UFO 50 review

Do you remember spending entire weekends playing games with your friends on your family's LX game console? Losing hours after school on Fist Hell, Cyber Owls, and Vainger? No of course you don't, because the entire line of systems and all their games were invented for UFO 50, a game collection that wants to recapture not just a certain style of retro gaming but the feeling of playing them at home as well.

The volume of experiences on offer and their randomness is designed to replicate that nostalgic pirate NES multicart feel, the sort of thing that had a picture of Rambo fighting a dinosaur on the label and was packed with games like TURBO KOMBAT RACER 12. Poking around the menu and finding out what the heck these games are is as much a part of the experience as playing any of the fully featured 50 games themselves.

Every game comes with a (very) short description to help make that poking a little easier. There's a tab for basic controls—more often than not as simple as X=SHOOT—and a history tab revealing an imaginary background for the game. I ended up playing something called Divers first, mostly because I had to pick something and my cursor happened to be hovering over its retro floppy disc icon at the time. I muddled through the short opening menu, a shop where I could equip my team of three lizard-like beings with elementally-aligned sticks, assuming I was in for some stiff 8-bit style RPG action. Instead I found myself swimming through dark caverns teeming with monsters, with only the on-screen depth counter for guidance.

Some passageways were blocked off, levers glimpsed on the other side. Large stone carvings could be investigated, but seemed to serve no further purpose. Aquatic battles felt intimidating and exciting. It was an incredible experience to go into completely blind, like I'd uncovered an atmospheric indie game that had been lost for over 30 years.

Well aware that there were 49 other games waiting to be played, I backed out as soon as I hit a