UFO 50 Review Space Shuttle Discovery Retro Style Games

UFO 50 is a masterful compilation of retro-style games that invokes the sense of delightful discovery at the heart of the 8-bit era

UFO 50 Review Space Shuttle Discovery video games have changed over the last 40 years. While we are arguably in a golden age of creativity and innovation in the medium, it’s a different type of creativity than when games were in their infancy–learning to crawl, grappling for new ideas, and guessing at best practices. Modern-day games have become largely standardized, and that’s mostly for the better. But when we look back at retro game collections like the NES Classic or compilations from Digital Eclipse, we’re often remembering the trailblazers, not the oddballs. That’s what makes UFO 50 so special–it invokes the sense of wild experimentation and surprise that you would find in a cross-section of the earliest video games.

And while UFO 50 doesn’t tell a straightforward narrative story, there is a lot of richness to be found in the metafiction of UFO Soft. You see the logo changing over time. The games themselves get more complex and more refined, and have better art direction and better quality-of-life features, over the fictional timeline. The games themselves have little notes about their development, and you can piece together criss-crossing plotlines involving the studio’s personalities and leadership. The occasional sequel will appear, showing an early style of iterative development that might result in radically different gameplay styles springing from the same core concepts. One of the games–a point-and-click adventure called Night Manor–has glimpses of the early cinematic achievement that you could see being influential in the fiction of the world.

Mortol:

This puzzle platformer gives you an array of peons willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good, making your resources and lives draw from the same large pool. Each one can perform a “ritual” to stick into walls, turn into a stone block, or blow up passages, so you progress through the stage by carefully managing when and how to sacrifice them to keep progressing further. It was followed by a sequel, Mortol II, later in the collection, which includes a more sophisticated class-based system for utilizing your willing sacrifices, but there’s something very pure and engaging about the original idea.

Bushido Ball:

A dodgeball-meets-fighting game with a selection of samurai characters to choose from. You smack the projectiles with your katana to ricochet it back at the other side, and on top of requiring precision timing, each character has their own special abilities, providing lots of replay value and room for skill-building.

Camouflage:

Camouflage is a brilliant little puzzle game with a root in stealth mechanics. As a largely helpless chameleon, you need to navigate to your home while avoiding watchful predators. But being a chameleon, you can change your colors to match the tile you’re standing on. That makes navigating through a stage a tense exercise in planning your route to pick up new camouflage patterns. For extra challenge, each stage has collectibles to pick up, including a baby chameleon who will follow you around and pick up its own camouflage pattern, thus doubling the challenge.

Party House:

Possibly my favorite surprise of the bunch, Party House is an ingenious puzzle game with mechanics similar to modern deck-builders. You’re given a strict number of turns to throw a series of parties, and you control the guest list. Each guest comes with bonuses to your cash and popularity–cash expands your house, and popularity goes toward inviting new guests. Some guests have “Troublemaker” attributes that will attract the cops, while others might sacrifice some popularity for cash, or vice-versa. Dancers stack as a multiplier for popularity. One party-goer even brings a random friend who risks overloading your party and summoning the fire marshall to kick someone out.

The party commences, a random assortment of your rolodex of party-goers shows up, and you tabulate your cash and popularity to put toward the next party, all while steering toward some particular win condition like having four aliens attend a single party. It’s shockingly compelling, and easy to keep the party going for just one more turn late into the night.

The Big Bell Race:

The is one of the shortest games of the collection but also one most suited to multiplayer. The Big Bell Race is pure game mechanics: You’re a spaceship navigating through a boxy maze-like racetrack while bouncing off the other racing ships and grabbing power-ups that create track hazards for your competitors. A single tournament is eight quick races, but the competition can be fierce, and you can always play two-player to bump elbows against a friend.

Warptank:

At first glance, Warptank appears similar to the classic Blaster Master tank segments, but it’s the “warp” in the name that really sets it apart. At any point, your tank can flip from floor to ceiling or to opposing walls. Navigating a stage is a delicate balance of avoiding traps and taking out enemies by frequently gaining access to new vantage points, giving it a fierce action-game feeling that also tickles your brain.

Vainger:

This metroidvania-like platformer has a hook similar to Warptank, but the application of it in this genre makes it feel very different. As an alien soldier, you can swap the gravity polarity by double-tapping the jump button, so all of the traps and enemies are positioned to take advantage of stages that could be upside-down at any time. The result is something like the second quest of Symphony of the Night in a reversed castle, except you control when the whole thing flips on its head.

Pingolf:

Lots of early games tried to approximate sports like golf, but Pingolf is a more modern take with a sci-fi aesthetic. The side-scrolling stages are set up like platforming stages with some elements of pinball, with narrow corners and bounce pads. It feels not quite like anything else, though the closest analogue is probably the recent Cursed to Golf.

Fist Hell:

It wouldn’t be a retro-style compilation without a River City Ransom riff, but Fist Hell sets itself apart with fantastic pixel art and an engaging hook: zombies! You’re taking on the hordes of the undead with nothing but your fists and found objects, which leads to neat twists like lopping the skull off of one zombie and throwing it at another. It’s the kind of comical early gore that felt daring in the ’80s, and with four characters to choose from, there’s lots of replay value.

Valbrace:

Another surprising favorite from a genre I haven’t had much experience with, Valbrace is a first-person dungeon-crawling RPG, similar to Dungeon Master or Wizardry 2.