the end of it.

Magic Garden (Part 2)

At this point, I decided to circle back to Magic Garden. One of my viewers said it was their favorite game and I was surprised because I didn't like it at first! It's so slow paced and it felt easy but with a really low margin of error, such that any small mistake started it all from the beginning. But I gave it another try and got better at not making mistakes, and it started to feel... better. And once I started ironing out my mistakes, understanding how the potions work and using them more wisely, I was able to win pretty easily, actually. And I kind of enjoyed the game at that point! It's got a cute aesthetic and eating up enemies when you have a potion is satisfying in a Pac-Man like way. I didn't get the cherry on my first victory because I didn't know I needed to play for points, but I decided to just give it another attempt and I got the cherry on my second attempt. Playing for score wasn't too hard - leaving a bunch of Oppies behind at the moment of using a potion makes it easy to get a huge combo up and gobble up a ton of points, and it was just a matter of trying to play mistake-free from there. Ended up liking this game a lot more than I thought I would.

Velgress (Part 2)

And then there's Velgress. Boy, I really hated this game for a WHILE, but once I realized that it's only like 5 minutes to finish a run of the game... well, eh. It's not so bad, I guess. I struggled with it for a long while, trying different strategies - clear the first level fast, or hang around and get money? I ended up landing on trying to make as much money as possible and go for stun reduction since that seemed to help the most, but gun power was nice to quickly kill the birds holding the keys - I figured I was gonna need those.

Level 2 was consistently the level that was giving me the most problems, mainly because for the longest time I didn't realize that shooting the blinking machines creates a line of clouds - not having those made advancing a lot harder, especially when trying to get past those electric gates that you have to rotate. I was also struggling with controls for a while but eventually realized that if you're holding jump when you land on the ground, that actually buffers the jump input and makes you jump immediately - I didn't realize this and was wondering why some of my jumps weren't working correctly.

On my third time through level 2, I saw the triple jump upgrade in the store for the first time and that was what finally gave me hope that I could actually clear the game. My first time buying it, I got through level 3 easily and went to the final level (not realizing that you need all three keys to continue - I ALWAYS got the keys so I didn't know the game could end here) and I only died to the final boss at the veeeeery end. I was like, right there. Didn't take me long to get back, with the triple jump in tow again, and finish off the game.

Again, knowing that it's pretty short does make the sting of dying a lot easier; it's shorter than, say, an all zones run of Crypt of the Necrodancer, and runs of that game at full tilt don't have much margin for error either. Velgress still frustrated me a lot and I didn't have the best time with it, even though it does play pretty fun and it's got great music.

Something I hadn't mentioned yet is that I've started to notice UFO 50 having common themes in a lot of its games - eggs, cherries, birds, octopuses/squids, one-eyed final bosses, and even the number 12 popping up a lot. Velgress has a lot of these - the eggs and the birds, the squids, a final boss with one eye, and there's 120 floors in the game (120 being another common number, that's how many points for a 1up in Paint Chase). I even timed how long it takes the birds with the keys to fly away and it was exactly 12 seconds! It's not a coincidence, I tell you! UFO 50 fucking loves the number 12! I've become kind of conspiratorial about this, like all the games must have references to eggs somewhere, and now I keep looking for it each game. Which of course meant that the next few games had like, no eggs.

Paint Chase 1ups were originally 150 points instead of 120, so Im not sure if a pattern actually exists there. But both Konami and Namco have been using their signature numbers since the 80s, so maybe they are going for that and I just havent noticed all the 12s/120s

oh yeah and for Mortol, a good thing to know: if you go back and for example play 1-A and improve your remaining life count, it retroactively gives you those extra lives on all future stages youve done as if you had them at the time. So once you feel like youre better at the game, replaying one or two early levels can give you a big boost at the end.

Also for Mortol you can chain abilities for a bit. Except after exploding, that's kinda final.

Attactics

I really enjoyed this one! Played through the first 16 levels of it right away and kind of got the hang of it pretty quick. Although it has the looks of something like a Fire Emblem or Advance Wars style game, in a way, it's really more of a falling-blocks puzzle game with rules for how the pieces interact, and that makes for a really interesting twist. On top of that, piece movement is pretty challenging to get your head around at first - the fact that you can move pieces backwards, but not forwards, is sorta hard to grasp. (Although you can move your pieces forwards if you're swapping them!)

I didn't really have too much trouble with this one so far; I think I had one level where I ran into trouble but otherwise it's pretty straightforward, line up your grunts, put archers where they have a clear path to kill stuff at range, put your shield guys in the same line as their archers, it all pretty much works out once you're doing all that correctly. You really don't have ANY time to think about it though, so it's a mad scramble and you're constantly making minor errors. Making tactical judgments at this kind of breakneck pace is really fun, but pretty tiring - I've come back to this one a couple more times and find I can't play it for too long before my brain starts to completely melt. Didn't even try the other modes here but I'm sure I'll have to for the cherry in the future. As of writing, I don't have the gold yet, but I'm just a couple levels away from finishing it.

STREAM 4

AKA the stream where I discovered my new favorite game

Devilition

It's not this one. But it is good! One of the things I'm really enjoying about UFO 50 so far is just adapting to the sheer confusion of starting up a new game for the first time and having absolutely no idea what's going on, but knowing that the game is simple and that I can figure it out in a few minutes. I'll really miss this feeling once I've played every game in the collection, which is part of why I'm playing these games at a slow pace and trying to savor them. Anyway, this is an excellent example of that initial confusion - am I supposed to defeat the little devil guys? But what about the guys that I'm placing down, are they bad? How many do I need to kill, exactly? The answer is of course, there needs to be less than the remaining humans, but it took one attempt to figure that out. At first this game felt too easy, all you really have to do is place the pieces down and make them chain together to kill everything, but it ramps up pretty quick. My first real attempt failed at level 9, and getting past that point was not easy at all - it took me a good 40 minutes and I unfortunately fell 3000 short of the cherry goal because I didn't know how scoring was gonna work at the end and I used too many pieces on the final boss. Ah well. Great game though, surprisingly novel gameplay mechanic - this feels like a puzzle game that should have already existed somewhere, but I don't think that it does. It feels basic on a level where someone eventually should have had to think of it. I will surely return for the cherry on this one soon.

Kick Club

Gah, another one of these. UFO 50 is really testing a long-held belief of mine. I've always felt that there should be more games with lives and continues, because I think more games should ask the player not simply to fluke through every challenge in the game once, but to master them, to play through them a few times until the player can demonstrate mastery. But man oh man, Kick Club is HARD, and I'm getting my ass beat by it. It took a bit to figure out that I could do charge shots but even that helps only so much - it's just so easy to get hit by an enemy and lose a life, and lives are precious in this one. This is kind of a Bubble Bobble-ish game and I'm not crazy about them - Kick Club kinda gets repetitive for me in a way that I'm not fond of. It's short though, only 40 levels (I think), so I should be able to finish it off, but 3-6 is the furthest I've gotten so far. I'm sure I'll get it one day but I'll have to come back to it. Definitely one of the harder games up to this point. Not my favorite, but it's pretty good.

Avianos

Guys, what the hell, this game rules so much. I am absolutely addicted. Within just my first play of this game I already made it my most-played game. I am a HUGE fan of euro board games and grand strategy games in general, so this simple, NES-styled one with easy to grasp mechanics and BIRDS and DINOSAURS is so up my alley it's not even funny. I absolutely love the mechanic of praying to a different dinosaur god each turn for different bonuses, and getting to choose how to level them up each time you pray to them enough times. I love moving around the board and building armies and protecting my castles. I love birds. This game rules.

