I decided at the start of 2025 to limit computer game purchases as much as possible. We've got a wedding on April 25, 2026 to plan for and it's time to adjust budgets. There's been Tokyo Xtreme Racing while it was in Early Access as something to explore when complete and we work out where to place all our steering wheels. Dragon Quest I+2 HD for a final, sort of definitive version to save for extreme health crashouts. Super Robot Wars Y and Tetris the Grandmaster 4: Absolute Eye for obvious, moral imperative reasons. It's been an easy limit to maintain because not only have I simply been exchanging game time for more exercise and music practice, but because I bought UFO 50 as well.
I'd say this collection from Mossmouth, the Spelunky devs needs no introduction by now, but conversations with friends of mine indicate that it's still not as well known as it should be. This is a set of 50 games developed by Mossmouth between 2018 and 2024, presented in kayfabe as an archived ROMset for the fictional LX microcomputer line. This is mostly a conceit to have a set of technical restrictions on all the games (only two buttons, 32 colours with a specific palette, 4 channels of FM sound and I'm pretty sure there's only 2 operators allowed for said FM) but it's not strictly a period piece. Various common games production techniques such as flickering sprites to cut down on draw time or create transparency in CRT displays aren't present. The framerates are stable and the aspect ratio's almost always 16:9. There's no scanline emulation. Still, it's an absurdly good value pack even if you only wind up liking one or two games. There's some obvious killer titles which could have been sold on their own here, but by bundling it all together there's a chance for people to dabble in genres they're unfamiliar with and a secret ARG to uncover if you want some Lore(tm) to go with your ROM dumps.
Did I mention that there's a crackware style drum & bass track on startup?
I'll talk about the games in their kayfabe release order and give a final verdict on each. Prior to that there's some general comments to make. First is my disappointment that every multiplayer game has a hard cap of 2 players. In kayfabe the LX microcomputers never had more than 2 controller ports, but there's a fair chunk of turn-based hot seat games which have no need for that limitation. Pingolf is the sorest offender here, though Party House and Avianos could have benefited from this too. The Big Bell Race would likely be a new party hit with guests at our home if we could break the limit as well. Second is that even in the hotseat multiplayer games, player 2 must use controller 2. To the best of my knowledge there's no way to configure a hot seat situation, which is annoying when Hayley and I would rather just pass the keyboard back and forth. Bafflingly, Quibble Race breaks all these rules, proving there's no real technical limitation. Not that there's really any; the entire set of games were made in Game Maker.
Barbuta
The collection starts out with one of its finest period pieces. This is a puzzle platformer with poor audiovisual tells for information, atrocious hit detection and design tricks like expecting you to swing blindly at an invisible switch but also timing the few other objects on screen to almost always make a sound effect which overrides the switch confirmation sound so you usually don't realise you even made contact with something. This is the sort of game La Mulana was a love letter to. Grab a fat sheet of paper for your notes.
Verdict: Not "good" but it is a perfect game.
Bug Hunter
On average I love deck building games. Not the Slay the Spire type, but their cardboard originators like Dominion. Thus it's a surprise that I genuinely don't enjoy this procedurally generated series of maps where you need to eliminate all enemies on the grid while obtaining enough currency to keep buying and replacing your deck of movement/attack actions. The best deck builders are about studying what's available and determining what's most exploitable; the options available are all too limited to really promote that.
Verdict: I hate Slay the Spire too by the way.
Ninpek
As an arcade horizontal autoscrolling platform shooter with a second, harder loop required for the cherry clear this is honestly one of the realest inclusions in the lineup. Admittedly only having a second loop instead of infinite loops is more of a 90s design decision but all in all I think this game's slept on by most people; myself included.
Verdict: I'll get to it after I finally beat Battle Garegga maybe.
Paint Chase
The obvious comparison to make here is with Splatoon but this reminds me as much of later 80s attempts by Taito to reimagine earlier genres already fading away. The Newzealand Story for maze platformers, Arkanoid for Breakout clones, Raimais for dot eaters and so on. Is Paint Chase as good as those three? Obviously not but for a couple of people coming up with ideas for a gigantic compilation this is a fair effort.
Verdict: I want to like it more than I actually do.
Magic Garden
Speaking of dot eaters, here we have a Snake style game which combines the tail growth mechanics with Pac-man Championship Edition style scoring. The idea is a risk/reward where you can either rescue red blorbos safely and quickly for a relatively easy game clear or stack up large chains of em for the big points required for a score. On top of the larger clears you also need to save up the potions larger clears reward you with to gain consecutive blue blorbo destruction with the right point values.
