Ever hear of Retro Game Challenge? Or Action 52? UFO 50 is clearly winking at those old (and awful) collections of retro-tanged games. The concept seems to be “Hey, what would it be like if one of those crappy combo cartridges was actually… good?.”
We played UFO 50 last year at PAX WEST and wanted to try it out again. Spoiler: It is STILL tons of fun! UFO 50 has an Incredible amount of variety, eat-’em-ups, shoot-’em-ups, tower defense, RPG’s and much, much more. Creative combinations of retro-style games with more modern mechanics built into them. For example, there was one shooter I played which had a mechanic where you could lock your aim in one direction and move in another direction. Considering that every game has NES-style graphics and is played with an NES controller – just a d-pad and 2 buttons – the fact that they pulled it off gave it a different feel than what I was used to.
Also, all of the games feel less like minigames and more like full NES games so far. Games-within-a-game-package thing. Much like those aforementioned anthologies above, where the games were basically full retro games too with multiple stages, scoring, sometimes difficulty settings, etc.
Another UFO 50 game I played was a dino-themed turn-based strategy about choosing gods to worship to gain resources and build your army to control territory. It’s got enough depth to be released as a cheap standalone game so far. Another game, Mortol, is a platformer where your character classes can be killed to benefit the next players. For instance, you can sacrifice the warrior to use him as a platform after killing enemies to clear a path for weaker characters. We have heard that you’ll probably need a hundred hours to beat them all. Go ahead, speed run it…we dare you. UFO 50 is set for release in 2019.
To listen to the full interview click here: https://soundcloud.com/poppundits/an-interview-with-mossmouth-ufo-50
-Dagobot
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