It's a very simple grand strategy game all things considered, given UFO 50's trademark small scope approach to each of these games, and unlike something like Civ V I don't think I'm going to put hundreds of hours into it - I've played like 4 hours of it and I feel like I've basically mastered it, more or less. But it's still a lot of fun! It's just so satisfying to build up all my shit and launch a perfect attack on the enemy. The AI's not too bad either, it puts up a decent enough fight and I feel like I have to play pretty well to avoid losing, which is about as much as I'm going to ask for.

Also, I like that despite the authentic-ish 80's visuals, it doesn't have authentic 80's controls. Something about strategy games of this era always have really terrible UI controls that are laggy and everything in the game processes slow. This feels like a dream, it's just the visual style that looks old. Thank goodness for this.

I played to the gold, and then trial 1, on my first playthrough, and on the next stream I did trials 2 and 3. I'll finish it out next time with 4 and 5 for a pretty easy cherry, considering how badly I WANT to keep playing this game.

STREAM 5

People really wanted to see Mooncat, anticipating that I would have a reaction to it. What the hell is Mooncat? Why is it so infamous? I find out after playing two games of Avianos first.

Mooncat

Oh, so this is Mooncat. It's great, actually, and I didn't have a single problem with it at all. Not kidding! I feel like this one is infamous for its bizarre controls, from what I've gathered from hearing about it, and I guess I can see why - the controls being totally alien seems to be the major gameplay gimmick in this one, and having to slowly adjust your brain to even handle what's going on gracefully is the main challenge. I actually took to it pretty easily though, working out how to move back and forth and jump and ground pound with enough dexterity to find my first egg in about 30 minutes or so. Really wasn't that bad, and I'm eager to play again. The vibes in this one are just great - the soundtrack in this one is the first real standout soundtrack of UFO 50 so far, I think, and the visuals are really strange and trippy but in a really good way. I don't even know what the character is. Some kind of eggplant with legs? Are we the Mooncat? This game left me with more questions than answers, but yeah, it's one of my favorite games so far, unironically. I have no idea if this is a hot take. Mooncat's great.

Bushido Ball

Another UFO 50 banger. I have played some games like this - I just recently discovered an obscure old arcade game called Battle Flip Shot that has a really similar premise to this but with shields instead of swords, and also it's way worse than this; this feels extremely polished. I still don't understand half of what I'm doing - I barely really understand the nuts and bolts behind my different shots or even how to perform them at times, but at least the game is buttery smooth to play. I ended up taking the old guy with max power whose name I can't remember now. Rai-something. It took me 8 continues to win, so thank GOD we've now invented the technology of having unlimited continues - I was terrified the game was going to cut me off at some point, especially when Yamada was in the middle of kicking my absolute ass with his Boo-style trick shots. I really like that you're ALLOWED to cheat in this game just a little - three fouls gives the opponent a point, but the first two fouls you commit are okay! I think we should bring this to other sports, to be honest. I think it's cool that you can cheat just a little bit, as a treat. I dread going for the cherry in this one, no continues is gonna be hard as balls. But yeah, another great game.

Block Koala

This one... ah. So far, I've had my frustrations with UFO 50 games so far, but this is the first UFO 50 game that I actually don't think is very good. It just feels like a sort of uninspired Sokoban with a mechanic that's not particularly novel, and it's slow, the puzzles feel kind of lame so far, and it's just not that interesting. I dunno, I really expected more when I saw that this was a Sokoban-style puzzle game but it just isn't doing it for me and I sort of dread returning to it. The only thing I really appreciate are its undo mechanics - being able to set an undo point is really nice of them. Oh and I guess I appreciate Flamingus, I only have a portrait and a brief description and I already love this flamingo twink bitch.

There, I'm caught up! I'll probably stream tomorrow and finish off Avianos and Devilition cherries, then... who knows! Sort of tempted to jump back into Mooncat, or maybe just play a new game.

Progress so far (I should have Paint Chase's, but it didn't apply retroactively, I guess). I am absolutely going to be aiming for all 50 cherries in this game. So far, the toughest one to get feels like Bushido Ball but they're all definitely in range. Devilition and Avianos will be easy. Barbuta is easy, but a little bit harrowing just because it needs to be so mistake-free. Paint Chase is free, basically, since I've already done it. I dunno what the cherry for Attactics is but I'm sure I can get it. I've been sort of putting off Mortol, but how hard can it be if I stick to it? Kick Club is hard but I'm sure I'll get it at some point. Mooncat is just a matter of playing the game more. Block Koala... uhhhh. I mean, I'm good enough at that style of game that I'll be able to get it eventually I'm sure, but I'm not thrilled by the prospect.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/0/037ff937.jpg

Paratroopa1 posted...

this feels like a puzzle game that should have already existed somewhere, but I don't think that it does.

It does exist--as a game Derek Yu made in the early 2000s called Diabolika. There are a couple other games in UFO50 that were either releases or prototypes these guys have had from years ago. I think Mooncat might be one of these too

Consider yourself lucky you played Bushido Ball after the AI nerf. They played nearly perfectly by round 4

kevwaffles posted...

Consider yourself lucky you played Bushido Ball after the AI nerf. They played nearly perfectly by round 4

That sounds horrible, because I was already getting my ass kicked as it is

while the AI was tougher, the physics were also sillier: if you set the speed to Hyper any lob shot would launch the ball completely over their heads so you could win super easily

WazzupGenius00 posted...

while the AI was tougher, the physics were also sillier: if you set the speed to Hyper any lob shot would launch the ball completely over their heads so you could win super easily

There was a short period where they patched this out but hadn't nerfed the AI. I actually got the cherry hours before that.

STREAM 6

I did a lot in this stream! Especially since some of the cherries were really easy.

Avianos, Part 2

OH GOD ALL THE DINOSAURS ARE RANDOMIZED NOW. This was a really fun twist that gave the game a little bit more life than it would have had! All the randomized dinosaur patrons are REALLY awkward and made planning a lot harder, but I guess it probably did for my opponent too, since on trials 4 and 5 I actually didn't face as much opposition as I was expecting. I had to restart a couple of games for bad rng starts (boards where it was just impossible for me to expand quickly enough before they took 4 castles and had a defensive position), but yeah, I did get the cherry by clearing all of the trials. I don't know if I'll come back to this game now that I've cherried it, I feel like I've basically mastered it after four hours, but what a fun game! I hope I can do multiplayer with someone on it sometime.

Camouflage

New game! Easy game. I was surprised to see another puzzle game after Block Koala, but this one doesn't have you pushing blocks so it's different I guess. The whole idea of camouflaging yourself as a sort of stealth/puzzle mechanic is fun, but this game left me wanting more. I played 5 levels of it, quit out to do something different, then came back and finished the rest of the levels. The last level isn't even a real level! There's only 15 levels and it took me just one hour to get the cherry here. This game could have been a lot more fleshed out but it feels rushed and kind of forgotten about, like probably not the most polished game in the collection. It's fun, but there's nothing to it really.

Campanella

This game is STRESSFUL! I was bitching about this game the entire time but that's just because not touching the floors or walls means I have to be so on guard AT ALL TIMES just made me feel really strung out after not that long playing it. I got into world B on my first play, and then all the way to the final level of world D on my next play - the one thing that's nice about this game is that it's very generous with 1ups, so there's a fairly sizable margin for error. D-9 had a water patch that I didn't understand how to navigate and I lost literally like 6 lives on that level, which sucked. I don't know how to control my ship through water properly quite yet. Anyway this one's... fine. I think I'll be able to beat it easier than Kick Club, and I guess I like it about the same - it's about equally stressful, lol.