I would gush about this game all day if it weren't for two points of frustration: walls and blue blorbo hit detection. Bumping into walls is a fail condition which makes sense for Snake but is ludicrous for a game which is far more Pac-man. The small window for rapid direction switches and the fact that unlike Pac-man you cannot make a 180º course correction lead to a lot of moments where the input interpreter feels like the enemy more than anything on screen or a tactical failure on the player's part. The hit detection is incredibly large, which is a problem when a lot of the time you're intended to jump a single tile over them. I'm not expecting Zoo Keeper levels of freedom but the timing is strangely tight for a game where the danger tiles move around. On that note, once a blue blorbo starts moving its hitbox is kind of on both the previous and new tile at the same time, ending far more runs than it should. Both of these problems seem minor on paper but lead to the game feeling like it's penalising me for pushing it to the limit instead of playing cowardly.
Verdict: In a perfect world I'd be playing this daily. Instead I'm glad to not touch it again.
Mortol
You start with 20 lives and all verbs besides "Jump" and "Walk" your character(s) are capable of will kill them. Find a path through each level that minimises total lives lost or ends with a net-gain. You also receive one extra life per three enemies slain, though enemy spawners in levels tend to cut themselves off if you find a way to farm them.
Verdict: This game is unbelievably great. If you like action focused puzzle platformers this is the secret sauce.
Velgress
Alpha the Space Pirate is a fun recurring character throughout the collection who is cursed to star in games I hate. This game is an attempt at working roguelite elements into something resembling Ice Climber or Kid Icarus but with the pace of Downwell. The thing is, Downwell has various pauses in its relentless tempo to let your brain take the rests it needs to resume chains of hyperfocus. Downwell also moves, well, downwards. That may sound insignificant but it means that your one input besides "move left" and "move right" fires a gun which slows your descent while also clearing obstacles. In Velgress you are required to continually perform the separate tasks of jumping and shooting to manage your ascent. Since every terrain type will disintegrate, just at different rates, you do not have that alternating intense flurry of activity followed by a breather and looming sense of dread before you resume your descent. It results in a flow that all feels a little wrong, even before hoping you reach the shop for your randomised selection of items you may or may not even want to purchase.
Verdict: I'm too old for this.
Planet Zoldath
What if a 2D Zelda game were short and procedurally generated? It'd be pretty neat but
Verdict: Not quite my jam. I like level design more than systems!
Attactics
I have never played Clash of Clans and thus avoided this. Hayley's stuck at a stage somewhere in the late teens.
Verdict: Need to re-examine.
Devilition
I love the mildly edgy Salem Witch Trials theming and the basics of the gameplay. I always enjoyed Rube Goldberg Machine puzzle games like The Incredible Machine so one with a catchy themesong and chain reactions of exploding frogs, homunculi etc. was sure to be a delight. By the time I achieved the Cherry Clear (which despite having three parameters for scoring, weighted heavily in the favour of surviving pilgrims and excess pieces in stock) I was exhausted with the game. In The Incredible Machine you are solving pre-assembled puzzles with a limited pool of pieces available immediately. In Devilition you can only select one piece from three at a time, slowly cycling through a deck which I'm not entirely sure wasn't being shuffled over and over. It all felt a little too random, like my quest for efficient engine construction was permitted to clear the game after enough attempts rather than me improving my board layouts. I'm not quite sure how to improve on this, be it making earlier stages a fixed design or providing some means to see what the full pool of upcoming pieces to use are. I don't regret my time with the game though.
Verdict: Fun bangs from the gang.
Kick Club
Single screen platformers were one of the most typical genres of the era so it would've been embarrassing if nobody tried to include one here. Much like Bubble Bobble, Snow Bros or Rodland a lot of note taking and routing is required if you want to both clear the game and achieve a high enough score for the cherry. The corny kids sports theme and soccer ball systems work quite well!
Verdict: It's no Zupapa but I respect the effort.
Avianos
It's a turn-based military conquest game where combat is determined by some janky real-time auto battles with limited orders available to you. It's also the only game to really play with sprite limits, by excess forces on a tile spawning as reserves. This adds a bit of tactical depth to when you want to retreat to try and spare lives.
The theming rules. Humanity has caused the death of all mammal life on Earth so now birds have risen to claim the world. Alas, they too have fallen to the temptation of war and now must kill on behalf of their ancient gods (various dinosaurs). Each turn you must pray to one of five gods and this determines which actions you may take that turn. The god you've chosen is locked out for the opponent that turn, and unavailable on the next so you must as a minimum alternate between two. It adds the right amount of strategic depth to the game, though some rather potent first turn advantage if you're trying out multiplayer.
After several maps of increasing computer-controlled opponent ability, the single player starts throwing in gimmicks and rules changes. The funniest are the last two, which remix all the gods. They're all kind of frustrating to deal with and I was glad to be done with the game by the time I'd won.
Verdict: My dad wouldn't sleep for a couple of months if he played this.
