"UFO 50's title art"

UFO 50 is a game that came out September 18th, made by Mossmouth. I’d not heard of it until about two months ago, when I was playing Monkey Ball on stream and someone went “HOLY SHIT UFO50 GOT A RELEASE DATE” and I was like “what”. When they explained the game and its history to me, I went “huh, okay”, with a bit of a shrug. Sounded kinda neat sure, but I had a lot of other stuff to play. I’d MAYBE check it out.

I am now 160 hours in, and fully 100%’d it after less than a week of owning it. I am UFO pilled. I have been defeated. This game won. It’s now probably my game of the year, and it’s not even really close.

Mossmouth is a collection of indie developers that made games you’ve probably heard of. The biggest dude is Derek Yu, who made Spelunky, though it also has the developer of Downwell on it. It’s basically a supergroup made out of indie devs with one super popular hit. It was announced in 2017, to a release date of 2018, which got pushed back by six years, because did you know making 50 video games is hard?

Yes, UFO50 is 50 video games in one. For 25 bucks, you can own 50 games. These aren’t Warioware micro games. These are full fledged-ass games. 80s games, so not SUPER long, but there IS a JRPG in here, and it IS apparently like, ten hours long. A ten hour long NES-style JRPG for 50 cents. Good lord.

"An LX with PLAY FOREVER "

But it’s not just the games that make this worth playing. The actual conceit off the game is something special all by itself. It’s not JUST a pack of 50 games all by itself, its a love letter to the 80s. The entire game is built into a framing device: Derek Wu and all those people I mentioned earlier? They didn’t make this. They found a floppy disk in an old warehouse filled with a compilation of 50 games for an ancient 80s microPC called the LX. They spent a few years porting it to modern PCs, and here you are! UFOSoft (in the framing device, mind you) was a company that existed in the mid to late 80s, and made 50 games, which seem to have fallen into obscurity, but here they all are, in one collection! The game is almost less about the games to me, and more about the fictional world it builds.

You can see the different developers, all fake people, who grow and develop these games. You see ideas and assets get reused and iterated on. Characters and concepts return all the time. And it almost ALL feels authentic. Not EVERYTHING, we’ll get to it in this series, but a lot of it does. This is very 80s gaming, at its finest. And even though none of this is real, it feels so real. There’s a memorium for someone in the credits of one of the games, and I felt sad. For someone who does not exist. I form bonds with these fake-ass people. Thorson Petters is my MAN, and Greg-Milk is, of course, the GOAT.

So for the next little while, every now and then, I’ll post a full on in depth review of every one of the UFO 50 games. There’s a lot of them. Almost 50 of them, even! And I’ll go into the little details and thoughts as I see and find them. If you don’t want to be spoiled though, and just want to know if you should get this game. Uh, yeah. Yeah you should.

"An LX with PLAY FOREVER "