Devilition, Part 2

I tried this one again thinking it would be an easy cherry, since I should have gotten the cherry last time I played if I knew how the scoring works... but alas, I wasn't able to do it. I actually messed up on the final boss and didn't kill him, but I wouldn't have gotten 30000 points anyway. I thought this game was going to be so easy, but it's way harder than I thought and totally broke my brain. I'll give it another try next time!

Golfaria

Oh boy, golf RPG in the weirdest way possible! You have to maneuver your golf ball around an overworld and try to find powerups and stuff and make progress finding secrets in the world. Very clever idea, I really like the concept here, but I did feel a bit frustrated because the controls just feel so loosey-goosey - I feel like my ball either doesn't go far enough to get over slopes, or just goes way too far and gets completely out of control. I never feel like I'm putting the ball where I actually want it to go and that makes progress feel... hard. I upgraded my strokes to 35, but I still haven't found any major upgrades or made any major progress in this one. Seems like a bit of a longer game, so I'll come back to it in multiple playthroughs. I like it so far but I do have gripes.

The Big Bell Race

Well, that was... the easiest cherry ever. Literally booted this one up, tried one race just to get a feel for the controls, reset, and then on my first attempt I easily won every race and got the trophy. Wasn't even a question - I won almost every race by multiple laps and was never really in any danger of losing. I ended with 12 minutes of playtime on this, 10 of which were on my winning run. Okay! I probably won't play that one again. I mean, it was fun enough, but it's just a Campanella racing game that's super easy to beat, there's nothing left for me here. Didn't expect to have two cherries today but those were really easy!

Warptank

Tried one more new game today and DAMN it's a cool one! VVVVVV + Blaster Master, somehow. I wish the scrolling were smoother and I wish that switching felt snappier, I feel like there's kind of a weird delay on it, but yeah, cool game, nice mix of action and puzzle, really great music. I only played this one for about ten minutes, beating four levels, and it seems like this is a long game, since I only have 5% progress in it! Nice! Definitely excited to return to this one.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/5/571e10b5.jpg

Oh, forgot to mention in that writeup that I also went and golded Attactics. Only had two more levels, they were tough but I got through them after a few attempts. Will try for the cherry later.

I wasnt planning on saying this but since youve been mostly sticking to games until you beat them, you may want to look at game 44, Pilot Quest, early. You will understand why once you play it.

WazzupGenius00 posted...

I wasnt planning on saying this but since youve been mostly sticking to games until you beat them, you may want to look at game 44, Pilot Quest, early. You will understand why once you play it.

I've been recommended this before and have decided not to do it

You can always just leave UFO 50 running so it's not that big a deal.

Forgot to update this for a hot minute but I played more games

STREAM 7

I started this one off by just working a little on Block Koala and, hoo boy, this game really isn't the best. There could be something interesting going on with the mechanics, I guess, but it's really just kind of boring. The level design isn't very interesting and often features a lot of slow walking around trying to solve something that's already readily apparent - the whole pushing the star block to the star panel takes a long time sometimes while not even really being a puzzle. I ended up playing a little bit of this off-stream just to make progress on it since it's a long game.

Golfaria, Part 2

This game really stumped me for a while due to me not knowing where to go and always overshooting everything and going into pits and I got frustrated for a while, but I made major breakthroughs here - just following what the person in town said about going west and south and finding the hole by the tree to talk to the wise man ended up leading me to where the brakes were, and wow, having the brake just changes everything about this game! I have actual control over my shots now! At this point, with 40ish max strokes and the brakes, it started to feel like a game I could really explore without too much fear, and I started making a lot more progress - it wasn't that long after getting the brakes that I got the block breaker which is the first item that actually lets me go into new areas. Shortly after that I actually sequence broke the game to get the holy tee behind the tee temple, which you normally need the water roll for, but I just made really good shots to avoid it. I went south, got the sand roll and another part of the holy tee, and it felt like I was pretty close to beating the game at that point but it had been 2 hours so I gave it a rest. Really enjoying this one, it's an interesting take on the Zelda formula.

Devilition, Part 3

I really blew it on this attempt to get the cherry. I had it in hand on the final boss, but was so worried I wasn't gonna get it and lose it on my time bonus that I rushed through it and didn't make sure that I actually had everything chained together properly. I got salty and frustrated and made a few more attempts at it while I had the will to keep going, worried that I'd lose my ability to play well if I didn't keep at it, but I didn't get the cherry on these attempts. Devilition is so much more challenging than it looked the first time I played.

Attactics, Part 3

I forgot to even mention part 2 and this is really more like part 4, but whatever. I just took on ranked mode for the cherry here. It was really easy. All you need to do is string along enough wins together to get your rank up to 100, and I faltered when I was in the 90s a couple times but I eventually fought through and got the win. It's so much easier to finish this off than doing the campaign! Attactics is great.

Campanella, Part 2

I really started to like Campanella on this run through it. At first I was so stressed about never having to touch the walls, but I got a lot more used to the controls and this game's extremely generous lives system meant that I had more than enough lives to power through to the end. My first attempt in this stream ended up dying midway through World E but that gave me enough knowledge to get to the final boss on my next attempt with like 23 lives in tow or something. Nice game! I wonder what the cherry goal is - what

Warptank, Part 2

Also I played more Warptank, which is a fun game but for some reason I'm always coming back to it at the end of the night and I get really tired and I only play two levels then stop

Love warptank but honestly the hub is ruining it for me, a bit. I just wanna play the next level, I don't wanna confusingly run around the hub repeatedly for 30 minutes wondering where the next one is.

Yeah I hate the hub world in Warptank holy moly

STREAM 8

Devilition, Part 4

I was absolutely determined to get this cherry after a near-miss on my first gold, followed by some pretty salty failures afterwards where I pushed myself a little too hard and messed up and got tilted, but coming back to it fresh this time I got it easily. More than easily - I got 44500 points, which easily cleared the cherry mark and then some. Pretty damn good score if I do say so myself! I got some fairly nice rng at the start and just rode it all the way to the end and didn't make any stupid or senseless mistakes. I do really like this game and I'm tempted to come back to it and speedrun it in the future, but for now, this'll do.

Golfaria, Part 3

Didn't have that much to do in Golfaria except get the water ball, the last parts of the holy tee, and find the ending, and while I thought finding the water ball was going to be challenging, it actually wasn't as bad as I thought it would be - the sand area seemed like it'd be a lot bigger than it really was, and eventually just following the path led me there. Finding the last parts of the holy tee took some work just because I knew I'd found all of them before but couldn't remember where. Then I put 'em in that conspicuous hole and whoa, a final dungeon/boss! I wasn't expecting that, since a lot of UFO 50 games so far have ended kind of abruptly or flatly, but Golfaria goes out on a high note. I love the cybergopher. Wasn't too hard really, I had most of the green balls rescued and they gave me a lot of extra strokes. I finished in about 4 hours with about 95% completion, so I'll have to come back to this and finish off the last few remaining items for the cherry. I really liked this one! The game isn't as big as it first appears but 4 hours is a pretty solid playtime for this, it didn't overstay its welcome too badly.

