Well the idea here is to A) post this new link to see if my RSS updates properly and B) maybe play some UFO 50 when that comes out. I broadly like Jeff Gerstmann's Ranking of NES and I watched his Ranking of Action 52 so, figured it might be a fun project. This means the list is built organically adding each game in sequence, though I did occasionally shift the order after revisiting them.

Much (not all) of this was played while streaming to friends, for what it's worth.

(Games are listed in chronological order, with the final ranked list at the end.)

1. Barbuta (1982)

I see they are really committing to the bit by having the first game be a completely impenetrable puzzle platformer where you move at a snail's pace. Having played Metroid, I went left first and ended up not being able to do shit. Once I made it back to the first screen and went right I got crushed by falling blocks. I also cannot believe the skull erases all your lives.
(I did go back and eventually finish this. It's pretty neat.)

2. Bug Hunter (1983)

How dare they curse me with a deckbuilder roguelike! HERE!

On my very first run I got caught in a bug whereupon using the Bombard skill in conjunction with a "makes all bugs detonate on hit" ability, the bugs just kept exploding indefinitely and the game softlocked. I wonder if that's an actual oversight or a like, emulation of the kinds of dumb oversights that would have been in games of this era. I suppose materially those are the same thing.

3. Ninpek (1983)

This one really reminds me of Capcom's SonSon. I've never been good at this kind of game and I'm not about to start now; I guess I'm just old. There are so many bullets! I'm not good at dodging! I'm not a fan of score attack games in the first place!

4. Paint Chase (1983)

There's always something satisfying about filling in colors, I think. I remember playing a fair amount of Bomberman Generations on Gamecube with my brother and his friends and we would always pick the "territory control" mode rather than just straight up deathmatch. I made it to level 10 on my first go.

5. Magic Garden (1984)

Took me a few runs to figure out this was basically Snake, and then took me another few runs to figure out how I was meant to actually score. The terrain effect is pretty interesting because you're always trying to manage the length of your trail rather than simply getting it as big as possible, since any followers outside of the score zone become evil... but you can get possibly even more points off them with the potion if you're well positioned.

6. Mortol (1984)

This feels like the kind of game that would be in the Top 10 of a Game Maker's Toolkit Game Jam Roundup; even I'm not sure myself if that's a compliment or a put-down. I'm really ambivalent on the way lives carry over between stages, because if you end up in a shitty situation the way to fix it might be to just replay the entire game but better. I guess that's just how old games were though.

7. Velgress (1984)

Downwell but UP. Feels nice and snappy but I'm really coming to understand that I'm not into score attack games. I managed to get to the third biome but man this ain't no joke. I know games of the era were sometimes brutally unforgiving but yikes.

8. Planet Zoldath (1984)

I guess this is kind of like Toejam & Earl? You're wandering a randomly generated alien planet looking for map pieces, collecting tools, and trading resources. I'm not sure there's actually a way to tell whether an alien type is hostile or not before you touch it.

9. Attactics (1984)

This is a neat auto tactics game. It gets really tough once the opponent starts getting big bonuses to how many units they get. I can see myself quickly getting back to this one when I'm not trying to entertain my friends on stream.
(Edit: I got back to it and it is insanely hard. My working memory isn't good enough to keep all of the unit abilities in mind when the rounds are that quick.)

10. Devilition (1984)

The way this modulates its balance with your ever-growing number of villagers both raising the difficulty by giving you fewer spaces and lowering it by letting you leave more demons alive is really neat. Almost got it.

11. Kick Club (1984)

I wish I could destroy bullets by kicking the ball into them. Otherwise, eh. Score attack still doesn't really do it for me. The sports theming is cute enough but I don't think I got far enough in to hit anything that I might call a "twist".

12. Avianos (1985)

Really trimmed down 4X type game. I feel like the play is to focus on the Ancestor who can add blessings to the others, since then you can ramp the rest up quick, but you might end up with a deficit of other resources if you do that. I've always been a simplistic "make a death ball of units and charge in" kind of strategy player anyway.

13. Mooncat (1985)

This derives pretty much all of its difficulty from just having a weird control scheme and jumping mechanics. The multi stage mechanic reminds me of Rondo of Blood, which is broadly a good thing, but I'll have to really hunt for some other secret exits. This is the first game on here that I officially beat/"Golded", but I don't think I'm anywhere near getting the cherry.

