UFO 1 at a time: Mooncat
I've been having a lot of fun with UFO 50, although the first game I randomly picked out of the 50 was certainly an... interesting experience. (As an aside: does anyone else have the same feeling with UFO 50 that they do with those 1000-in-1 multicarts, or an emulator full of ROMs, that there are just so many options that you have issues picking what to play first?)
Anyway, don't do what I did. Start with Pilot Quest. It's got idle game features that run in the background to generate resources while you play the other games in the collection. Instead, based solely on the name, I started with Mooncat.
Mooncat is hard to describe, and honestly it was hard to get my head around at first. You play a weird little thing that looks like an eggplant with legs; your goal is to find ... eggs? I think? It's a platformer, and you only have a few moves -- you can jump, you can dash, you can slide, and you can ground-pound. You've got unlimited lives, which is good, because you're going to fail a great number of times, and a lot of that is due to the control scheme.
This game is basically designed to demonstrate its weird control scheme: _all_ of the left-hand side of the controller (so any d-pad direction) moves you left, while _all_ the face buttons on the right-hand side of the controller move you right. However, if you're moving right, pressing any of the left buttons makes you jump. If you're moving left, pressing any of the right buttons makes you jump. Pressing a jump button in midair makes you ground-pound.
Yeah. It's a lot. You're going to fall directly into pits a lot. Get ready to see these respawn fish a lot.
That said, once you kind of get into the zen mindspace of Mooncat, which I rarely did, you learn to appreciate what it really is. It's a demonstration of a really unusual control scheme, but also the pixel art here is just so surreal and cool. You're going through a whole bunch of environments with really minimal music -- canyons, ancient ruins, caves, and more -- and facing off against some truly unusual enemies like rolling eyeball straight out of that one Game Boy Castlevania game, birds carrying giant rocks, and things that looks like nothing so much as a spider crossed with a one-eyed squid.
The bad thing is after I played Mooncat for a few hours (and did, in fact, eventually get frustrated and close it) is that I never really did manage to find a single of the game's eggs, which is the goal. Evidently there are three of them? I dunno. I'm looking forward to getting back to Mooncat.
Eventually.
Not today.
- Previous: hello world