One Unique Thing About Every UFO 50 Game

by: TheHans255

Date: October 13, 2024

Lately, I've been playing a lot of UFO 50, a collection of retro-styled video games published by Mossmouth, who is also responsible for the delightfully evil roguelite Spelunky. I love retro games, so playing this has been a real treat for me. However, I was having a conversation with my brother about the collection, and he said that he wished for something more novel, such as some kind of rougelite where beating each game unlocks a mechanic in another game.

While I think that's a cool idea, I don't really think that it's something that UFO 50 wants or needs, mainly because the games in UFO 50 differ so much in genre and length. UFO 50 is definitely not a minigame or microgame collection like WarioWare - while some of the games, such as Ninpek and Magic Garden, are intended as several-minute action arcade experiences, other games are much longer, including a full-length Final Fantasy-style RPG and an open-world sidescrolling platformer with a sprawling, multi-level map. Indeed, probably the best way to think of UFO 50 is a successful, competent attempt at what Action 52 tried to do many years ago. And to be completely frank, I'm glad that I'm not being forced to play all of these games, especially in order, in order to play the games I'm interested in.

I will cede that the games are largely separate - the format of the collection is indeed intended to resemble the many "rerelease of a bunch of old games" format used by titles like Mega Man Legacy Collection or even simple bundles like Pikmin 1+2, but I think there's a lot of novelty to be found in the games themselves. The games are made to fit a retro style - controlled with a D-Pad and 2 buttons, displayed with 32 colors and a low resolution, sticking to mostly 2D themes - but have several additional decades of game design behind them, updating archaic mechanics and delving into genres that had not yet been explored in the 80s, such as action rougelites and tower defense. It's very similar to the treatment that Shovel Knight gives to its source material, replicating the precision platformer feel of Capcom NES games but replacing the unforgiving limited life count mechanic with a Dark Souls-style penalty of dropping half of your money at the spot where you die, among other new mechanics and design decisions.

Therefore, I'm going to go through each of the games in UFO 50 and identify something unique and interesting that each game does. Some of these things are going to be small details, while others are going to be large, overarching concepts full of interesting implications. I will disclaim that I have far less playtime in some games than in others, so I won't have as much to say about some of them, but I will go back and update some of these entries as I have more playtime.

1. Barbuta

Now, this first game is a very interesting inclusion, simply because it is so unapologetically rough. It's a slow, methodical platformer game that's very similar to what you might find on the Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum, and is full of cheap traps and unforgiving challenges. As far as I can tell, people either play through the whole thing and love it, or they bounce off it very quickly, relieved in the fact that they do not, in fact, have to play all of the games in the pack in order.

I think that this game's best strength in the UFO 50 pack is in establishing the lore of the alternate universe that UFO 50 comes from - UFO 50 is presented as a pack of games that has been lost to time (and was found in an abandoned storage unit by Mossmouth and friends), and Barbuta is presented as a game that was developed secretly on company time by employees of a business software company, and almost got the head designer fired. It seems like a ZX Spectrum platformer game is exactly the sort of thing that you would develop under those circumstances.

2. Bug Hunter

A rougelike strategy game about exterminating giant bugs in a shifting grid. There are several interesting design decisions going on here, mostly revolving around the game's resource management. The player starts with a set of basic actions, and in order to purchase better ones, must collect and spend energy cubes that drop onto the field. However, energy cubes also explode when attacked, which is often necessary in order to achieve each day's kill quota.

3. Ninpek

A sidescrolling run-and-gun game. Rather basic design, but has an interesting take on recovering after death - when you die, you turn into a ghost, and can float and fire freely, but cannot get any collectibles (and thus earn any points) until you press the jump button to turn back into a corporeal ninja.

4. Paint Chase

A Rally-X-style driving game. This game is essentially an 80s take on the main conceit of Splatoon, where the objective is to paint a certain percentage of the field your color, in competiion with other cars that are painting it the opposite color. As a convenience, your car can freely destroy most other cars in order to stop them from painting - a massive change from Rally-X, where getting hit by other cars is the primary way you lose.

5. Magic Garden

A fun little cross between Snake and Pac-Man - you are tasked with building a snake of friendly blobs and dropping them off at drop points, all while avoiding angry blobs until you can get a potion that allows you to destroy them. An interesting advanced technique you can pull off involves dropping off blobs improperly - if you drop off blobs away from a drop point, they get angry, but will also immediately become vulnerable if a potion is active, meaning that while under the effects of a potion, you can score massive points off a chain of blobs by angering it on purpose.