Mooncat
Let's be honest: the puzzles are obtuse in often uninspired ways. The levels aren't that difficult. What elevates this from "kind of weird platformer that you might have played as a flash file in 2004" to "transformative classic" is the deranged control scheme which makes its seemingly basic tasks much trickier than they would otherwise be. By default, the ZX Microcomputer's controller buttons move left and any input on the d-pad moves right. Press both to jump. Simultaneously for a neutral jump, and hold a direction before adding the other to jump a direction. Press both again to ground pound, which bounces off enemies (either neutral or in a direction depending on what you were first holding once again). You can double tap a direction to dash on the ground, which has a huge coyote time window to buffer a jump and slide off of platforms. You have a meager airdash with the same input. It's not quite a Bennett Foddy game in terms of control awkwardness, but it's one game of 50. In that context, a weird platformer with loose abstract dream-like aesthetics which makes you feel like you're 6 years old and learning to play a computer game for the first time is a treat.
Verdict: Magic.
Bushido Ball
There's a couple of versus games for sickos here, but I feel I'm siding with IdolismJ on becoming haters towards them. There's a really delicate balance between making something as tightly controlled and deep as Windjammers without falling into the sloppiness of something like whichever Kunio-kun sports game you hate the most. I really like the Foul system and the ways you can strategise around it as a single player game. The theming is excellent.
Verdict: It's no Videoball.
Block Koala
Making a great Sokoban style block pushing puzzle game is harder than it seems. People have been designing levels in this style for decades, but an outsider game designer might fall into certain artistic habits which are genuine crimes when applied to this genre. In a great Sokoban game like, well Sokoban for the PC-88 or the various releases of Chip's Challenge, moving from grid to grid is instantaneous. For those unfamiliar with the genre, this may seem like a product of early computer limits. It's actually vital for game feel. Inputs need to be crisp and snappy because you are going to be performing tens, if not hundreds of steps to move even a few boxes. A cute little walk cycle becomes agony in such an environment. Compare these hateful koalas and their lazy gait to Void Stranger, a game whose animations are brimming with personality yet feel so much more responsive than Block Koala's misery.
The same goes for your music. Reusing a single song is fine so long as it's unobtrusive. You need a song which encourages a zen-like state of deep thought and doesn't irritate. Here too Block Koala is a criminal. There's plenty of great examples of music that encourages the right mental state with only 4 channels of FM sound throughout the collection but Block Koala feels like the exact sort of game parents regret letting their children near for their own sanity.
The puzzles are fine; even clever and unique in the genre's space. Blocks all have a number and you can push lines of blocks if the block you push from is equal or greater to the total numbers of the rest of the line. There's blocks whose value reduces with each consecutive push, eventually disappearing entirely. You can undo your actions step-by-step in addition to the usual level reset function every Sokoban style game includes. The problem is the act of pushing blocks themselves is so slow and tedious as to remove the joy from the act. The magical garden is far less pleasant than any traditional eldritch warehouse labyrinth we're used to.
Verdict: Torture.
Camouflage
Now here's a real delight after Block Koala. Initially the aim is to reach the exit while working out which spaces you need to switch colours on to avoid static predators watching you. As it rolls on, a real time element is added which allows for both greater puzzle complexity and some wriggle room to feel like you're cheating the system. 100% completion requires collecting two static items, and a smaller chameleon on each level. This further complicates the solution to each stage, as you now effectively have to plan your route for two squares' worth of visibility instead of the initial one.
The music is far less intrusive than Block Koala and the theming is such a delight. There's a corny story book prologue and epilogue which feel like somewhere between a basic reader for children and the mythology in Watership Down. While the time moving between each square makes Block Koala cumbersome, here in Camouflage it builds tension. Have you really read this board right, or are you hurtling straight into a predator's maw? It's made all the better by how fast the predators leap over to eat you when you make a mistake.
The only real criticism is it has so few levels in comparison to Block Koala. There's no level editor like the former to boot. I think in a collection like this it's better to leave you wanting more of a game than less so I'm happy with what we have here. You could always try building your own full fangame if you crave more Camouflage.
Verdict: Gaiety is a portmanteau of Gay and Deity.
Campanella
The controls in this game are perfect. Despite purely digital inputs, the rate of acceleration, descent and lateral velocity all feels so analogue. You're a little UFO navigating abstract worlds with a vague carnival theme and die if you so much as brush against anything on screen. I've always enjoyed weird lunar lander games and Solar Jetman and this feels like those ideas run through the fixed screen platformer worlds of Bubble Bobble and so on. There's also a secret coffee worth 500 points per stage, and a bonus stage halfway through each of the five worlds. 1UPs a granted every 1000 points.
I have two main gripes: the Cherry condition and the level design. The Cherry clear requires collecting every coffee. I dislike that the coffees are hidden in this case. It demands a level of note taking and memorisation that feels counter to the flow of the movement. I think a score threshold would've worked better if the coffees are hidden, or you just make the coffees visible and place some of the easier ones in nastier locations on each screen. The fun of playing for score in this game is taking a look at each screen and assessing the risks vs reward. Some actions only reward 100 points. Others can net over 1000. The coffees as they are interrupt that flow in a way I disliked. The final coffee unlock being placed directly behind the final stage exit was great though. Pure evil.