14. Bushido Ball (1985)

Windjammers truly has an outsized share of the indie mindspace almost certainly due to classic Giant Bomb bits. Thankfully a Windjammers knock-off still has some some juice to it. I don't think I'll ever be able to win without continues, though.

15. Block Koala (1985)

I'm still not sure I quite get how the blocks work. I think you can only push groups if you push the highest number? Once they introduced the black blocks that tick down with every push, I got a bit demoralized. I can only handle so much block pushing at once; I never even beat Baba is You.

16. Camoflage (1985)

The puzzle concept of trying to find your way to the right terrain and then find your way to where you need to go is a pretty solid one, I think. Once they started adding roving enemies, I decided I didn't have enough brain juice to keep playing on stream.

17. Campanella (1985)

Gives me war flashbacks to Terrarria on the Sega Genesis. Feathering the throttle in these kinds of games is always maybe a little too much micromanaging for my brain to handle.

18. Golfaria (1985)

Holy shit I suck at golf. The idea of a Golf RPG is pretty neat, but it is just so hard to get anywhere you want without dropping directly into a water trap and losing strokes over and over.

19. The Big Bell Race (1985)

The controls of Campanella for basically Kirby Air Ride's top-down race mode. Fun, but kind of slight. This would probably be better in multiplayer.

20. Warptank (1985)

I played this for like two hours in one sitting and the game told me that I only completed 23% of it. This is probably the first game that made me go "oh shit, there's a lot in this collection huh". Really neat, but I started to get tired of the main mechanic after playing like 20 stages in a row.

21. Waldorf's Journey (1986)

This is a game where you won't get anywhere if you don't put time into mastering the floaty, slide-y, golf-like movement mechanics, so I ran into the same kinds of issues I did with Golfaria. Not really my kind of game.

22. Porgy (1986)

I played a ton of this, got 97% of the items, and there's no way I'm trawling through the entire sea looking for that last fish egg. I had a good time, but the fuel limit can feel overly punitive at times; maybe if enemies dropped it just a smidge more often. Granted, if UFO 50 is teaching me anything about my gameplay habits, I play action games way too loosely and aggressively.

23. Onion Delivery (1986)

Top down Crazy Taxi. You'd think I'd be better at this type of driving considering how many hours of Combat Cars on Sega Genesis my brother forced me to play as a kid (fuck that game), but like Campanella I can't quite manage to feather the controls that finely while maintaining any kind of speed.

24. Caramel Caramel (1986)

I have never been good at shmups / danmaku and I ain't about to start now. Again, unforgiving action game design is part of the vibe of the whole collection and the time period it's channeling, but man. It's tough.

25. Party House (1986)

A lot of people have called this one as a standout in the collection as a whole and I have to agree. I didn't do very well until I stopped just mashing on the door, inevitably getting busted by the cops. IMO you always gotta beeline the guests who nullify Trouble and focus on getting cash early so you can ramp up.

26. Hot Foot (1986)

Another competitive sports game clearly informed by Windjammers, though this one also has Super Dodgeball DNA in it. This would probably be way better in multiplayer; I found it really fiddly to control both characters at once when playing single player.

27. Divers (1986)

Of course the first RPG in the collection is in an inscrutable pre-console style. This is the kind of game where you would be referencing the manual, but of course UFO 50 does not come with manuals (making manuals for each game strikes me as a pretty neat fanzine kind of idea, but I ain't touching that with a ten foot pole). Like Porgy, you have to constantly swim aaalllll the way back up to base, and like RPGs of the time you are comically weak and underequipped at the beginning and you'll be doing that a lot.
I stopped playing this one after I realized it did not re-target attacks that were aimed at an enemy which has now died. I wanted to get to the rest of the collection.

28. Rail Heist (1987)

A pseudo-turn based heist game. The almost instant death when spotted is rough, but also lets you set up some really wacky scenarios and trick guards into shooting each other. I found the global mission time limit started getting pretty tight once you have to control multiple characters, but I was also having a good time.