6. Mortol

The first game in the list that I would consider to have a genuinely unique concept from the ground up. The game is a platformer where you have to guide a band of soldiers to the end of a level, but every attack you can perform - firing yourself forward, exploding, or turning to stone - comes at the cost of killing your current soldier and requiring the next soldier to parachute onto the field. Hence, the game requires you to carefully manage your limited army in order to get through levels with as few sacrifices as possible.

7. Velgress

An action rougelite where the player is tasked with climbing a tower with an ever advancing spike roller below. The game is actually quite similar conceptually to Doodle Jump - the player only loses if they fall to the bottom of where the screen has currently scrolled. Not that it matters all that much - one interesting thing about the game's design is that every platform in the game is temporary and will eventually crumble after stepping on it.

8. Planet Zoldath

A top-down Zelda-style action adventure game. This game takes the interesting design approach of being procedurally generated with certain parameters, randomly setting up the map and placing items, randomly choosing which races are friendly, etc. Unfortunately, I don't think this approach makes for a very interesting game.

9. Attactics

A top-down army tactics game. I don't have the most familiarity with other games of this genre, so I can't exactly pin down what makes the game unique among them, but I can say that it does have a nice combination of basic unit types and combat interactions. It's also quite snappy - many of the games in UFO 50 have an excellent 8-bit soundtrack, and this game's gameplay tune flows well with the pace of the game.

10. Devilition

A puzzle game similar to Pipe Dreams in which you lay down explosive units to set up a chain reaction on a square grid. The nice thing about this choice is that you have a lot of flexiblity as to which direction you need the chain to go, allowing you to adapt to the random selection of pieces available.

11. Kick Club

A platformer game with a conceit similar to Bubble Bobble in which you go through screen-sized rooms and clear out enemies. Kick Club does this by having the player collect a soccer ball and kick it at enemies - interestingly, in the 2-player co-op mode, there is still only one soccer ball, meaning that players will have to pass it between each other in order to get good results.

12. Avianos

One of my favorites. A wargame in the style of Sid Meier's Civilization, this game's unique aspect comes mostly from its story. In the game, you play as birds who have taken over the world following an apocalypse, and each turn, you pray to one of five dinosaur ancestors, giving you a series of three actions such as producing resources, recruiting units, moving units, or performing miracles such as seeing through fog of war or moving mountains. Players gain favor with individual ancestors as they pray more to them, improving their actions, but a player cannot pray to the ancestor that either they or the enemy player prayed to in the previous turn. Limiting the actions to bundled sets like this creates an interesting dynamic that forces you to plan multiple turns in advance.

13. Mooncat

Now, everyone who's played this platformer can tell you what's unique about it - the controls are nothing like you expect. Instead of something traditional where you move with the D-pad and jump with the jump button or something, any direction on the D-Pad will move you left and any of the two buttons will move you right, with more advanced manouvers available though pressing combinations of these two buttons (e.g. to jump, you need to press the opposite direction while moving in the primary direction). There's actually a surprisingly deep set of moves available, and a lot of the difficulty is derived from certain things that would be easy in a traditional setup not being possible in this setup, such as being able to turn on a dime.

This is also probably one of the most atmospheric and calm games in the collection, with no UI elements, infinite retries per room, and an atmospheric soundtrack, especially the waltz tune in the forest sections.

14. Bushido Ball

This game is basically tennis or Pong with samurai and ninjas, with the nice thematic bonus of special moves and secondary weapons. A nice little multiplayer game.

15. Block Koala

A Sokoban-style block pushing game. A unique mechanic of this one is that blocks have a numeric weight, and you cannot push a smaller block into a larger block. However, there are some blocks in the field that can be pushed into numbered blocks to increment them.

16. Camouflage

A stealth puzzle game in which you need to change color to avoid detection from predators. Has interesting difficulty layering in its extra collectibles - while two of the collectibles in each stage are oranges that can be picked up with no consequence, the third is a baby chameleon that follows along behind you and must be kept safe. Many of the layouts are decidely harder when you have to manage both yourself and the baby.

Personally, I liked this one well enough until I started getting to levels that had moving predators, which I did not have the patience for.

17. Campanella

A platformer/obstacle course game where you control a little UFO, break targets, and reach a goal. I admittedly need to play more of this one, but I have heard that the game goes through a lot of unique settings for its levels.

18. Golfaria

An RPG you traverse by playing mini-golf. Each stroke depletes from a total in the top-left corner of the screen, and you will be sent back to your last safe room if you run out - therefore, when traversing the world, you want to make efficient shots and reach your destinations in as few strokes as possible. (There are actually several golf-themed games in this pack, as well as games that have a similar "use as few of a resource as possible" concept).

