UFO 50: The Definitive Review

Cascading 50 Action 52s into a longform WarioWare for the Gen-50 Generation

It’s often hard, as a terminally Gen-X grump, to wade into the waters of modern retro-themed indie and not be outraged at some transgression or other against the objective history of the era being referenced, but UFO 50 manages to transgress the hell out of the 80s while remaining indelibly charming. UFO 50’s catalogue feels true to the fantasy hardware platform it’s supposedly running on, even if that platform had some suspiciously fancy features for 1982 hardware. A general sense of some grand conceptual coherence means UFO 50 maintains an air of realism that is at the very least self-consistent. The 32-colour, quasi-8/16-bit hybrid LX hardware at the heart of UFO 50 is, in some ways, as much the star of the show as the games themselves. It almost feels as if the platform conceit is the real point of the exercise, that Mossmouth and Derek Yu had implemented some Von-Trier creative mandate, a Dogme ‘95 of sorts, with which to create a glorious fictional biography.

Derek Yu was born in 1982, which is interestingly where the LX and UFO 50 catalogue begins. It’s also the year when the Intel 286, Commodore 64 and ZX Spectrum launched, and is one year after NEC’s iconic PC-88’s debut. However if you were to pick a machine that seems, as a physical object, closest to the LX graphic it’d be the Sharp X1, which coincidentally also launched in 1982. UFO 50 runs through to 1989, which is the launch year of the Sega Megadrive and for many, the year when gamers shifted to 16-bit home computers¹. As such it seems that the LX describes an entire era, one that the bulk of which would have been out of cognitive reach for early millennials like Derek and his collaborators. He would have been just three when the NES launched in the US, and seven in 1989, so much more likely to be indoctrinated by the 16-bit era (although perhaps romanced by hand-me-down 8-bits). Yet still, Derek and the rest of the team for UFO 50 wouldn’t exactly be natives to the period the LX covers. This helps to explain some of the modernity underlying some of the game designs and the anachrony of things like Cyber Owl’s extremely 44khz, 16-bit speech samples². That’s not to discount the sense of a lighter touch and a more simplified approach of homage rather than hardcore, avant-garde rigour. And honestly, this is because UFO 50 is really about having fun. Yet the thought remains that the whole concept is about re-coding an 8-bit past as an exercise in exploration. Yes, it hums to the same tune as Action 52, and yes, the intro does have a Warez-like, demosceney vibe that may preface some pirated collection, but the catalogue is so wide and playful, and beautifully weaves established tropes with imagination and innovation, that it seems far more than a mere facile tribute. It absolutely carries the baggage of an imagined past, and the intrusion of modern concepts rendering some of the games impossible in principle, although the more interesting thing about that conceptual a-temporalism is how the ideas were always possible on ancient hardware, it’s just that the thinking about these concepts needed decades to iterate and fully evolve. 

Other reviews and coverage for UFO 50 will namecheck faves among the catalogue and naturally, the urge is strong to list a few of my own discoveries, but I think that’s probably a bit boring for a review that’s arguably a week late³. Instead, I think I prefer thinking about what UFO 50 does in its totality. It did remind me of the illicit experience, of chugging through a big old set of retro ROMs or poring over the format menus in a Chinese retro handheld. But that’s the shallow take. UFO 50 is much more structured than that. The sense of wealth is quite palpable, but what’s perhaps more intelligent and authentic is the sense of UFO Soft’s growing experience with the LX hardware and its developers’ increasing ability to exploit it. Hence, Cyber Owls from 1989 reads very much like an implementation of the 1988 arcade hits Bad Dudes vs Dragon Ninja or Robocop, taking on a very much 16-bit vision and delivering it with aplomb on a legacy format⁴. It’s keenly observed enough to avoid drifting towards key antecedents like Kung-Fu Master (1984) or Rolling Thunder (1986), and hence to my elder eyes, Cyber Owls feels authentically from 1989 -  a kind of cultural precision that belies the talent and genuine sentiment at the heart of UFO 50. It’s interesting that the final game appears to have serious historical detail, as does the opener, Barbuta, with its opaque ruleset, seemingly arbitrary difficulty and technical clunk - although design details that would be highly improbable for 1982 do betray the vision somewhat. Nonetheless, Barbuta’s primitivist details manage to pull off an air of embryonic first steps.

The fact that the UFO 50 vision isn’t wholly correct to period authenticity underlines the generational difference. This is a set of games made by tourists rather than natives to its stated period and that absolutely shows. But it’s a testament to the skill with which UFO 50 is constructed that nothing really clangs. There’s a kind of earnestness underlying so much of it, a seeking of authenticity that, even if only in spirit, absolutely deserves commendation and respect. For it’s a respectful resurrection of a frequently disrespected past. Equally commendable is the Millennial and Gen-Z reception to the suite, which seems full of love for an era they’d only know in barely-remembered fringes of experience or through a modern lens of retro colonialism. For UFO 50 to break through the AAA machinery and endless depths of indie releases is something of a wonder, even if it’s mostly due to Derek Yu’s celebrity. But I can’t begrudge that - this is neo-revivalism done correctly, with serious vigour and so much willingness to delight. It recalls the sheer joy, the pure fun of the era, which was a snowballing, continuous stream of wonder and exploration as much as a car-crash of imbalanced and technically deficient wastes of money. As such, and in a nicely contained and sanitised form, it relays plenty of the era’s spirit to audiences that never got the chance to be part of that journey. I harbour some pity that these over-saturated youngsters never had to nailbite their ways though loading screens, only to find the single pixel of corruption in the final line that signified the game would never load. Or equally that they never had the glee and delight of getting a ten-game compilation for £9.95 of stuff they never had enough pocket money to play. UFO 50 at least reaches a virtual corollary for this, even if accidentally, but it has to be said that in my opinion, a lot of the catalogue would be more at home in the Mastertronic £1.99 and £2.99 bracket than the more expensive £9.95 end of the 8-bit market. The distinction wasn’t always clear in the content, but it was obvious there were far more glorious failures, of games from fun imaginations falling foul of poor implementation, at the cheaper end. What’s interesting with UFO 50 is that the implementation is great. In a sense, it collects the vanguard spirit while correcting the technical shortfalls. Alongside this, lessons from the grand sweep of videogame design history have been teleported back in time, creating a fictional past where any frustration for the player is measured and intentional rather than springing from a lack of experience or expertise. Again, a sense of sanitation of the past rings some concern in my ears, but when the artifice is as honest as this, and the set is this much fun, it’s to be praised.