Waldorf's Journey

Every UFO 50 game is a little bit weird in some way, but some are more mystifying than others. Mooncat is, so far, the most mystifying of all, but Waldorf's Journey is up there - playing as a flying walrus having a dream in a game that is again strangely similar to a golf game, which was weird after I just finished Golfaria. The world seems to be randomly generated, you have limited flight power that you have to recover, you can collect shells and buy items, and if you fall a puffin will save you once but then it's over. I didn't play this game very carefully but ended up getting the gold in about 15 minutes by just kinda brute forcing it by taking long shots and then using flight to get a good landing, and using a propeller at the end to ensure a controlled finish. And that's the game! This is the second shortest gold for me behind only The Big Bell Race, since all it took was one solid attempt and there was less of a learning curve than Velgress... sort of, anyway, because it was pretty easy to cheat to the end. Getting the cherry is going to require a LOT more work and much better precision. I will come back to it at some point.

Porgy

Uh oh. I think I hate Porgy. I really wanted to like this one because it's obviously a metroidvania, and it's an underwater adventure with a cute submarine! I love aquatic environments and themes, and I do like a decent metroidvania, but this isn't one of them. It's slow, your attack sucks, and having to keep going back and forth carrying items to the surface is INTENSELY tedious, not to mention roaming minibosses that can show up and ruin your day because you're not strong enough to do anything about it, and even diverting your path away from them could be enough to make you run out of fuel. Fuel drops from enemies are extremely inconsistent too so if you run too far out of fuel you might just be screwed with no way to fix the problem, it's not like you have E-tanks or anything. Deeply frustrating game that might end up towards the bottom of my list - I think it's my least favorite game so far.

Campanella, Part 3

Made my first attempt at the cherry here. I figured I could find the coffees on my own, but some of them ended up being in pretty unintuitive locations that had me losing a lot of lives, and I eventually gave up in frustration early in world D after losing a bunch of lives in a stupid place. I'll come back to it soon, I should be pretty close especially if I use a map.

Warptank, Part 3

Couple more levels then stopped. The hub world really does stop me from wanting to play this game more, lol

Porgy gets better but it's a rough start.

STREAM 9

(Catching up on these writeups a bit again lol, I'm playing this game more frequently than I thought I was going to)

Golfaria, Part 4

Finishing up Golfaria for the last few items took me like another hour because good lord, it is time consuming to wander around the world just looking for those last damn few items. Fortunately, I had an idea that ended up being fruitful; start my search in the areas early in the game, where I was more likely to miss things because I couldn't explore as far. Sure enough, that was where MOST of the items I was missing were, but not all, so I still basically had to scour the entire map for everything. And then beat the final boss again, which was a bit annoying. But I did it!

Campanella, Part 4

I thought cleaning up Campanella was going to be stupidly easy but oh how wrong I was. My first attempt got softlocked on C-3, because I misremembered the coffee's location and tripped the levers - not knowing the levers could only be flipped once, and they don't reset if you die! But the coffee was behind the blocks that they open and shut, so if you hit both levers without getting the coffee, your run is over, even if you have like 20 lives in the bank. Frustrating, but then it happened again in C-7 - again I misremembered the coffee location and instead of going for the coffee, I headed straight into a tile that contained a warp, again ending my run because I could not go back. I had to take a break after this. I've enjoyed Campanella quite a bit, but hunting for the coffees when things like this can happen that instantly end your run is infuriating.

Porgy, Part 2

Playing more Porgy has yet to change my mind much about Porgy. It's still slow and tedious and just painful to play in pretty much every regard. I was really mad about the fact that you only have two equipment slots, too, but fortunately beating some minibosses did give me a third slot, which makes a difference - but I'm still annoyed that I'm eventually going to have to pick what I want to bring in. Just let me use all my upgrades, please! I got the drill which I thought would let me break blocks, and it didn't, which confused the shit out of me - I hadn't even SEEN any of the dirt blocks that the drill actually breaks yet. It didn't let me progress that far still - getting into the 2nd area was still rough and progress was slow. I had a lot of frustrating deaths. Porgy's rough.

Onion Delivery

Oh dear god, it's Onion Delivery. This is easily the hardest game in UFO 50 so far by a MILE, and it's gonna drive me absolutely insane. The idea of like a top-down Crazy Taxi is cool, but it's so hard to control and so unforgiving, especially when it gives you a location that's really hard to find or access. And some of the events are maddening - I was driven especially crazy by the onions that chase you, and the storm event that just places random water tiles everywhere; just exceedingly hard to drive in those conditions and it felt like you can die so randomly. In spite of sort of hating this game, I sort of got into the flow of it - the music is fun and driving fast is fun, you just kind of have to enjoy the vibes and be prepared to reset a LOT. Again, a very frustrating game, but at least it's not boring.

Warptank, Part 4

I played two levels and quit again

Just wait until you learn what the cherry for Warptank is

I feel the same about Onion Delivery, something keeps compelling me to play it even though I dont think its a good game

The cherry for Warptank isn't hard to guess, unless you never find a single one. It's also "do you want to look it up or not" difficulty.

Yeah after I got the cherry for Porgy I decided to take a break from UFO50 (and other games like Metaphor helped too).

Porgy started out okay for me but honestly it was more frustrating and tedious by the end so you're not going to end up liking that one.

I don't want to spoil too much but there's another game after Porgy that also has underwater diving stuff and I was very confused why it's so close to Porgy. I only played a few minutes but it's very different from Porgy at least.

STREAM 10

Onion Delivery, Part 2

This game is uh... hard. I made a few more attempts at it and feel like I got nowhere. I have no idea how to navigate the map quickly without getting myself stuck in some stupid dead end and losing all my time, or just running into three cars and dying quickly. This one's gonna be hard fought.

Campanella, Part 5

Finally got the cherry! I'd had a lot of almost-successful runs up to this point, so finally putting it together was easy and means I can finally finish this one up. Solid game!

Caramel Caramel

OH GOD WHAT THE HELL IS THIS GAME. I was waiting for a shmup to come up in this game collection, since it's one of the most ubiquitous game genres of this era, but I wasn't expecting this. It's fun, it has awesome music, and it's fucking impossible and nearly gave me a heart attack on stream! I spent the first 30 minutes or so just bitching about how many times I had to redo the first level because I kept making it to the miniboss or boss and dying because the game's health and lives system is so unforgiving, with a max of 2 health and no checkpoints in the levels at all, noting that the game was awesome except for how unforgiving it was... but then I got through the first level, finally, and beat the entire game on that attempt! But the whole ordeal made me lose my fucking mind. The whole time I'm tensed up and screaming but somehow playing my absolute best and managing to win with lives to spare. Getting the cherry on this one is going to be HARD. I'm going to set it down for now and come back later because, woof. Great game but does every game in UFO 50 have to be LIKE this?

Party House

I have really bad news, because I know ahead of time that this is one of peoples' favorite games. I don't like Party House. It's one of my least favorite games in the collection. Sorry! It's a deckbuilder, so you would think I would like it, but I find the mechanics both too simple to be interesting and extremely frustrating. I played this one for about five minutes, was like "okay I basically get it" since there's no real mystery to how the game is going to play out once you've seen the board, but no matter what you do you could always top-deck three troubles and lose the game - it's literally impossible to stop this from happening in the worst case scenario. I like the basic concept of the game, I like the theming a lot, but it's boring and frustrating and I don't get why everyone likes it. Sure, I don't have the strategy perfectly figured out yet - I know I made some misplays - but I had some really bad luck at the end of the second scenario here and got frustrated and quit out, I ended up finishing the second scenario off-stream, which I've generally not done for any of these games. Unlike Avianos, which I was absolutely addicted to, this one's going to be one I'm playing until I get out and never thinking about again.