19. The Big Bell Race

A 2D racing game that shares Campanella's controls. It's pretty average by 2D racing game standards, but the controls are nice and intuitive compared to most top-down track racing games of the era.

20. Warptank

A 2D platformer that feels a lot like a natural evolution to VVVVVV - you play as a tank that can move left and right and warp instantly to the opposite ceiling or floor. Ramps in levels allow you to orient yourself horizontally and warp between walls.

21. Waldorf's Journey

A very cute, though admittedly rage-inducing game about a walrus who dreams he can fly. Players launch themselves using an artillery system similar to firing missiles in Worms, and can use limited resources to either test flight trajectories, adjust momentum mid flight, or latch onto platforms using harpoons.

22. Porgy

An undersea exploration game where you find treasure and upgrades and haul them back up to base. Interestingly, it includes boss hunting mechanics - bosses do not stay put in a single spawn zone, but instead roam the ocean floor, which can admittedly be frustrating if you're not prepared.

23. Onion Delivery

A top-down driving game where you are tasked with delivering goods to locations throughout the city. I admittedly have very little to say about this one, as the controls kept me from enjoying it much.

24. Caramel Caramel

A side-scrolling shoot-em-up similar to R-Type. It's interesting thing comes from its secondary weapon - the main character is equipped with a Polaroid camera that traps enemies inside the frame, damaging everything inside and killing everything that falls out of frame. The camera can only be used every so often, so you should save it for big combos.

25. Party House

Another one of my favorites, this game is a deck-builder (the genre of card games started by Dominion) in which you are tasked with throwing parties wild and popular enough that they get frequented by aliens, ghosts, and other supernatural beings. Not only is this a genre that would not have existed in the 80s, but unlike other deck-builders, there does not exist any way to permanently remove a character from your deck (or Rolodex, as the game flavors it), meaning that any addition to the Rolodex is something you'd better be happy with. This is especially important as the starting Rolodex contains four "Wild Buddies" who cause trouble - if three of them show up at your house without anyone around to calm them down, the cops show up and your turn is forfeited. This also means that you usually can't draw your entire deck in one turn, a cornerstone strategy in games like Dominion.

26. Hot Foot

A two-on-two dodgeball game where you play as elementary school kids. The game has a lot of interesting mechanics, though one thing I did find cute was that the teams are picked at the start from a draft pick of five, with the last kid who didn't get picked crying and walking away. A nice tone setter, honestly.

27. Divers

An RPG where you play as lizards diving into the deep ocean. I couldn't get into the gameplay of this one much, but I really liked the atomsphere - very calm and meditative music, good use of very little lighting, and more. The battles are also quick and to the point.

28. Rail Heist

A side-scrolling stealth game where you play as Wild West bandits robbing trains. It has a lot in common with strategy games such as XCOM, including the ability of both you and enemy "lawmen" to enter overwatch and fire at any non-allied that comes in range. In order to facilitate skillful platforming and manouvering, however, turns are taken in 10-second live increments.

Also, you can punch away almost any part of the train, including punching the floor out from under an unsuspecting lawman, so there's that.

29. Vainger

A Metroidvania where you play as an insectoid creature exploring a base. This game's interesting mechanic is worn on its sleeve - it shares VVVVVV's gravity flipping mechanic and uses it heavily for exploration.

30. Rock On! Island

A tower defense game set in the mythic age of dinosaurs and cavemen and another favorite of mine. One unique thing the game does is manage all construction decisions through a main character who must traverse the map - in that way, this game could be seen as being to tower defense what Pikmin is to real time strategy (though of course both games have wildly different production standards and design principles).

31. Pingolf

Another great one that mixes pinball and golf - players must hit a ball through an obstacle course that contains both pinball obstacles, such as bumpers and springs, and golf hazards, such as water and sand traps. A fun part of the aesthetic is that the bottom of the screen includes an amber dot matrix display that accentuates game events, much in the style of 80s pinball machines.

32. Mortol II

A sequel to Mortol, this one inherits most of the unique ideas from the first game in which attacks and progress are made through sacrificing soldiers. This game shifts from the side-scrolling platformer format to a Metroidvania format, where you are simply tasked with reaching a goal and killing a central monster in as few lives as possible. The game also allows you to make some more basic attacks without sacrificing yourself, making combat more important.

33. Fist Hell

A beat-em-up similar to Double Dragon, River City Ransom, or Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. Players are tasked with fighting zombies, and often end up using those zombie parts as improvised weapons. This game also has more interesting implications for the UFO 50 lore, as the game features an anti-establishment narrative with a town mayor who refuses to help the main characters in their crisis.