What I dislike about Campanella's level design is how gimmicky it becomes. Switch puzzles, shifting platforms, fuel-draining ghosts and so on. It all gets in the way of what I really enjoy about the game (trying to move efficiently, quickly assessing the risk/reward for each piece on the board). Somehow, Campanella feels less like a Bubble Bobble and more like a Bubble Memories; a sequel needlessly bloating itself with tricks because it doesn't trust simplicity to be enough. By the time I finished the game I was content to never touch it again.
Verdict: My most tsundere experience.
Golfaria
I love the idea here but sadly don't enjoy the act of playing it as much as I do thinking about doing so. It's a top-down adventure game in the vein of a 2D Legend of Zelda but you're a golf ball with a stroke limit. As you obtain more heart piece equivalent items you steadily expand that stroke limit until it no longer matters. My first complaint is that sometimes you wind up in an obnoxious checkpoint that chews up strokes trying to move away from, bogging down the exploration. My second is that the strength of putting in general feels... wrong. There's distances I expect balls to move in relation to the bar after years of Neo Turf Masters and hazing groups with Kirby's Dream Course and where I wind up in Golfaria never really matches my expectations. This is entirely a Me problem but it really has dampened my desire to finish this game.
Verdict: I'll stick to Fernando Almeida.
The Big Bell Race
It's Campanella but as a series of single screen races like Top Ride mode in Kirby Air Ride or your preferred 80s arcade type deal. Given my complaint about the original game is all the gimmickry, I enjoy this focus purely on movement significantly more. It's a real shame we can't actually play it with 8 people at the same time.
Verdict: Might use it in a Mystery Bracket some time.
Warptank
This rules. An action puzzler where you're a tank whose only mobility options are left, right and teleport to the geometry directly opposite you. It's the sort of game which is only as strong as its level design and thankfully the levels all feel much more engaging and clever than Campanella's over designed gimmicks. This is also one of the games to stick harder to the period piece feel by having awful static animations which make Hayley slightly ill whenever I boot the game up.
Verdict: One of the killer apps.
Waldorf's Journey
Once upon a time there was a flash game called Heli Attack 2 which I kept thinking about the few times I booted up Waldorf's Journey. They're both games with fairly simple flow but these volumes of depth to what's going on in the world that can captivate you if you're in the mood for entering a machine state and sinking into the game.
Unfortunately I'm a busy woman with a full time job and too many hobbies so I kept avoiding the deep dive this game was asking for.
Verdict: Neato!
Porgy
While this isn't a platformer, its focus on exploration and incremental upgrade gathering in between significant new abilities means this is effectively a (sigh) "Metroidvania" style game. It also feels like a direct attack on the last 15 or so years of design assumptions about that ambiguous genre. Platformers built around non-linear exploration tend to force routes through the game with a series of coloured doors opened by specific keys or height/horizontal spaces preventing your access to a door to the point that they're effectively treating a climbing action or double jump as another type of key. They're all just games about bombing blocks and finding keys instead of losing yourself in a well realised world the way a couple of Samus Aran's early adventures did.
Instead, Porgy is a game about slowly pushing your luck. Your fuel to explore the ocean is also your life bar, so any stray damage forces you to ask whether you should keep pushing ahead or bail on the current tour. Items are only obtained once you bring them back to base, so over reaching means you can lose it all and have to replay everything you just played. At the same time, a series of roaming boss fights can cost you the run anyway until you're ready to fight them.
I love this.
The plot is about reconnecting with an ocean gone astray and the repetition works in favour here. Locations become familiar in the way they only can when they're regular, common sights. Sure the game's difficulty curve looks like a synthesised drum (steep Attack and Decay, extremely low Sustain and Release) as a result, but that's honestly how Super Metroid and Symphony of the Night flow as well. You become one with the ocean you love and in doing so, of course what's threatening your home now seems like a trivial fight. A game like this is about the journey not sticking our flag in a succession of conquered foes.
Verdict: Best metroidvania since Metroid II.
Onion Delivery
It's kind of amazing nobody's made a top-down 2D take on Crazy Taxi before now. Playing through the game requires meeting a series of delivery quotas (or passenger drops to keep with Crazy Taxi comparisons) over several days, with strange events and weather conditions complicating each day the further into the run you manage.
Being a 2D driving game, there isn't quite the mechanical complexity of Crazy Taxi. Mostly it's a game about releasing the accelerator well before you start cornering or opting to drive in reverse to maintain a lower top speed and thus have more time to react to what obstacles are in the way. There's a quick 180 spin somewhat analogous to Crazy Taxi's when you hold both accelerator and brake but it sure doesn't feel the same as a Crazy Turn. Likewise don't expect any accelerator pumping, gear shift tricks or rapid braking.
For some strange reason there's a life bar in addition to the time limit on each stage. This is particularly weird since crashing and slowing down is enough of a penalty itself in these sorts of games. A truly great arcade game understands how to pace its margins for error (this is why Darius Gaiden is a better game than G-Darius) and the life bar system messes with the flow.