Hot Foot

We're in a bad stretch of games here. Hot Foot, I think, would be a lot more fun co-op, but single player I find the controls frustrating - I can't seem to pick up objects or swap characters precisely when I need to sometimes which leads to me panicking and fumbling a lot, and it's hard to aim with precision too. I'm sure I can get better at it, but it's kind of just less fun than Bushido Ball and I'd rather get better at that. The most frustrating thing here though is that you have to win six games in a row - I keep winning two games and then losing my third, and it's just like... okay, gotta start all over! I'm not having fun with this one at all. Bottom tier.

Divers

I keep saying a new game is my least favorite game in the collection and then finding a new floor. What the hell is Divers? Like all UFO 50 games, I'm enchanted by the possibility of what it is at first - I love the character designs in this, and of course, I love underwater games... but it's another goddamn diving and returning to the surface game like Porgy? And it's even SLOWER than Porgy? And the RPG mechanics are just super grindy and lame? Oh god, this one's really bad. It's so slow and so far doesn't really offer any sort of apparent strategy at all, it's just... slow and grinding and really annoying when you can't get back and you die, or you get into some encounter that you can't run from and you die, or you get into some encounter you have no way of knowing is dangerous and die. I hate this one, I hope it gets better, but I'm not hopeful!

Honestly, the last three games here are in contention for my three least favorite games in UFO 50 so far. That combined with my struggle with Onion Delivery and my early frustration at Caramel Caramel made this was a ROUGH session - games 1-20 were almost all certified bangers but row 3 has not been kind to me.

STREAM 11

Party House, Part 2

I came back to Party House TRYING to keep an open mind - maybe later scenarios are a bit more interesting, or maybe when it gets random it gets good? But, eh, nah, I didn't find any new reasons to like this one. It's just not dynamic enough for my tastes - it doesn't feel like I'm making a lot of tactical decisions, just broad strategy, and the broad strategy isn't that good. There's a couple of obvious engine combos and that's kinda it. I got the gold pretty easily here despite a couple of runs of bad luck. I really hate how easy it is to overhit on the door and accidentally let in a third trouble. I hate having to force myself to proceed slowly so I don't do that. I do not like Party House. But, I did finish all five scenarios here and get the gold. I will come back for the cherry... maybe.

Porgy, Part 2

Porgy... is maybe good? It's still a little too early to say, but once you start getting some upgrades it gets... better. It's still frustrating, on account of being slow, of requiring an obnoxious number of trips back and forth through parts of the game you're already long familiar with, and of not being allowed to equip all your upgrades, but... well, I dunno, I played it for a long time on this stream and kind came to... like it, a little bit, I guess. Like, I like the design of the world, I like the underwater theming, getting upgrades is fun, and there is something to be said for how the upgrades in this game really do make you feel more powerful and more able to explore the world. Starting you off so weak and so unable to do anything makes you feel some kind of way once you're able to actually go places. Maybe there's something to be said for it? Porgy hasn't won me over yet, but it might.

Kick Club, Part 2

Hey remember Kick Club? I do! I don't like Kick Club! I find its lack of lives really unforgiving and it's too easy for me to slide kick into an enemy and die or just kinda... mess up and lose a lot of lives and then it's over suddenly. It's not a very long game, so I'm sure I'll get through it at some point, but I had two unsuccessful attempts here and gave up.

Rail Heist

FINALLY, a banger game in row 3! Well, Caramel Caramel was also kind of a banger, but this one's also really good without being frustrating at all! I love Rail Heist. It took me a bit to work out the turn-based stealth mechanics here - initially I thought I had to get out of the train in 10 seconds PERIOD after alerting someone, but then I realized that it's actually turn based, you move around, then they move, then you move, etc, and I was like, oh yeah, this is awesome! What a cool puzzle game. I like the different goal stars you have to achieve for killing everyone or killing nobody and also doing it quickly - the time goals are QUITE tight and require you to think up some pretty inventive and very carefully considered solutions. This is one of the best games in UFO 50 so far, though it's challenging enough that it gets a bit daunting to play at times.

Hot Foot, Part 2

I did not make any progress in Hot Foot. I did start to get a little bit better at the controls, as well as uh, realizing that I have a special ability that I can use when I double jump, which I forgot about, oops. I like the wave special the most because it just seems to be pretty reliable. But, I still wasn't able to make it past game 3 and I feel like I'm kinda wasting my time with this one. Still not a favorite of mine. Again, might be fun co-op, but I'm not having fun with it as a single player game. I don't feel like anything's really bad about this game, I just don't like it and don't really want to play it.

Onion Delivery, Part 3

I continued to not make progress in Onion Delivery.

STREAM 12

Onion Delivery, Part 4

Finally! I did a bit of practice of Onion Delivery off-stream just to get a handle of some things, especially learning a little bit how the map is laid out and where each of the locations the game gives you ACTUALLY are, and also realizing that the game's health mechanic works by regenerating your health not just when you make a delivery, but also slowly over time when you're driving at max speed. So you can just hit a straightaway if you're in trouble and that helps consistency a LOT. I got the gold on stream here which I'm really proud of and happy about doing. I do still kinda hate this game but also find it sort of addictive and compelling to play - it's a hard one to explain, really. I've played it for 2 and a half hours and I dread having to get the cherry on this one but... it's probably gonna keep me coming back, I guess? It's not one of my favorites, but there is something to be said for it.

Rail Heist, Part 2

Yay more Rail Heist! Love this game. Don't have much more to say about it, I played four more levels over two separate sessions in this stream and yeah it rocks. Every stage introduces something a little bit new - the chickens and the gatling guns are both fun twists - and it takes a lot of attempts to work out a strategy that works, but it never feels frustrating and it's always rewarding when I get it. This game just rocks, but I can't play it too long at a time because it makes my brain hurt.

Party House, Part 3

I will say this about Party House. First of all, the random games are a little bit more interesting, because at least you do get to kind of think about what your strategy is going to be each time. That said, also very frustrating, because sometimes you can get REALLY BAD setups - like setups that have really bad cash generation, or setups that have a lot of troubles with no way to mitigate them (which are sometimes also your only cash generation), or guests that just have abilities that are completely useless in that setup. And, also, it's still just broad strategy - once you figured out what you're going to do, it's just executing it for 15 rounds at that point, there isn't really a whole lot to think about. It's too long and boring for how few tactical decisions you get to make. But, the second thing about it is that at least it's a pretty easy game, and it's easy to pick up, so I don't DREAD playing it or anything, I'm just kinda... vaguely bored. I gave some streaking a try but gave up after losing a 2 streak to a couple of unlucky final days and swore not to cherry streak this on stream and just do it off stream instead because... god, who knows how long it'll take before I get a streak of 5 with this luck.

Vainger

I feel like I deserve a Metroidvania after all that partying. Spoilers for later - my second play session of this game goes a lot better, but the first play session was rough. I didn't like Vainger at first, but it's purely down to user error - I missed the door on the right side of the first tall room and just completely ignored it, going straight into the first hot area instead thinking it's the only way to go. The problem is, in Super Metroid, the first time you get to a hot area you actually ARE supposed to run through it a bit, and also every game in UFO 50 conditions me to think the game is a bastard, so... I just beat my head against it for a while. And it actually worked! I got through the first hot area despite no heat resistance and made it to the left part of that area, with a fork going to the two different biomes. I went up and fought a dual boss with 600 hp and complained a lot about how hard it was, eventually mastering its pattern after about 5 attempts or so and killing it with... absolutely no upgrades to my name. I was like, man, Vainger is hard as shit, how are people supposed to play this? Not knowing I'm sequence breaking at this point and doing a low% run until now. Uh, whoops! I got to a boss in the Verde Sector that also kicked my ass and decided to give up for now. Again, I was hating the game at this point, but if I just went the right way at the start... I would have found this game a lot more welcoming! Oops!