34. Overbold

A twin-stick shoot-em-up similar to Smash TV, the player is tasked with fighting monsters in successive rounds of combat. The game features a unique adaptive difficulty where the player can successively raise the payout of the next round by introducing more monsters, either using the points to put towards their final score or use to buy upgrades (which are very important, since the character will usually die in one hit by default). This is a bit limited in practice, though, as the 8th and final round will always be set to the maximum possible prize and contain the game's final boss.

35. Campanella 2

A sequel to Campanella, this game is probably the most similar to Mossmouth's Spelunky out of the whole pack, featuring a roguelite game loop through several run-and-gun worlds as well as large flight stages with the UFO. In a way, it could also be seen as a take on Blaster Master with the UFO replacing SOFIA III, the tank that the main character uses in that series.

36. Hyper Contender

A platform fighter similar to Super Smash Bros or Towerfall in which players fight one-on-one on platforming stages to collect rings. The unique elements come from how the game adapts itself to a two-button format - instead of each player necessarily having a jump, they have their own height-gaining manouever assigned to the jump button. For instance, one character has a short jump, another has a gravity flip, and a third summons an elevator that stops at the next platform up.

37. Valbrace

A first-person dungeon-crawling RPG in the style of The Bard's Tale and Shin Megami Tensei. I honestly just loved seeing this style of game again, and also appreciated the game's snappy approach to combat in having encounters play out like simplified Punch-Out!! matches.

38. Rakshasa

A side-scrolling run-and-gun game that feels most similar to Ghosts 'n' Goblins, this one replaces the limited life count with an increasingly difficult bullet hell segment, in which you must collect soul fragments to revive your character where he fell.

39. Star Waspir

A top-down shoot-em-up in the style of Raiden or 1942, the game sets itself apart with its unique powerup system - rather than drop discrete powerups at random, enemies will drop the letters "E", "G", and "G" in sequence, and the player can get a powerup by collecting some permutation of those letters - for instance, "EGG" increases a score multipler while "GGG" summons a buddy plane.

40. Grimstone

A full-size Final Fantasy-style JRPG, complete with similar overworld traversal and combat. I haven't really gotten into this one, but one interesting thing does appear at the beginning of the game: there are seven possible party members, and the game starts by having you choose four of them to serve as your party throughout the entire game (with the other three perishing in a saloon fire).

41. Lords of Diskonia

A mix of classic fantasy combat with any number of skill-based tabletop games, most notably Carrom and marbles. I don't think I need to elaborate much more on that one.

42. Night Manor

Yet another interesting inclusion, this one is a point-and-click horror game in which you are relentlessly chased by a killer as you piece together a mystery and attempt to escape. In addition to featuring multiple endings, the game is also relatively forgiving when it comes to death - if the killer finds and kills you (which he probably will often, since hiding from him requires playing a relatively tight quick-time event), the game portrays it as a nightmare and has you wake up in the starting room, with all of your items and gameplay changes intact (which, interestingly enough, includes some of the hiding spots being destroyed by the killer).

43. Elfazar's Hat

A twin-stick co-op shooter in which you play as a magician's rabbit and pigeon. This one takes a similar approach to powerups as Star Waspir does, with effects coming into play by collecting sets of three matching cards.

44. Pilot Quest

Another Zelda-like top-down action adventure that serves as a sequel to Planet Zoldath, this one trades the procedural generation gimmick for idle mechanics, where you can set up your base camp to generate resources while you're away based on a real-time clock.

What is very interesting about this implementation is that it is intimately tied to the UFO 50 collection - the real time clock for resource generation only ticks while you are playing games in UFO 50. Not only does this encourage you to play Pilot Quest while playing other games in UFO 50 (and thus regularly switch between the games in general), it also means that Pilot Quest can generate resources far faster than it would otherwise be able to get away with - on average, you fill up on resources once per hour, as opposed to the once per day common in many standalone real-time games such as Animal Crossing or Candy Crush.

45. Mini & Max

Another deep one with its unique traits on its sleeve - the game is an open world 2D platforming adventure that takes place entirely in a small storage room, which becomes much larger when the main characters learn that the house is enchanted and they can shrink down to miniature size. The game expands on this concept in many ways, both taking advantage of the fact that you can easily fast travel to some other part of the house, and giving you the ability early in the game to shrink to an even smaller micro size and explore multiple size levels. All while having you collect as much treasure as you can, naturally encouraging you to explore every inch of the world.

