xeneth.design

    I seem to recall saying something daft about wondering whether or not I could manage to fill my secret menu garden with gifts, since there's no longer enough time left in the project to do anything ambitious like gold all the cartridges. Well, time's a-wasting so let's take a look at all the gifts that I have yet to earn: TO GIVE A 🏠 GIFT... Campanella 3 (clear the bonus round) Could have sworn I've done this thing with the balloons, so that means what I'm thinking of would be worded something like "survive the bonus round" and what I need to do is shoot more things, better. Quibble Race (sponsor a quibble that wins a race) I must have originally read this as "bet on a quibble that wins a race," because looking at it now, I don't actually know what sponsoring a quibble is. I was under the impression that one merely bet on them! CombatAnts (slay a spider) Early spoilers in the menus, jeez! I had no idea there were  spiders until I rea...

     Been thinking about the "challenge structure" of UFO 50  lately. It's a three-tiered system applied to every game: Gift - This is the easiest to earn and generally unlocked for playing enough of a game to "witness the core of the thing" Gold - This is awarded for "beating the game," which obviously varies a bit depending on structure Cherry - This is the completionist tier for "doing everything,"  which doesn't necessarily demand perfection but is highly likely to show you all of the regular content... Slightly controversially, this objective isn't visible in the menus until you've earned Gold on that game I think I'm going to be forced to agree with the decision to hide the cherry info, given even my guesses or assumptions about the nature of the objective has already had warping effects on my play; I'd have golded Rock On! Island  days ago if I stopped quitting missions every time my cave takes a single point of...

[This is the home stretch, designer; you're falling way behind on the comparatively simple task of playing and beating high quality games there, bucko...]      If there was ever any doubt about what an awful game journalist I'd theoretically be, this project has dispelled it. My personal gaming habit of flitting about from title to title, playing enough to feel like the design shape of them is clear; that's about as far from knuckling down and digesting the content as butterflies are from locusts. This has been a very thorough education in how multiple UFO 50  reviews can simultaneously contain quips about it being " a terrible review experience " and also lines referring to the game being " a joy to play ." Turning exploring the collection into a job or task is like tunneling one layer deeper into the dreamscape, where the application of my own "design research pollinator" pattern feels inadequate when applied recursively, not to mention every...

     WarpTank might be one of the most charming and thought-provoking games in the collection for me. It almost feels weirdly laser-targeted to surprise and confound my specific taste. Take the initial presentation, for example; the minimalist title screen and sparse sci-fi aesthetic will trigger my love of Metroid , right? Well they would, if the music wasn't immediately zigging out on a jazzy café jag instead of zagging into moody atmospherics. Then, some later game tracks are more like what I was expecting ... before going full carnival mode once again! One of the tricks they're using to make WarpTank  feel like an older game than it is involves limited animation and scrolling. Your vehicular character is allowed only a single frame of animation between each tile it occupies, and the camera snaps to the tile grid in a way that makes the game less visually smooth. Straining your persistence of vision a bit accomplishes the goal of making it feel less like 2024,...

     I'm having a bit of a bad time here with the sixth title in UFO 50 's constructed chronology, Mortol . It's not just a lack of run optimization to build up a reserve of extra lives, though. The whole theme of sacrificing people to advance is reminding me of the real world problems affecting my chosen profession. This isn't some scathing criticism of the game's core design gimmick or anything; it's an interesting enough twist on the challenges and demands of a puzzle-platformer, (even if the sequel, Mortol II  feels more pointed.) No, the rotten mood I'm in is mostly to blame. Two more studios had layoffs today; Happy Halloween! And I hear tell of yet more positions being cut at websites and publications that ostensibly cover games. The idea was to use this project to get back into some sort of structured habit and then return to the job hunt, but it's hard not to feel apprehensive. Even if I manage to make it back into the industry, will I be thrown...

     Rather than making a bunch of tired Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy jokes, I just got a much better idea! One of these days I'll learn that not everything needs to take the additional time to have some sort of catchy title attached, but how does " The Struggle Game Roundup " sound? [With blog topics like these, it's obvious you're writing and editing too much and not playing enough...] The plan is investigate a few of the UFO 50  titles that seem like I should  be done and dusted with by this late stage in the project, and pick apart what barriers I'm encountering, whether they're issues with the games themselves or just things that expose some of my personal hang-ups. Onion Delivery With the deepest apologies to fictional programmer Chiffon Bola, I've been trying and failing to convince myself to take another bite of this particular vegetable... My biggest internal point of comparison is Campanella , given both games confronted me with an in...

     Man, oh, man does it ever feel good to finally get the gold cartridge on Magic Garden! And what a vindication of my ability to pick up on vaguely Sapphic vibes, given the tone of that post I wrote long before seeing how it ends. [The, *ahem* rivals-to-friends tone implied by the character designs were not exactly subtle , but you're unusually dense when it comes to such things, so perhaps that's why it feels like some sort of prediction feat from your perspective...] I didn't score highly enough to get the cherry, but this should loosen the grip of cuteness that I've been subjecting myself to at the start of every play session for several days now. It starts with a puzzle or two in Block Koala , which has only resulted in clearing something like twenty of what I hope  is fifty block pushing puzzles. I'm not exactly a Sokoban slouch per se; I've yet to get properly stuck on any of them, but they're only going to get harder. After that dose of pastel ch...