UFO 50’s artifice is again, as interesting as the games themselves. The presence of the terminal, a text interface for each game, opens up the mystery of the arcane and inscrutable underpinnings of the 8-bit, all-in-assembly era. It also pulls the LX platform closer to the idea of it being more a computer than a console. I remember my own interactions with a command line when using the built-in monitor for the Commodore Plus/4. We’d use it to type in pokes for cheats from the magazines, or simply inspect the contents of memory in search of game data and text, or even for secret messages from the programmer. To have this in UFO 50 absolutely warms my heart and I love the idea it’s an additional layer to the overall concept where hidden treasure may lie. It’s already thrown up a 51st game, which in combination with the Garden⁵ brings (I believe at the time of writing) the total to 52, matching Action 52 perfectly. But I wouldn’t rule out it going beyond that, or the ‘real’ ending being masked somewhere in the underbelly of it all. Given Spelunky’s patronage as one of the saints of speedrunning, I wonder what considerations Mossmouth gave to people undoubtedly trying to speedrun UFO 50. Would it be getting everything for the Garden, or finishing one of the 50 games? Is it finishing all the games? Or is there yet some thread, some genius twist of metagaming that would comprise the ‘true’ speedrun for the whole thing? Naturally, time will tell. But for a quixotic Affectionate Discourse comment, the unsung hero here is GameMaker Studio, the ‘engine’ on which the whole thing runs. I briefly did the PR for YoYo Games during my industry days, so to see GameMaker still powering truly great things is hugely rewarding. It’s almost a shame that UFO 50 doesn’t carry some boilerplate to promote GameMaker, as if to hint that with a bit of dedication we could all contribute our own 50th of some community UFO 50 if we really wanted to. And this is totally true. Just fucking around for an afternoon, I was able to get a rudimentary game up and running - much to my surprise and delight. Knowing that Spelunky was made in its pre-Studio form and that shit like Hotline Miami or Heat Signature have their roots in GameMaker, it feels unfairly ignored in all the celebrations. Make no mistake - I doubt there’d be the 50 if GameMaker didn’t exist and wasn’t as brilliantly accessible to mortal minds as it is. 

If UFO 50 inspires anything in me, yes maybe it’s a niggle that I could make a game that could join its ranks, but really it inspires the idea that neo-retro compilations should perhaps expand outwards from this new ground zero. I frequently see mentions of new carts for the Evercade, but that’s not what I want, and that’s not the spirit of UFO 50 either. What I mean is taking the superstructure and using it, in combination with emulation, to make collections of modern content for genuinely 80s devices. Are there 50 21st-Century Commodore 64 homebrew games that are up to par with UFO 50’s catalogue? I think there might be. Same goes for the ZX Spectrum, or the NES, or the Atari 2600. Or the Amiga, ST, Megadrive, Neo Geo. Or even the Dreamcast. Would I pay £25 to have them? If assembled with the passion, the dedication, the eye for excellence of UFO 50 then maybe I would. I’d like to think that this a door that UFO 50 opens, where its Gamemaker construction of an imagined past serves as some celebrity emissary to the bare-metal-coded jewels of platforms with four decades of experience under their belts. It feels like some egalitarian fantasy utopia for me, a place where the gaming enthusiast mainstream finally realises that the old platforms never died, but are kept alive by the passionate die-hards and the expert explorers of those forgotten domains. That through the promotion of this tourists’ account, we can once again all be natives to an era that birthed nearly everything that we have today.

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1. Consider that for UK Amiga/ST gamers, 1989 was the year of Xenon II: Megablast, It Came From The Desert, Rainbow Islands, Populous and Stunt Car Racer, to name a few. 1989 was undoubtedly the real arrival of the 16-bit era.

2. I mean seriously, how hard is it to bitcrush them down to 8khz 8-bit?

3. If you must know, Devilition, Warptank, Camoflage, Bushido Ball, the bell racing one that's like Super Sprint, the one where you're a flying walrus. Like most reviewers, I also haven't played them all yet!

4. This tracks closely with the real 8-bits of the time, which by 1989 were producing games of such exquisite optimisation and technical sophistication that they would have been unthinkable when the machines launched. Often this was down to extreme optimisation and exploiting undocumented hardware tricks, borne out of years of experience. Unconscious or not, the reflection of this maturation in Cyber Owls is wonderful, even if an easily missed detail.

5. A metagame as part of the UFO 50 superstructure where progress markers in each of the 50 games unlocks items for what seems to be a tribute to Little Computer People.