This game is really neat but honestly I had more fun just putting on the invincibility code and simply driving around the town in ten minute stints. I used to do the same thing in games like Midtown Madness back in the day, so that shouldn't come as much of a surprise.
Verdict: Somebody else's favourite game.
Caramel Caramel
The final STG in the collection has a different designer to the rest, so when playing in "chronological" order this is the first time the main crew interpret one of the foundational genres of computer games. As a take on Gradius style level design it's fine I suppose. The charge shot requires holding down your regular shot instead of prepping while you're not shooting like better game designers opt for and the camera bomb system fits with that early-mid 80s style of bombs being a strategic high-damage tool rather than a panic escape resource. There's nothing offensively bad here but it's clear that this is a shooter made by somebody who played a couple of Konami shooters and said "yeah I can do that" without any real love for the genre.
Verdict: 5/10 (positive)
Party House
This deck builder is such a great marriage of systems and theming that I genuinely believe a physical print run with support for up to 4 players could win Spiel des Jahres.
Each turn you draw cards from your deck up to your current maximum capacity (initially 10), then gather the resources each card provides. These are either popularity (use to purchase cards) or money (use to increase how many cards you may draw on subsequent turns). What spices things up is some cards, usually with stronger rewards than the rest, are also flagged with Troublemaker status. Draw three troublemakers and the cops break up your party for being too rowdy and you gain no resources that turn. The beauty is that your initial deck contains 6 regular cards and 4 troublemakers. As a result there's a high chance even on turn 1 that you can bust your party. Thus, at all times this is a deck builder that's also a push your luck game. Of course, in typical deck builder fashion there's cards you can obtain to reduce the odds of going bust, but it's always a statistical looming threat to add spice to the game.
Initially there's five sets of cards to achieve a win condition (draw 3 or more victory cards in one turn) and the cherry clear comes from beating five or more randomised card sets in a row. We had a great time with this one.
Verdict: Party host Amy, please call me.
Hot Foot
While Bushido Ball is a mixed bag of neat ideas and slightly wonky execution, Hot Foot just plain stinks. As a 2v2 game, the strict 2 player controller limit prevents the ideal way for humans to play. You're always dealing with AI players who exist to be exploited in certain ways. On top of that, this is the worst take on a Super Dodgeball esque game out there. It's not the worst game in the collection but it still stinks.
Verdict: Maybe stick to hosting parties, Amy.
Divers
It rules that this collection features two ocean diving games about slowly venturing further and deeper to bring items back to your home which play and feel completely differently. While Porgy is a bright action game, Divers uses the theming to make a traditional dungeon crawler with obtuse item descriptions, harsh EXP curves, extremely limited resources and an entire wide open area which serves no purpose other than make you question both its existence and your own. The three lizard boys you play as are hot too.
Verdict: Wet Wizardry
Rail Heist
There is something truly beautiful to saying you want to make a wild west horizontal stealth action game and then basing all its verbs on Super Mario Bros. 2. There's rewards for beating each level quickly, with no deaths or by killing every lawman on every carriage on the train you're robbing. Once the law's been alerted to your presence, the real time gameplay is broken up into phases of action between yourself and the law. It all results in a game with strategic depth, tactical fluidity and multiple solutions to any puzzle.
Verdict: This game is so cool.
Vainger
This is kinda the sort of metroidvania I was grizzling about earlier. The big gimmick to make this seem different to Metroid is you have gravity switching like VVVVVV. The art direction's fine and the level design is fine and the bosses are fine but it was all so uninspiring to me. If I'd never played a low cost indie exploratory platformer before I'd be more impressed but as it is, nothing here really excited me to lose myself in the world or want to methodically clear every room out.
Verdict: 5/10 (slur).
Rock On! Island
Like sixteen years ago I bought a first-person tower defense game in a Steam sale called Sanctum. I hated it. The poor shot damage, how difficulty assessing the entire battlefield was and the sterile art direction. It should come as no surprise that Rock On! Island was a delight for me. There's a quirk with the input interpreter which means that while you can move diagonally, releasing your direction inputs tends to leave you facing a strict orthogonal direction. Since your player character's shots deal damage more efficiently from diagonals, it meant I had to work out that you can conceal your direction key releases with a shot or menu access press. That is to say, this is a tower defense game where I had to work out movement tech.
Unlike most tower defense games I've played, I felt a great tension between when to purchase additional towers (cavemen), upgrade those towers (cavemen), when to upgrade my own character's shots and when to build up my economy. While things inevitably snowball in your favour once your economy's established, the journey to reaching that point made the early waves some great puzzles to solve. The Cherry Clear requires you to beat every stage without a single enemy reaching your home base, so there's a real incentive to optimise your builds. Given how long some of the later stages are, this meant poor Hayley had to listen to me cussing like a sailor over and over as I worked out the builds. Live life passionately, including your frustrations at computer games.