Rock On! Island

Oh... it's a tower defense game. That's it? I don't like tower defense games. And this one offers... uh, basically no twist on the formula that I can see. It's JUST a tower defense game. I guess you can control your character to help out. Okay, cool. Uhhhh, this sucks, and the fact that I'm obviously going to have to get a perfect score on every level to get the cherry makes it worse. This one's just got nothing to offer, I'm long played out on tower defense games, I don't want to play this one, thanks. At least the dinosaurs are cute! I may end up playing some of this off-stream, especially to perfect the first level which I lost some health stupidly on.

Mortol, Part 2

I finally come back to Mortol after all this time! I dunno why, but level 1-C was pissing me off, and it took a few more attempts to get it all right but I came out of it +7, which feels really good! And getting into a new area, with a new environment and some new gimmicks, was a lot of fun - I like the water, although it took me a bit to figure out that drowning to create platforms across the water is a thing. Mortol is pretty cool and I don't know why I'm not more into it, I think feeling like I have to reset every time I lose even a single life in a stupid way makes me feel kind of annoyed, but I should probably take it a bit easier and allow some mistakes just to get through every level.

Kick Club, Part 3

No progress here. Just pain.

STREAM 13

Rock On! Island, Part 2

I hate this game. I'm really hoping there'll be some kind of twist on the tower defense idea and there just never is. I had to complete the second level off-stream again because I finished with 29 hp after stupidly letting myself get hit once. I floundered at a side level where I just couldn't figure out a way to get through the second wave without losing health, but I got it off-stream too. I hate having to mash my bones with perfect accuracy in some of the earlier waves, and then just all the mashing I have to do in late waves too. Bluh. Well, I'll do it a little bit at a time and eventually be done with it, the world map doesn't look that big.

Party House, Part 4

I initially promised I wouldn't come back to this one on stream, but I decided after getting a streak of 3 off-stream that I would try to finish off the cherry on stream. I did. I don't have much more to say about it because every game of Party House is basically the same, there's nothing to say about it. The only noteworthy thing here is that I was finally taught that the Grillmaster/Athlete sends your guests back to the DECK, not booted entirely, which I failed to realize has an excellent synergy with Climber - so that's a little bit interesting, I guess! Other than that it was mostly just buying Cute Dogs and Gamblers because, yeah, sometimes that's the only way to make money. Whatever, I got it and now I can stop thinking about this game for a while.

Porgy, Part 3

Porgy... good? Porgy good! I mean, I do still have some of the same frustrations with it. The 'you can't bring every upgrade' thing REALLY reared its ugly head this session, where going down to the bottom area (requiring one of your slots to be eaten by the lamp) takes a really long time and you just kind of have to guess what pieces of gear you need. You get upgrades in this game you can't even use because there's never a time you have enough inventory space to take them. That said, taking the lamp down to the bottom area and hearing the awesome music for the first time put me in a really good mood. I love the last area, and having a lot of upgrades at that point, especially the homing system (which I basically needed a hint to find but whatever), made the game a LOT more fun. I actually legitimately enjoyed playing the game at this point and, once I got the radar, I was able to stick with it until I collected everything in the game to get the gold and the cherry simultaneously, although getting the last few items took me a couple of tries because I kept getting lost on the way back. I do like the design of the final area of the game and how you can take multiple different paths depending on what items you brought, that's kind of cool. And I have to admit that taking that final trip knowing you're going to the final boss is kind of exciting - it feels a little more dramatic having to dive from the surface to do it. So maybe there's a method to Porgy's madness after all. Despite all the stuff I don't like about it, I kind of came away with a soft spot for Porgy, which I wasn't expecting. Good game!

Vainger, Part 2

Vainger good! I decided to take some advice to go through that stupid door at the start of the game that I was missing and my god, that solved all my problems and completely changed the game. No more sequence breaking! I marked out when I realized I could install the new upgrade in one of three different systems for different effects - what a cool idea! It's a shame that there's only four of them, and that this game is clearly going to be pretty short - I would totally play the hell out of a full-length Vainger! I went to bed late because I got addicted to this game - I played it for hours, much like Porgy. The game was super easy once I started getting upgrades and I didn't face any real problems after learning how to play this game the hard way by sequence breaking. But that's alright - I don't want every game in UFO 50 to just be a nonstop kick to the balls. Sometimes I just want a chill Metroidvania! I think I have 63% completion as of the end of this stream, and I should beat it next time. I'm sad by how short it is! Seriously, this is so far the game I most wish was longer in the collection. I love that every game is a short little bite-sized game that is fun and doesn't overstay its welcome, but Vainger could have stuck around for longer if it wanted.

Finally caught up on those writeups, yes I got a bit behind. Current progress!

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/e/ec64b728.jpg

I have sworn to myself that I must get at least five cherries in row 3 before proceeding to the next row - and also I have to beat Mortol because yes, I see Mortol 2 on the horizon. Vainger will surely be a cherry soon, but I'm not sure what I'll do other than that - Waldorf's Journey, Onion Delivery and Caramel Caramel all will likely prove to be VERY hard, I suck at Hot Foot, and Divers and Rock On Island will just... take a while, in general. We'll see! I will continue to work on them. I have to go back and work on Block Koala and Warptank too, neither of which are close to being done. So far, though, I've done a pretty decent job at not leaving loose ends in the collection, which I'm really proud of.

You shouldnt need to mash in Rock On Island, holding the button works just fine. I guess I never even thought to try mashing though, maybe it actually shoots faster and Ive been handicapping myself

agree about the controls in Hot Foot, something about it is not quite right and causes you to not do what you want at exactly the wrong time.

Oh can you hold in Rock On Island? I'll have to try that.

STREAM 14

Long stream that I remembered to actually recap after I finished lol

Rail Heist, Part 3

I keep doing like two levels of this game at a time because while I do like it, it also takes a lot of attempts to get it right since the goals are pretty demanding. I think I'm like eight levels in at this point? I got to a level that starts with a guy staring you down behind like four crates and I couldn't quite figure out a good way to start it so I gave up for a bit. I did discover that you can roll underneath lawmens' guns to stay out of their range which is really funny.

Vainger, Part 3

100%ed and cherried! Fun game, I wish it was longer honestly - the fundamentals here are really good, the mod system is very cool, and I'd love to play a sequel to this game that does even more with it. The final boss was surprisingly hard - three phases and all of them had some bullshit to deal with, but especially the last one. I had to use all my lives and took him down on my last bit of health, then went back, used a map to find the upgrades I was missing (there were only four shield upgrades and that was it, I found everything else), and took out the final boss a second time, which was much easier that time. And that's Vainger! Definitely a worthwhile play.

Caramel Caramel, Part 2

I was a little bit more calm taking on the game this time, since I've beaten it before and I know I can beat it again for sure, but man, this is still a truly panic-inducing game - having only two hits to work with, with no checkpoints for the entire level, and a very limited lives pool makes this game incredibly stressful. I managed to get all the way to the final boss and I'm PRETTY SURE I had every enemy photographed, but I have no way of knowing, because I died as soon as the boss came out, lol. I'll make another attempt soon, but I can only do one of these attempts per day I think, this game is just a lot.