29. Vainger (1987)

Sure, flipping gravity is cool, but I think the star of the show here is the upgrade mechanic where each major power-up can be slotted into either your Flip, Suit, or Gun. It can get a little annoying to trek back to a save point to change up and I wish there was just a plain map button. I can see myself going back to this one.

30. Rock On! Island (1987)

I like me a good tower defense. The chicken-based economy of this is interesting, but the 99 meat limit is tough to manage because you have to keep running back and forth to upgrade like one or two guys before you have to grab more chicken. I found success mostly by lining hallways with fire dudes and putting wheel guys at each end of long paths.

31. Pingolf (1987)

I learned from Golfaria and Waldorf's Journey that I absolutely suck at golf. This game is no exception. I will never beat it and that's okay.

32. Mortol 2 (1987)

As noted, I play action games way too aggressively, and this makes something like Mortol and Mortol 2 my kryptonite. You mean I gotta plan out my moves while I do twitch platforming? Oof. All that said, the conceit behind UFO 50 means it can include this type of iterative sequel within itself and that's cool as hell.

33. Fist Hell (1987)

I played a lot of Streets of Rage 1 and Golden Axe when I was very young, so I'll always have a bit of a soft spot for the ol' side-scrolling brawler, but this runs up against the common issue of being insanely tough and with only a single life. You know what both Streets of Rage and Golden Axe had? Options menus where I could turn up my number of lives and shit.

34. Overbold (1987)

The opt-in difficulty scaling to get more money is a pretty neat concept, but it's also kind of the only concept here. When I eventually beat the boss I was surprised it was the end end and not just like, end of Track 1 of 3 or something.

35. Campanella 2 (1987)

Okay this gives me way more war flashbacks to Terraria on Sega Genesis than Campanella 1 ever did. There's some part of me that's fascinated by these sort of dual-layer games where you have a vehicle you can exit at any time to enter smaller zones, and yet I never quite had it in me to play Blaster Master. As is the running theme, man this is fucking hard. I think I only ever got like two stages in.

36. Hyper Contender (1988)

Reminds me a bit of Towerfall. I had by far the most success with the angel character who could just float at will and more importantly had a weapon with the Castlevania axe arc. I did beat it, but I got pretty damn frustrated along the way; it sucks that the computer always wins out if you collide melee hits.

37. Valbrace (1988)

I spent about an hour dying repeatedly on the first floor, then said fuck it and opened up a guide; I had a much better time after that. It's rough to only have save points between floors and the number of gotcha-traps is a bit frustrating, but I ultimately had a good time with this.

38. Rakshasa (1988)

Cool theming and insanely tough (running theme, I guess). I think the comeback mechanic is neat, but it scales up way faster than I could keep up since you die in a single hit.

39. Star Waspir (1988)

Pretty much anything I said about Caramel Caramel also applies to this. I do prefer the aesthetic of this one (what can I say, I'm basic) and the alternate firing modes are neat, but I hate having to also dodge the power-ups so you can make the combinations you want.

40. Grimstone (1988)

Being an 8-12 hour JRPG, this is something like a solid 20% of my playtime for the entire collection. I ended up using Rufus, Pearl, Umbra, and Maria, which worked okay once I hit the mid-game and their unique character traits started actually becoming relevant. In true FF1 fashion, you're scraping by with a teensy inventory and random encounters that'll wreck you no matter what level you are. Tedious as hell (harhar) but I had a good time.

41. Lords of Diskonia (1988)

Tin Pin Slammer returns! I liked this a fair bit, but the battles can really drag on, even with the fog meant to force a conclusion. The computer also blatantly cheats harder and harder as the missions go on. I found the ranged units to clearly be the best as long as you've got ammo.

42. Night Manor (1988)

Ended up following a guide for this one because I never trained my point-and-click game sense (I've only really played the first Monkey Island). Cool to have one of them here; it's definitely a completely different vibe from the rest of the catalog. From the POV of the framing device, this is also the only game directed by Gregory Milk, which is notable for the meta-narrative.

43. Elfazar's Hat (1988)

I've never actually played Pocky & Rocky so I don't have any particular attachment to this style of game. The power-up system from Star Waspir where you have to stack the proper combinations of icons returns here, but since this is a much slower game it's easier to avoid the ones you don't want. Unfortunately, you also can't make the ones you do want spawn in, it's just random chance.