Verdict: Borderline a comfort game for me now.
Pingolf
It's a side-scrolling golf game with the ability to "dunk" the ball once per stroke if it's airborne, greatly increasing its acceleration. Given the course layouts, this means you can make ridiculous gains in ground by launching along ramps or off bumpers. That's the pinball part of "Pinball Golf". There's no level select, not even via a cheat code like some other games in the collection offer, so you have to engage in extensive memorisation or note taking to play a full 18 holes under Par.
Verdict: Love it or hate it, this is a perfect computer game.
Mortol II
Now we're talking! Let's take the limited lives concept of Mortol and instead give you a single interconnected exploratory platformer (oh fine I'll say "metroidvania" again) map and 99 lives to sacrifice however you wish in a quest to find the ending. If metroidvanias are now a genre about finding types of key, this game removes all the layers of obfuscation and makes it explicitly about finding enough literal keys to reach the final boss and slay them. Ultimately, it's a game about routing and resource management with some execution requirements to ensure you maintain enough lives to actually achieve those goals. That all gives it so much more spice than being some overly long 30+ hour Ender Lilies type situation.
Verdict: As fresh to metroidvanias as Porgy.
Fist Hell
Beat 'em ups are as foundational a genre to computer games as scrolling shooters so it was inevitable one would be here. Much like STG, they're also a surprisingly difficult genre to get right. Where your moves fit on the z-axis, how enemies behave, how hitstun functions and how useful the powerups are all need careful tuning to make a great game.
Hitstun's mostly done right. The fourth hit of your punch string links back into itself, so the game is more about finding the position and opportunity to begin your kill string on targets.
Throws are handled strangely, though not quite as offensive as River City Girls. Unlike Final Fight or The Ninja Warriors Again or Streets of Rage, you don't enter a clinch by walking into throwable targets. You must land a strike first. This totally kills the flow and value of grappling, made even worse by how few invincible frames your throw itself has. The purpose of throws in these sorts of games is sacrificing the raw damage of attack strings for safety and crowd control. Here they're more of a fail state for not executing your kill string on a target.
There's a River City Ransom style upgrade store after each level and this is frankly an awful idea. Cash is so tight that the game winds up demanding no-hit runs to upgrade your character correctly. This defeats the point of pacing health pickups in your level design, as health pickups are now part of your cash routing. The character stats have such a wide disparity that given the value of your basic string over any other part of the toolkit, 3/4 of the (extremely hot) characters are pretty bad options to choose.
There's some creative enemy designs and thankfully nothing breaks the basic hitstun rules, but there's all these little details that detract from the experience and make the game feel tedious to clear in ways that it shouldn't.
Verdict: Amy bring your friends too.
Overbold
Poor Alpha the Space Pirate feels cursed to star in games which annoy me to no end. This is a top-down run 'n gun game where you have to clear a bunch of waves of enemy spawns before you're allowed to purchase upgrades in a store. You can then choose how many waves and additional stage hazards the next segment has, with a greater cash reward harder you made things. The issues, much like most of the collection's shooting-oriented games, stem from how miserable your starting kit is. UFO 50 tends to sidestep the autofire debates of the actual 80s by coding in fixed rates of fire. You can purchase increases to your firing rate and basic shot damage and these are vital for having any sort of consistent space control. All but one enemy type are extremely spongey and the paltry three land mines you have by default are a pittance for clearing a stage with a decent amount of enemy spawns. Since the first trip to the shop only starts you with $100, there's barely any variety into how you start your builds. As a result, the flow of the game becomes playing the first stage, making a gigantic gamble on the second stage, then flailing about until you actually clear that. Now you have some actual resources to play with, you can pick the obviously correct upgrades which make the game function at a basic level and then pick just enough extensions to the later stage antes to meet the Cherry Clear's cash threshold and have a little bit of build variety. It really speaks to how great the survival mode in something like The Red Star is. Still better than Smash TV at least.
Verdict: The "cash shop" crimes half of a Euroshmup that Star Waspir forgot to insult us with.
Campanella 2
I'd have loved if this were an alternating series of Campanella levels and run 'n gun sections. Perhaps have the Campanella levels freeform with the idea you use them to find upgrades you'll use in the run 'n guns or something. Instead, it's a procedurally generated roguelite take on Campanella because this is by the Spelunky devs and they couldn't help themselves.
Verdict: I know I know, it's not them. It's me. I'm the weirdo who likes "level design", a concept that's out of fashion.
Hyper Contender
It's a platform fighter where the aim is to hit your opponent to knock out a ring which you then collect. Somewhere between Super Mario Bros. 3's battle mode reimagining of Mario Bros. Arcade and Super Smash Bros. coin mode. I think the two button limitation really makes this game a mechanic or two away from being a sleeper hit. As it stands, it's an amusing distraction but not much more.
Verdict: Somewhere between Bushido Ball and Hot Foot.