Waldorf's Journey, Part 2

This is another game that I thought was going to be super stress-inducing - I kinda beat this game by fluke, just launching myself and using my fish power to fly all the way to the end, but now I have to go shell hunting and use the store to a very limited capacity (or not at all, which is what I really ended up doing). So I had to like... actually learn how to play the game reasonably well. And I did! It took like 6 or 7 attempts but I got better and closer each time. I had to figure out that the weather vanes change the weather, which knocks it out if the weather is already in effect; very useful. Besides that, it was mostly just a matter of learning how much power to put into my shots, and I eventually finished it with 59 shells and got the cherry. I also found a hidden message that was... pretty mysterious? I have no idea what it means!

Rock On! Island, Part 3

Ugh. The Wasteland level, where it has two full screens and you can't even see everything going on, was just awful to play. I didn't get a perfect on it but I did finish it. I checked out a couple other levels and then just checked out in general. I have so little to say about this game, it's just awful.

Divers, Part 2

I would really like to understand what the hell is going on with Divers, because conceptually it seems cool and it has a cool atmosphere, but oh my god it just sucks so much to play? It's just a super grindy RPG with basically no tactics where you can just really easily die if you get into the wrong fight. There are other games in UFO 50 that are kind of like this, where you have to trial and error your way through the game to figure it out, but this is my least favorite of the bunch so far. The low pont of this was spending 1000 of my hard earned money on a coral(?) aligned Lance, which was the only one I could buy, and then finding a pearl deeper down that... just gave me another one for free. And it wasn't even the weakness of the one boss I found, who killed me very quickly and I have no idea what I'm supposed to do against him and figuring it out is just going to be more slow, boring trial and error. Yay.

Hot Foot, Part 3

Speaking of games I hate! I mean, I have to give them a serious attempt, at least. But I didn't get very far in this one, yet again - I keep getting stymied by the third match. I can't even get the freaking gift in this one, guys, let alone the gold. It's rough. I feel like I'm making very little progress here at all.

Onion Delivery, Part 5

I was SO DAMN CLOSE. I've been playing this one for nearly four hours by the end of this, and I'm really close to knowing the map pretty damn well and having my strategies planned out and knowing how to not crash my car into everything. I'm playing really damn well. But beating this game, especially with a cherry, is just SO MUCH MORE DEMANDING than every game in the collection so far - you have to MASTER it and be able to play it perfectly and consistently. I got so damn close - I got to the final day with just three onions left to deliver and finally lost, and I had a couple of other attempts that went really far too. This one is just barely in my grasp. I am so close to this Onion Delivery cherry, and it will be EASILY my hardest-earned cherry to date when I get it. This might be one of the most difficult cherries in the game, at least so far.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/8/887c90e7.jpg

I'm gonna get those Onion Delivery and Caramel Caramel cherries, I swear to god

STREAM 15

Onion Delivery, Part 6

I was absolutely determined to get this fucking cherry and FINALLY it paid off. It took a few attempts to even get a good one off the ground since I wasn't going out of day 1 without at least 9 deliveries, but I finally got one with 10, and then did 8 on the next day. I got the storm the next day (the worst event) but got 7, so I was pretty well set, but I nearly choked it away regardless - I had to settle for 5 deliveries on one day at one point and needed 7 on the final day to finish it off. But I did, and thank god. I came in at just under 5 hours played on this game, and it's easily the hardest-earned cherry yet for me. I still had some rough attempts in this one too - I got a bug on the zombie event where the zombies made me clip into a wall and instantly die, which really hurt. But thank goodness, I can put Onion Delivery aside now. It's done.

Pingolf

I was challenged to get five cherries in row 3 before opening row 4 - challenge complete! Here's Pingolf! I like this one quite a bit, but I think I play it too fast and loose, or something. Maybe it was just because I was in Onion Delivery mode but I kept taking my shots too fast even though there's no time limit. I reset a lot because of dissatisfaction with my first few holes, which means I got pretty good at the first few - even got an accidental hole-in-one on hole 1 twice - and eventually I parlayed a really good first 5 holes into a mediocre rest-of-the-course and won with a stupidly bad score of +11. Usually someone gets a +6 or +7, but no, the next-best score was a fucking +15, so I won, with a +11. Great! I mean, that's an easy gold down I guess - not even an hour spent on this game. Getting the cherry, though... THAT will take much higher mastery. We will come back to it. I think it's really funny that this is basically the third golf game of the collection, with Golfaria and Waldorf's Journey which is essentially a golf game.

Mortol, Part 3

Mortol has been staring me in the face for a WHILE now - remember, I've been doing these chronologically, so Mortol was a game I cracked open pretty early, and I just never felt motivated to play it for some reason. I don't know why! I just got frustrated with it and couldn't get past level 1-C. But my second attempt at this game went better and encouraged me to play more, and this time, I decided to just sit down and play it all the way through - I can't move on to the sequel until I've beaten this game! So I did. 2-C was a tough level because I just felt like I wasn't doing a lot of things right but I came out of it with more lives than I thought I would. I liked world 3's gimmick of climbing plants a lot, probably my favorite levels in the bunch. 4-A was a weird level with no ship, and I had a sort of bad score on it I think but I can go back and do better. And then yeah, the final boss - I have a really bad score on that one, I had no idea what I was doing, but eventually I figured it out I guess? I finished with 20 lives, exactly what I started with, but I have some huge improvements to make, mainly on 1-C and 4-B. Pretty cool game in the end, not my favorite mainly because I found it annoying to watch my lives get whittled down knowing I should just restart and do better each time, and some of the puzzles I just felt like I wasn't grasping, but it's a cool game with a cool concept.

Mortol II

So, might as well crack this one open right away! I didn't play it for very long. I don't feel like I "get" this one yet - I'm not sure where to go, how to make progress, what the goal is, aside from finding keys and opening doors and just scouting things out, I guess. This has Mortol's problem but even worse, with 99 lives for the entire game, and I can't reset 'em except by resetting the whole game. I guess this one must be a short one, because you can't save, so it can't be that big - just one big level that I have to solve in 99 lives, I guess! I have no idea what to think of this one.

Caramel Caramel, Part 3

Well, I got a little bit nervous that maybe I didn't really know what the true goal was - I figured photographing every enemy made sense! The credits showed them all and gave me big red X's for each enemy I didn't get, so that had to be the goal, right? NOPE! That doesn't matter for shit! The only thing that matters is photographing three extremely-hard-to-see letters in each stage. How the fuck was I EVER going to notice those and know that that was the goal? Nothing was pointing me in that way and I wasn't even looking for them! Completely insane bullshit. I'm actually pissed at this. I didn't finish the run on this one, but I'll come back to it. It's basically just beating the game over again but getting these stupid letters that I NEVER would have found and NEVER even known I needed to look for. I'm going to pretend photographing every enemy was the real cherry.