44. Pilot Quest (1988)

This got some buzz for being a weird idle/clicker game that runs while you're playing any of the other games on UFO 50, which brings up the question of how it was supposed to work within the fiction of the framing device (I suppose the LX had an internal clock?). I do not care for idle games and I did not find the adventuring outside the compound to be particularly compelling either, since it's full of confusing dead ends made to run out your timer.

45. Mini & Max (1989)

Delightful, to the point where I don't necessarily want to spoil some of the mechanics (hint: try the bottom left corner of the map). The running back and forth gets a smidge tedious, but I never found it confusing or overly difficult. Considering where I found some of those upgrades, they've got to be placed in multiple locations, right?

46. Combatants (1989)

I am terrible at this; I got walled at like the third stage. Your control over the other ants is so imperfect and fiddly that I could not rely on them to do anything, so I just keep getting overwhelmed by enemies. I want to like it way more than I actually do.

47. Quibble Race (1989)

This feels like it should be some kind of dog racing minigame within Grimstone. Like real gambling, there's so much chance involved that you might as well not have any control over the outcome of any given race. Funny for a few minutes.

48. Seaside Drive (1989)

Great aesthetic and it's a neat design choice to force you to constantly move back and forth across the screen. Unfortunately, I suck at shmups and score attack games. It's funny that the bonus stage you unlock by not losing a life in a stage simply rewards you with more lives, but I suppose that's the "memorize these levels exactly" design of the era at work.

49. Campanella 3 (1989)

I'd thought that the level screen in Campanella 2 was Star Fox esque, so I had a laugh seeing that Campenlla 3 basically is Star Fox. Great that I don't have to worry about feathering the throttle and managing a fuel gauge anymore, but I'm just as bad at rail shooting. Frankly I have no idea how you're supposed to get a perfect round in some of these stages.

50. Cyber Owls (1989)

Of course the final game is an elaborate Cheetahmen joke. Of course.
I did not bother to get to the final mission here, but I did find the tile-based rescue gameplay - only playable via losing in another stage - to be the most fun type. I suppose at least I'm consistent?

51. Miasma Tower (1989)

The whole package's framing device is great. Seeing the rise and fall of specific UFO Soft employees in the credits of each game is surprisingly affecting, especially as you get towards the end of the catalog where the company is starting to crumble. For what it's worth, I did not hunt down all the clues myself, I looked up a guide.

Other Thoughts

• Having at least touched every game in the collection, I feel like you can tell a lot about someone's game taste by seeing which games in UFO 50 they do or don't have Gold/Cherry on.
• I get it: intense difficulty and the accompanying stage memorization was certainly a major element of design at the time. But a lot of these NES-era games also had password systems or other methods of maintaining some kind of progress (and yes, I know there are some cheat codes somewhere in there). I'd love to just be able to skip to levels that I haven't seen in games like Elfazar's Hat or Fist Hell.
• As a whole package, cool game. I'd give it 5 stars easily.

The List

1. Mini & Max
2. Avianos
3. Porgy
4. Warptank
5. Party House
6. Grimstone
7. Rock On! Island
8. Vainger
9. Valbrace
10. Rail Heist
11. Lords of Diskonia
12. Miasma Tower
13. Night Manor
14. Mortol 2
15. Devilition
16. Attactics
17. Bushido Ball
18. Hot Foot
19. Camoflage
20. Barbuta
21. Cyber Owls
22. Seaside Drive
23. Mortol
24. Elfazar's Hat
25. Campanella 2
26. Hyper Contender
27. Campanella
28. Mooncat
29. Elfazar's Hat
30. Golfaria
31. Bug Hunter
32. Overbold
33. Fist Hell
34. Velgress
35. Campanella 3
36. Rakshasa
37. Caramel Caramel
38. Onion Delivery
39. Star Waspir
40. Waldorf's Journey
41. Block Koala
42. Divers
43. Pingolf
44. Pilot Quest
45. Paint Chase
46. Planet Zoldath
47. The Big Bell Race
48. Magic Garden
49. Kick Club
50. Quibble Race
51. Ninpek

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