    At various times over the last month, I've been up late wracking my brain for what the next day's blog post should be about. In between prodding at several in-progress posts that have yet to cohere with an editing stick, I'll curse my foolishness at having not constrained the project to something orderly and sensical like, "play as much of a single game each day as you can, and just write about your impressions." Never mind that some of the weirder, more personal or experimental posts wouldn't exist! At least each day would be pre-scoped. Well, this thing is what it is at this point, and every now and then, I'm simply overlooking a part of the whole dizzying experience that I really should've been writing about... LIKE THE SOUNDTRACK     I can only assume this is because it's been such a constant companion throughout the process of writing all these posts. I'm constantly idling in one game or another while writing or editing. In fact, right...

  [Look at you, designer. You're a mess after all that intestinal spilling about your early failures to get back on the proverbial horse. Woefully behind on blogging, and not playing nearly enough UFO 50 , which this project is ostensibly all about...]     Apologies for the disruption; ol' day 39 here might just have to be a short high level check-in about how things are progressing. With Campanella  thoroughly coffeed out, I've been turning to its sequel a bit. I've gotta say, Campanella 2  makes a heck of a lot more sense when your UFO piloting skills aren't costing you any hit points just travelling between locations in these big levels! I'm still working out what most of the items do though trial-and-error, and the fuel management game is... interesting. There seems to be a lot of mechanical weight placed on the timing and order you collect stars in, and there may be some tricky advantages to getting as much done on foot as possible. Problem is, in tiny Min...

      Getting caught up in the work-like rhythms of this project has perhaps caused it to become slightly  less personal over time. There was initially a lot of frustrated "whatever, I guess this is what I'm doing now" energy that sort of burned off as I began to focus on what made each UFO 50  game special; broadly, these games are far  more interesting than my own problems and limitations as a game designer. Well, playing what amounts to a more focused console version of SimAnt  has put me right back in my feelings today. When I wrote about my reaction to playing CombatAnts  for the first time, I wasn't fully ready to unpack some of those memories and experiences. Apologies in advance for once again getting way too real about my past... So when I say that StarCraft had a huge, but not necessarily positive, impact on me as a teenager, I mostly mean that it changed me in several ways, but not into someone that generally enjoys real time strateg...

    When I first played Campanella way back on Day 7 , it was such a struggle just to keep the UFO from running into walls, let alone earn enough lives to make it past World B. The controls are good and responsive enough that it was clear this was my fault, but BOY did it take some time to get where I am now with the game. In my most recent run, I deftly collected all forty steaming mugs of coffee and defeated the final boss with over   thirty  extra lives to spare! The way Campanella  handles feels so precise and buttery smooth once you internalize the muscle memory for how much thrust you need. Without this excellent gamefeel, there wouldn't be nearly so much heft to the UFO Soft fiction of this being the title that really solidified their status as a game studio; not just some department inside of LX Systems, Inc. Being the eventual inspiration for the studio name is load bearing, in the lore sense, so I can tell an effort was made to make you feel the impa...

    So, I've had a bit of a hard time getting into Rock On! Island . This is partially because I don't generally play a lot of tower defense games; I've never touched any  Bloons TD , which from the outside seems like it must be seminal given the number of sequels and its placement on digital storefronts. Long ago, I probably took a little dip in  Defense Grid  and thought, "Neat!" before returning to the rivers and lakes that I'm used to. It just isn't a series of waterfalls that I tend to migrate up casually, and there simply has to be a way to escape this TLC metaphor I appear to be trapped in! All I'm saying is that I'm a tower defense scrub - ENOUGH! I've lost a bunch, and have slowly been learning weird tricks like putting chickens next to fires or spending meat while the dinos are active. Things that would have let me start kicking this game's butt MUCH sooner had I known about them. ...but that's just how UFO 50  is, right? We...

     This has come up a couple of times now, but I'm on record as claiming that " UFO 50  is haunted by the spirit of golf games." Let's dig into what that means. Why does it feel like "video golf" is some sort of mechanically animating force across multiple titles? Did Derek Yu stumble across a Neo Turf Masters  cabinet at a very influential time in his life? Does he hear " ON THE GREEN! " in a high-pitched digitized voice as he drifts off to sleep at night? [You have this strange obsession with Neo Turf Masters  despite never having played it. In fact, you haven't really tried to get into any golf game other than Ribbit King since getting your ass kicked in Mario Golf  on the N64 by the coffee shop stoner girls you used to work with... Make of that what you will!] Now that I've at least come to grips with all fifty games, what better way to go hunting in the proverbial rough than to interrogate their designs one-by-one in search of go...