Block Koala, Part 2

It's really more like part 5 or 6 because I keep chipping away at this one off-stream, but I decided, no, I should actually try playing this on-stream, maybe it'll help me focus, and also I want to do everything in UFO 50 on-stream, even the boring stuff! I actually don't hate Block Koala THAT much, but I did puzzles 20-22 this time and... yeah, sometimes the level design just doesn't have the best intentionality behind it, and walking is so slow, and... I dunno, yeah, it's not great? But it's not terrible either. I'll keep chipping away at it but I don't feel too bad about not having this gold yet. I'm up to 19 stars, so I guess I'm about halfway to gold.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/3/3158f590.jpg

STREAM 15

Block Koala, Part 3

I'd been kinda chipping away at this offline a bit but I decided at this point to make a concerted push to actually play in onstream - it didn't feel right to not have my progress documented! I went back and finally got level 8 with less trouble than I was expecting - I just took it step by step, figured out what moves NEEDED to be done for the puzzle to work, and it just kind of accidentally fell into place. But then holy hell, level 23 was a doozy. Block Koala is such a weird one - a solid 3/4 of these puzzles are super easy and don't require much more thought than just kinda, ehh, push the blocks around a bit, get them out of the way, okay you're done, but the hard ones strike at random and they're hard enough that even someone like me, who plays a lot of puzzle games, has trouble. Like, I've beaten Baba Is You and Void Stranger, and the hardest Block Koala puzzles are right up there, which is crazy for a game in this collection that doesn't seem intended to punish players who are new to the genre. Level 23 has a super sharp solution that requires multiple very precise steps, including one very subtle push of a block in the middle that takes like five-moves-ahead foresight to even understand the significance of at the one chance you have to make it. But then after that, levels 24-30 were all super easy. Weird! When this game's challenging it's really good, but I still think the movement is too slow, and too many of the puzzles just don't feel that well designed. But again, when it's good, it really is good.

Fist Hell

Hey cool, I found my new least favorite game in the collection. Feels like it happens a lot, but the last 10 games or so have just had a lot of new least favorites. But this one is really down there. I don't like most beat-em-ups. I do like The Simpsons and TMNT, I guess, but most beat-em-ups don't really do it for me, and this one's really slow and awkward, and I just don't like that River City Ransom-esque art style like in Hot Foot. The characters aren't appealing and the gameplay is just painful. I played it for 15 minutes and could tolerate no more of it. It'll take a real doozy of a game to unseat this from last place.

Overbold

Overbold, on the other hand, rules. I was frustrated by it at first like most UFO 50 games, and at one point I wondered if it was nearly impossible - you die in one hit by default and the last fight throws an absurd number of enemies at you. But I got really addicted to this one and was determined to stick with it to the end - even when I got really frustrated I couldn't put it down at all. The second fight is the toughest, since it really feels like you need to go up to 400 or 500 to get decent prize money, but you're super weak and die in one hit so... there's a lot of dying, even though it's quick to just pick it back up and try it again until you get it. Eventually I landed on the best upgrade in the game - medkits. One bar of starting health just to take 2 hits before you die, and then maxed out medkits, makes it easy to fill up your life and be a LOT safer - at that point you can take guns or bombs or whatever you want and be totally fine. After about an hour and a half of this I got the cherry at the end by finishing with 4500 (I asked my chat how much I'd need so I didn't overspend - not making that mistake like I did with Devilition again). Definitely a top tier UFO 50 game, this one kept me coming back even after I cherried it just to see if I could do better.

Campanella 2

My time with Campanella 2 was inconclusive, but fun. This is another game where it's short but you start at the beginning if you die, and UFO 50 has a lot of these and I'm getting a little tired of it - I really wanted this one to be like, a full Metroidvania adventure game kind of like Blaster Master, but I suppose what we get here is good too. I mean, it's fun! It's kind of roguelikey in that it's all procgen and you find different abilities in the shop each time, which is a pleasant spin on the Campanella formula. I don't know if I like the original or the sequel more. I got to the final level of this after taking an unexpected warp in world 3 but died shortly after, but I feel like I can get this soon. Not sure if this ranks at the top, but it's solid.

Divers, Part 3

Sure, I played Fist Hell, so now Divers isn't the worst game anymore, so why not? I made... progress, I guess. I found the flippers last time, which helps me swim faster, which is good, because swimming is stupid slow in this game and that makes it slightly more tolerable. I explored, did manage to make some progress, tried the boss again by using the bomb to do some major damage but it still wasn't enough. What is enough? Who knows! I can't see any stats, I have no idea how much HP the boss has, there's just absolutely nothing to go by here. I tried exploring to the east past the piranhas again and managed to give them the slip this time, which got me to an area with a Parasite hammer, which was oddly the criteria for getting the gift - weird. Using this, I gave the boss another try, and this time it worked, despite never wanting to target Orlok, who had the hammer. However, I didn't equip the flippers, so I got into an encounter on the way back and died after not being able to flee like three times in a row. I hate this game.

STREAM 16

Block Koala, Part 4

Level 31 was another truly brutal level, but really well designed - it looks simple at first, but then you start to notice problems with any solution you try, and you realize that those little problems compound into a surprisingly tricky, but elegant, solution. Along with level 23, level 31 is my favorite in the game so far - it was EXTREMELY satisfying to put it all together. And then we go right back to baby puzzles again! Sigh. Block Koala, you're striving for greatness like 10% of the time and complete filler the other 90%. Anyway, I got 40 puzzles done here in no time at all after completing level 31, so I just went straight to Flamingus to get the gold - the puzzle there was somewhat interesting but not really that difficult, but I guess that's fitting since you have to beat it to win the game. So yeah, gold unlocked, which ultimately took me a lot less time than I thought it was going to based on the difficulty of a few of the early puzzles in this game. I'll come back and finish the rest for the cherry soon, I only have 8 left I think.

Divers, Part 4

Well, I went back to the boss and tried it again, with the bomb and the parasite hammer, but this time I also brought the flippers to make it easier to get back home. Yet again, I had to try this boss a few times because I kept dying on the way back - in one case, I couldn't run from an enemy SEVEN TIMES IN A ROW, which is just ridiculous. Fortunately, at least I got the extremely helpful mist orb which makes you invislble to enemies, and I was able to explore some new areas, which led to a few random goodies so far and also a big open room that had new music but absolutely nothing in it. Cool...? I opened up a gate that I think will take me deeper into the game's final area, probably, but I also feel like I still need to grind a lot more and get better equipment before I'll be able to win. I still can't beat a lot of fairly routine encounters in areas I've already been to, so... I still don't know how long this game will take to beat. I'm truly stumped by this game. I just DON'T get it. I don't get the point of Divers.

Kick Club, Part 4

Nope. I gave it another try and quickly gave up. So far, Kick Club has been probably the second hardest game to get gold in behind Onion Delivery, maybe third behind Hot Foot, not sure. I really wish this game had continues.

Warptank, Part 5

I played like one level again and quit lol. I have absolutely no idea why I just can't be bothered to play this game for long periods of time at a time - when I first played it I was like wow! Cool game! But I have absolutely no motivation to keep playing it. And I'm only like 20% of the way through? Good god, how long is this game? Every other game in UFO 50 is over before you know it but this one must have like 100 levels or some shit. Well, eventually I'll make my way through.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/e/eec76d63.jpg

So here's where we're at now. Kick Club and Warptank remain my two lone unbeatens in the first two rows - Kick Club is just brutally hard and Warptank seems long and I can't focus on it. The games at the end of row 3 are a lot. I love Rail Heist but it's pretty thinky and has a lot of levels so it'll take time... the others, good god. I hate Hot Foot, Divers, and Rock On Island, so I'm not looking forward to finishing off any of them. Hot Foot is really hard, Rock On Island is really long and boring, and Divers is... Divers. I'm not really looking forward to going back to Mortol II, and I'm REALLY not looking forward to touching Fist Hell ever again, but Campanella 2 should be easy enough to beat.

As far as cherries... still gotta go back to Barbuta, it shouldn't be hard, but it is nervewracking knowing how easily I could botch it at the end. I'm sure I can get Mortol if I work harder on it, having a better handle on the game now. Block Koala shouldn't be hard to finish off. Caramel Caramel I just have to beat the game again pretty much. Pingolf I just have to practice more. For some reason I've been saving Mooncat, idk what for. Bushido Ball I'm dreading because I think it'll be tough and I don't want to change the settings.