46. Combatants

A real-time strategy game about managing competing colonies of ants. This takes a similar approach to Pikmin and embodies the strategy management into a controllable character, who acts as a sort of general. I admittedly haven't figured out the trick for this one yet, since it seems like the enemy ants generate units much faster than I do, but I imagine I will eventually.

47. Quibble Race

A sports-betting game in which up to 3 players gamble on races performed by small creatures called Quibbles. I admittedly have no idea how similar this game is to other sports-betting video games (much less real horse betting), but something I do appreciate about this game is just how much power you have to influence and fix the race - you can buy insider information, sponsor and train Quibbles, or go with the decidedly darker route of doping, crippling, drugging, or even fatally poisoning Quibbles. And, of course, you can buy protection for the above, providing a level of counterplay.

This game is great, but is definitely hurt by the retro format in multiplayer. The game, as released, asks the other players to look away from the screen while each player is taking their turn, and the experience would definitely be improved if everyone could take their turns on their own screens, perhaps best with a Jackbox-style phones-as-controllers model so that the race could still be viewed on a shared screen, or perhaps with a Pokemon Stadium-style UI where choices are mapped to buttons, so players don't see the actual choices made.

48. Seaside Drive

One of several games directed by Ojiro Fumoto, the director of Downwell, this game shares Downwell's penchant for interconnected, multi-use systems. Seaside Drive is a side-scrolling shoot-em-up where you are encouraged to move forward to fire at enemies, but must also drift backward to charge up your weapon. The game also has a nice art style that makes strong use of color and avoids outlines, and the co-op multiplayer takes the tried-but-true arrangement of making one player the driver and the other the gunner.

49. Campanella 3

A 3D space shoot-em-up game which definitely pushes the limits of what the 80s retro art style can pull off, this one adds the ability to shoot to the sides as well as forwards, and complements this with enemies that stay in your plane of travel.

This game also hides a set of 50 microgames that are playable in the radar screen - if you press both action buttons on a second controller, you can choose from and play very tiny, primitive games. If you get a Game Over, the game will not advance past the UI until you press the fire button on the first controller, meaning that a single player can play all the microgames by themselves.

50. Cyber Owls

If there's any game that indicates that Mossmouth knew about Action 52, it's probably this one. The flagship game of Action 52 was "The Cheetahmen", the last game in the pack featuring a group of well-built anthromorphic cheetahs wearing wifebeaters, fighting crime, and posturing themselves as competitors to the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In UFO 50, we have a set of well-built anthropomorhic owls fighting crime, with one very similarly dressed and going through a very similar side-scrolling beat-em-up stage.

Fortunately, Cyber Owls is built more competently, and each of the four owls has a different style of gameplay for their missions - the other three owls do an on-rails shoot-em-up mission, a biker heist, and a Metal Gear-style stealth mission. Cyber Owls also has a unique mechanic where owls that fail their missions must be rescued by remaining team members, using a fifth gameplay style that resembles a tactics game.

Conclusion

I'm definitely enjoying UFO 50 as a collection of standalone games, as nearly all of them bring something interesting and unique to the table that's worth enjoying on its own, while the pack aspect encourages switching between them and trying other games. If I had to pick my favorite games from the pack so far, I would choose, in no particular order, Bug Hunter, Magic Garden, Avianos, Mooncat, Party House, Rail Heist, Rock On! Island, Pingolf, Valbrace, Mini & Max, and Quibble Race. If there any games I don't really care for as much - not necessarily bad, just not my thing - I'd have to identify Barbuta, Planet Zoldath, Block Koala, Camouflage, Onion Delivery, Grimstone, and Combatants. (Except for Onion Delivery. That one is bad.)

All of that said, the games are indeed interconnected. Available at all times while playing UFO 50 is the mysterious Terminal, which shows cryptic debug information about each game and allows you to enter eight-character codes. The most obvious use for these is for cheats (such as being able to set up a custom board for Party House), but entering the right codes will lead you down a scavenger hunt that has you playing specific games, activating the terminal in certain rooms and specific conditions, finding alternate beta versions of games (such as a version of Paint Chase where you actually do have to avoid enemy cars), and ultimately finding a secret 51st game that isn't listed in the main menu at all.

UFO 50, after all, is framed as a "rerelease of a bunch of old games" collection that was lost to time until a recovery team found it in an abandoned storage unit. The fictional curator of UFO 50 is telling the story of a once prominent and beloved game studio, and the secrets make clear that this curator has quite the sordid story to tell.

As of this writing, UFO 50 is available now on Steam.