I liked writing about videogames for the Cublex Awards 2024, but the Cublex Awards are a year-end event, and I've been wanting to write about games as I play them. So here’s some games I’ve played somewhat recently and my opinions on them.
This is a game I hadn’t played very much at the time of reviewing UFO 50 for Cublex Awards 2024, and it’s because of the one thing that’s blatantly obvious. The controls are weird. And I knew that was the entire point, but I couldn’t do it. I got past the beginning cutscene and I knew I was in for a good time, but I just wanted to move on to something else. But I’d be back.
I knew I was in a good time for a very specific reason: the death screen. There’s just something about it. It screams quality. I don’t know what it is about the fish animation that’s there for a second as your weird-ass guy stands back up, but it’s an amazing indicator for the rest of the game. It’s a perfect amount of serenity between attempts.
And when I went back, I got it completely. I didn’t fully get it until I actually got my first egg, but it’s an understanding that grows over the time of the full gold playthrough. It’s not an understanding I can bestow on you by talking about it because I don’t really have words for it, it’s just the kind of experience that happens and then it’s the best game ever made by the end of it. I’ve 100%ed it now, and I wish there was more to do, more places to explore, more levels to complete. It’s pure quality, and it’s fun too. It’s almost arguably worth the $30 price tag on its own.
But it’s not a game that stands alone, and I’m not talking about the other 49 games in UFO 50.
..and the mooncats is the predecessor to Mooncat, being developed by the same Eirik Suhrke with the same control scheme featuring the same weird creature as the main character. It was developed in 48 hours for a Ludum Dare game jam, so it’s definitely much smaller scale, but the part that I didn’t expect is that it’s got a much darker tone. The one song it has is very drone-y and the graphics aren’t nearly as bright colors and creatures as Mooncat is, with the enemies being a weird skull dude, a regular spider, and a falling spike trap that you could compare to the first room of Barbuta if you felt like it. It’s also a tiny bit harder than my first run through Mooncat, but since I’ve already gotten used to the controls I was ready for the challenge. (That being said, I think a 100% of Mooncat is much harder.)
Comparing these two games is less of a “this one is better/this one is worse” and more like looking at the differences between Super Mario Bros 1 and Super Mario Bros 3. Mooncat is more heavily developed, generally better made, and has a lot more in it, but ..and the mooncats is still damn good, and it’s got its value. And I don’t think Mooncat would be as good without it having been attempted before. ..and the mooncats is worth playing even if you’ve cherried Mooncat.
We’ll return to UFO 50 later. For now, let’s pop some balloons. BTD6 is another good entry into the Bloons series. You place monkeys and other towers, and they pop the balloons headed across the track. I played a lot of BTD3 as a kid and a little bit of BTD5 when it was the new hotness, so BTD6’s changes to the tower upgrade chain are a bit jarring. For those unaware, in BTD6 every tower has three upgrade chains with 5 upgrades each. One can go to level 5 and another can go to level 2, but you can’t get every upgrade - you have to choose how to specialize the tower. Along with the almost unnecessary amount of individual towers, it’s a lot to think about.
I’ve picked a couple favorites. Bomb Shooter, Monkey Sub, Druid, and Monkey Village are my current favorites out of each category. 2-0-3+ Monkey Sub is especially fun - it’s weird to have what amounts to a regular dart tower be able to target the entire board, but it certainly helps and I find it funny. I appreciate that it copies the camo coverage from other towers, it’s a nice touch that makes it worth spending the coins on.
I don’t have much else to say. I’ve not gone into any of the online stuff at all, just having a good time with the base boards. I’m mainly playing Easy and Normal mode as a time passer sometimes.
Super Stickman Golf is a mobile game classic and I think everyone who’s played a game in the series likes it to some degree. I made a post on Bluesky about how there should be an SSG collection for consoles and PC, and that ended up launching me into playing the games again after a conversation with MarkGamed. I think I can blame Mark for this multiple times at this point.
The problem with golf games is the frustration with having a lack of control. Once you’ve made the shot, that’s where it’s going, and you don’t know what it is until it’s there. Obviously you can just get better at the game, but SSG3 does something cooler: it lets you put spin on the ball at any point during the shot. Along with the gacha system immediately giving me a hat with extra shot preview, it’s been my favorite golf experience since the last Systemspace Tower Unite recording session.
SSG1 and SSG2 don’t have spin, and while that arguably makes it more skill-based I find it less fun. SSG3’s level design also takes spin into account, requiring it for a couple courses and generally just being designed to be somewhat difficult. It’s kind of a Tetris The Grandmaster situation – the third entry gives you tools you wish you had the entire time, then make it so you need to master them. The only difference is that you can actually beat SSG3 – as of writing, I’ve 100%ed the base game and am chipping (heh) through the DLC courses. I am not at all close to beating TGM3 and probably never will be.
Golf is also a lot of fun when there’s alternative goals to complete. I already mentioned clean ball, but there’s also a star badge for getting 10 under par with powerups, and a bunch of dollars and a secret flag to find in each course. The secret flags are generally annoying until you find them, but then they feel pretty smart once you find them – every course has one hole with an invisible portal that leads to the secret flag. So far they’ve been in pretty good spots - when they’re easy to spot they’re hard to get to, and when they’re hard to spot they’re easy to get to. It’s very well done.
I’ve got nothing more to add, it’s just a fun game to play.
Cleopatra Fortune is better than Tetris.