Valbrace
It's a single character first person dungeon crawler evocative of Wizardry but the combat system is Super Punch Out! with a stamina system like modern From Software action RPGs. There's a big pile of magic spells you can learn and perform by inputting a series of motions while holding down button 2. What rules is that when I say "learn" I mean you, the player, finds the input written down and remembers to execute it. The in-game character already knows them all if you remember the inputs next time you reload a save or start a new game.
This game rules. The fixed dungeon layouts mean there's value in drawing up the maps in graph paper. There's some secrets at varying levels of esoteric. You can think outside the box to skip entire boss fights if you wish. There's a secret code to force your build purely into a glass cannon wizard. Switch out the art for something flashier, add some more maps and this would be an easy $20 game in its own right.
Verdict: Maybe like Super Punch Out! we'll discover a hidden Vs mode 30+ years later too.
Rakshasa
Perhaps the real world game developer the most spiritually similar to what's going on in UFO 50 was Data East, so it's fitting that the only real mascot platformer type game is a Karnov tribute. The unique spice here is rather than a limited pool of lives, you can simply resume playing if you guide our hero's spirit back into his body. The more deaths you take, the more spiritual hazards in the way of doing so.
I mentioned Karnov but there's a lot of Makaimura going on in the level design too. Sure you jump over platforms and find some secrets but this is very much an action game with a great deal of crowd control. It's all quite excellent though and a solid recommendation.
Verdict: It's less mean than Makaimura too!
Star Waspir
The verizontal STG is a scrolling shooter which moves vertically but uses a horizontal aspect ratio for the play space. The most famous and respected arcade examples are Takumi's Giga Wing and Marx Matrix. The most controversial is Radiant Silvergun, albeit for reasons unrelated to the screen. Part of what makes them work are the extremely powerful tools the player begins the game with, along with the screen using a 4:3 aspect ratio. This isn't to say a 16:9 verizontal is an impossible feat, but the one successful entry is Jamestown and that's made for four players simultaneously. Indeed, when you play it solo the space control issues are obvious quite quickly and so the best weapons by far are the homing shot, aim-able shot and the sword which is a shorter range aim-able shot with terrain penetration and higher damage on bosses.
Star Waspir does not understand any of this. What's worse, it doesn't understand how to tweak HP values or make a satisfying shot to save its life. On paper it's a fast-paced caravan shooter where the enemies are easier and the challenge comes from timing your item pickups and clearing waves quick enough to rack up a gigantic score. In practice it's a game with an absolutely miserable shot upgrade system which leaves you scrambling to kill any enemies at all, let alone collect items in the proper order to gain the upgrades which make your shot function at all. If Caramel Caramel was a designer looking at Gradius and saying "yeah I can do that" then Star Waspir is somebody looking at some footage of Blazing Lasers, saying "this stuff's for babies I can do better" and then never playing the game that they derided or even bothering to test their own.
This game sucks and if you enjoyed it you really owe it to yourself to play Batsugun Special Version or V-V or something. Eugh.
Verdict: The "poor interactions with the world space and enemies" crimes of a Euroshmup that Overbold forgot to insult us with.
Grimstone
I should probably write an entire separate piece on this game. I enjoyed this fully fledged 80s JRPG but oooooooooooh boy does it make some bad decisions.
So this game runs on the Final Fantasy 1 approach to party construction: at the start of the game there's 8 characters from which you may select 4. This inherently gives replay value as you can mix and match what tools you have to play through the game. While fine on its own, it takes ages for your cast to actually gain those mechanics. Part of what makes Final Fantasy 1 so replayable is that the endgame is homogenous but the early game (everything up to the Lich) is where all the class variety shakes things up. For an all-fighter party the Vampire and Lich are intimidating paralysis-laden fights. For all white mages, the elf king becomes a nail-biting race to land a single low chance of Silence kicking in before you spend an hour whittling him down with 10 damage hammers. Stuff like that. By making the later game when your party's abilities come together, the early game is the sort of slog that even Dragon Quest learned to avoid after their first game.
Second and much more offensively, this game features timed hits. Yes little Super Mario RPG tutorial toad, I know about timed hits. See, when you make a game with timed hits they need to either contribute an optional extra benefit (like in Super Mario RPG) or function as a flat hit or miss check (Legend of the Necrodancer). Grimstone commits a grave sin by framing the timed hits as a flat hit or miss check but then also including accuracy and evasion checks. No, landing in the timed hit window doesn't guarantee you connect with your enemies at all. It just lets you commence the dice check. If a weapon has a much smaller critical hit window, then those are guaranteed when landed. Not every weapon includes a critical hit though. This results in some of the game's most interesting weapons, balanced by requiring a reload after every use, often dealing pitiful damage as the dice decide you're not allowed to play for a while.
It's such a shame because everything else is pretty great! The setting (Texas is in Hell now), the tuning of resource drains while in dungeons, the encounter rates and so on are all well thought out and have a great flow. The cherry clear doesn't even require you to grind and fight the ridiculous hidden Warmech tribute.
