UFO 50 and Nostalgia of Structure

A bonus blogpost this week, because it's really nothing to do with tabletop games at all. Instead I'm going to rave about UFO 50. 

UFO 50 is a collection of 50 games. 

The framing device is that this is a collection of lost 8-bit era games from a single company. They span dozens of genres and, from my experience so far, the quality is good to excellent, leaning toward the latter. 

Frankly, at the price it’s currently at on Steam, I’d encourage everybody to buy it. We're talking less than 50p per game, and there are some that I'd easily pay £5 for.

It got me thinking about nostalgia of structure rather than form.

Yes, it has charming pixel art and chiptunes, even little era details like Kick Club’s fast food collectables. But for me the whole package feels like a more specific memory.

My young brain was told that sports are good and fast food is good. 

It's the early 90s Christmas when my family got an Amiga 600. It came with one legit game, Captain Planet, but shortly after we’d finished unwrapping our presents my uncle appeared and dropped a carrier bag filled with copied game discs. None of them had manuals, and some of the names scrawled onto the floppies were unreadable. It was a wilderness of games.

Waldorf's Journey feels very Amiga-coded to me

The quality was... variable. For every gem like The Chaos Engine or Cannon Fodder there was a dud like Body Blows or Live and Let Die. There were also a bunch of wildcards in there. Games I’d be fascinated by, and return to every now and then, often trying to decode the game behind their opaque exterior. Stuff like proto-Farcry Hunter and the atmospheric but confusing Syndicate. I was limited by my age and lack of instruction manuals, but I kept going back. After all, I had the games, why wouldn’t I play them? This time I might work out how to play properly. There were a bunch of games where I never got past the first level, but I’d go back and play that first level over and over. 

Daunting but not as complicated as it looks.

This is stark contrast to some years later when I got a SNES. It came with three games (Super Mario All Stars, Kart, and World) and because of their high price I only ever bought one more (A Link to the Past). I played those games to death, right through to their credits. They were super accessible, fantastic quality, and unified by their Nintendo polish.

But I kinda missed that weird bag full of copied floppies. I’d always go back to the Amiga. 

UFO 50 feels like the best of both worlds. It’s an overwhelming heap of 50 disparate games, but the quality is consistently high. They feel at once arcane but accessible. 

This one is a dungeon crawler with Super Punch Out combat

It’s also a notably different feeling to scrolling through my huge Steam library of underplayed games.

If I play Velgress or Overbold or Pingolf for 15 minutes then I’m experiencing the real game for 15 minutes. A lot of games in my steam library would barely be scraping the surface of the tutorial, or at least have me caged in a starting area. Some might even curse me with unskippable cutscenes. Even roguelites, lauded for their casual appeal, often gate their best bits behind successive playthroughs.

I'm going back in now. On my first play of Mini & Max I thought it was an okay platformer with a little twist, but last time I stumbled onto a few things that really shake it up.

UFO 50 has captured my heart. Go and check it out.