Let me try to explain it. Cleopatra Fortune is all about entombing treasure pieces. Your pieces contain treasure pieces and block pieces. If you make a line of blocks, they disappear; if you trap treasure pieces between the floor, walls, and block pieces, they also disappear. You can chain treasure clears and block clears for more points, but the real money is in perfect clears, which are much more consistent in this game than in most block games. As you progress through the game, more complicated pieces show up, as well as some mummies that are like treasure pieces except they don’t clear when trapped (unless a treasure piece is also included.)
The game is the same level of “easy to play, hard to master” that Tetris is. If things get out of hand, they get out of hand very quickly, but downstacking can happen just as quick. It’s very satisfying to ruin your board on accident, downstack with a well-built tomb, and then get back to the perfect clear loop after a few rows of blocks. It helps that the pieces, especially at the beginning, are well crafted for these purposes. Even the weird pieces are pretty usable in most scenarios. (Cleopatra Fortune Plus, the sequel, ends up giving you much weirder pieces.)
Cleopatra Fortune S-Tribute is absolutely terrible on PC, but the Switch version plays perfectly. If you want to play on PC specifically, emulate the game.
Pikiinya is absolutely not better than Tetris.
Pikiinya! Excellent is about penguins and ice. Your pieces contain ice blocks and penguins. Ice blocks can also contain penguins. Making a row of ice breaks the ice, and making a group of 6 penguins gets rid of the penguins. Just like the other game, you can chain these two activities, and unlike Cleopatra over there, you do want to do that here.
For context, I played this game for the first time for a tournament series called Puzzle Wednesday. They do a versus puzzle game tournament every week, with some of the best and worst of the genre. It’s a really great way to discover weird obscure block games. Pikiinya seems to be mostly a versus game, and Excellent has a character meta. It’s a pretty good meta from what I’ve seen, but the tournament only used the base roster so there’s 6 characters nobody’s seen yet. The two top tiers that were available complement each other quite well with their different damage patterns, and since all garbage turns into random pieces if you can manage to make a match, it’s a very exciting game. You can just gamble your way into a killshot!
The main issue (and honestly, the only issue) is that every block you get handed is a 2x2 piece, ala Lumines. This makes downstacking one of the most painful things in existence. At any point in time you can get a 1 block wide column and you’re just fucked, especially if it’s in one of the columns next to the board wall. If you get slapped by the character that intentionally creates spires and don’t get a good garbage roll, good luck recovering. And you can screw yourself just as easily.
Despite the issues that I think partially stem from design (and partially a skill issue on my part), at the end of the day the game is fun. The day of the tournament was the first day I played it, and I enjoyed all of my studying beforehand and tournament play after. I think the word kusoge applies, at least in the modern “enjoying things that have glaring flaws” sense and not the original “this game fuckin sucks” sense.
Since the tournament, DigiDigi found out the method to unlock the locked characters, and punk7890 made a Gameshark code to unlock them automatically (from my request, thank you!). The character meta will definitely be different with the new people but I don’t know if it’s better or worse. A couple of the characters have a rough 2-5 attack pattern that feels maximally effective, but you seemingly need a strong chain to really go for it. Only time will tell.
The Gameshark code is 30041A50 00FF. Online multiplayer is possible through a fork of Duckstation and it is absolutely seamless. I’d be down to run some sets any time.
This section contains massive spoilers for UFO 50. This is the last game in the article, so if you don’t want to be spoiled you’re good to leave now.
UFO 50 has secrets! I knew that when playing the first time and writing Cublex Awards, but I’m dumb and unobservant so I decided to just ignore it. However, when I started working on the high score charts for the website Cyberscore, I needed the details. I had already heard that it ends in a secret 51st game, and what if that game has a high score system or a numerically counted collectable? And I wanted to see how the secret chain worked anyway, so I looked up a guide and ran through the full thing.
The very beginning starts in a place you’ll already be looking at, the notes for each game. One of the later ones credits a Gregory Milk (an in-universe UFOsoft employee) in an interesting way - it calls him “GREG-MILK”. That’s a terminal code. We’re off!
GREG-MILK displays a message that points you to Mini & Max without telling you what to do. I knew exactly what it was talking about - there’s a room with nothing to do but a symbol to look at, which also appears on the Terminal by default. If you’re in that room and you open the Terminal, it gives you the first clue, telling you to do something in some game in the form of a riddle-type thing.
Most of the rest of the chain plays out like this: solve the riddle, do the in-game goal, open the Terminal, receive a new riddle. I was actually pretty solid at this, I think I got about 75% of them without needing the guide. The most painful one to do was the Golfaria clue, which expects you to start at the beginning of the game. I had just made progress in the game for the first time, so I had to backtrack. Generally, this was fun to do and most of the goals don’t require much game skill.
Four of the riddles instead give you a Terminal code. Entering this terminal code puts you into a segment of Miasma Tower – the 51st game. It’s an adventure game about UFOsoft’s late years where you play as one of the employees. It’s an amazing piece of metafiction, telling you info about UFO 50’s creation and various employees in the company, including unkind portrayals of the management. It’s also a fun piece of in-world fan service - at the end of the first three segments is a prototype of a game. If you beat the prototype, it ends your playthrough of Miasma Tower and gives you the next riddle. The fourth segment rolls credits, which simply state “an experience by Gregory Milk”. Gregory Milk also did the majority of the work on the UFO 50 compilation in-universe, and is who you play as in Miasma Tower. This is cool as fuck. Completely worth the effort.
I can’t recite nor remember everything within Miasma Tower, I definitely missed some things, and I don’t want to fully spoil it anyhow. If you want to give it a shot, enter GREG-MILK in the terminal and get going - he’d want you to!