While the game ending with the English speaking world's stereotype of fighting God at the end (it's far more common to see false prophets claiming to represent God or various types of crackpot attempting to become a god than to kill actual God outside games by ATLUS) is a bit of an eyeroller, it is also a game where you can simply pay The Devil a bunch of money to fuck off. That alone is worth the price of entry.
Verdict: I will never forgive Paper Mario.
Lords of Diskonia
Have you ever played any iteration of Crossbows and Catapults? The tabletop game/toy where you and an opponent build castles then fling rocks and discs at each other to knock over the flag/trap all their ammunition/kill a commander using nothing but, well, ballistae and catapults? It's a delightful game and I wish it were the inspiration for Lords of Diskonia instead of Carrom.
Don't get me wrong; Carrom is a wonderful game. I'm better at it than any form of Billiards to boot. It's just that trying to make a version of the game where all the discs have stats and you use more than one per turn and the win condition is based on HP instead of knocking discs into holes all makes for something woefully slow, horribly clunky with the control scheme available and all around one of the most unintentionally miserable experiences in the collection. Much like how MOBAs as a genre keep bolting crap onto a simple capture the flag core, Lords of Diskonia ruins a great game that's at least a century old, if not two.
Verdict: Colonialism wears the face of orcs.
Night Manor
This may be the most perfect game for a big bundle like this. As a graphic adventure game its puzzles are all fairly quick to solve and there's no surprise twist expansion of the game's scope: you're in a bad spooky house and need to leave it. The spice comes from being pursued by a slasher movie monster whose presence fills you with such dread that the cursor you perform all actions with shakes like crazy, making it difficult to navigate to a safe place and hide/move to 6+ moves consecutively to shake them off. There is nothing as groundbreaking as what you'd find in actual graphic adventures of the era (Famicom Detective Club has a first person dungeon crawl, a puzzle involving how the Save prompt is written in-game and a dialogue puzzle built around maintaining an alzheimer's patient's erratic train of thought for comparison) but that's a single purchase game. For a breath of fresh air amongst all the arcadey games demanding 1 coin clears or extreme completionist fodder, it's a fun afternoon's worth of puzzles and spooks.
Verdict: I'm far less toxic than Him, Amy. Please call me.
Elfazar's Hat
It's a top-down run 'n gun in the vein of Natsume's later Kikikaikai / Pocky & Rocky sequels with another perplexing powerup system. Given the game's slightly occult magic theme the bizarre symbols work much more in its favour than the awful "rearrange the letters E and G" system of Star Warspir.
Games like these thrive on level design and it's much stronger here than in the previous shooters too. Run 'n Guns are a little closer to platformers and the like than fixed pace scrolling shooters, so it makes sense that people associated with Mossmouth are more comfortable in this territory. It's not better than Natsume's efforts or Mamoru-kun's Been Cursed but it's a fair effort and worth playing.
Verdict: Fun magic show.
Pilot Quest
"What if a 2D The Legend of Zelda game was also Cookie Clicker?" is a ridiculous idea made all the funnier by including it so deep into the games list. If you insisted on playing these in chronological order, you're now pranked by 10+ hours of farming materials. The game starts you in the Cookie Clicker resource gathering phase and you must purchase enough meat to allow you to explore the Zelda world outside for a limited time. Each hit you take from enemies depletes time from your stock. You need to go out, gain other resources or find the lost ship parts to leave the planet and return to base before time runs out.
My gripe with the game is that the overworld is randomised each game. I think the world should've remained static, with the three dungeons you must clear randomised instead. Idle games are all about repetition, metaprogress and paths to efficiency. By randomising the outside world so much, the instinct-driven number crunching mental machine state isn't achieved and you can't explore the dark recesses of your id the way you're meant to with this ghastly genre. It's made all the harsher given the Cherry Clear condition requires you to find and defeat a superboss six times in a single trip the outsidew world. Given how much health this fight has, that's around 600 hits. It's an ideal sort of excess to end an idle game but the tedium of locating the jerk on a randomised map interrupts the alleged thrill of the hunt.
Verdict: Let your life partner play it while you cook dinner then never touch it yourself.
Mini & Max
This is such a triumph of theming and world design and one of the games which could have been released individually. You're a precocious child and her pet dog locked inside a storage room by renowned party host and beat em up star Amy who pass the time by learning to shrink to the size of an ant. This would be a large enough shift in scale to be fun and creative but eventually you are also able to shrink to the size of a virus. Thus, any tile of the ant-size scale is about six screens' worth of world at the smallest scale.
Mechanically it's an exploratory platformer with Super Mario Bros. 2's lift and throw toolkit, much like Rail Heist. As you find various upgrades there's some more complexity past that point such as storing whatever you've grabbed to use elsewhere but it's mostly a game about exploring the world, learning about the incredibly complex societies living in the store room and discovering that your temper tantrum at the start has resulted in a zero sum game of wealth disparity tearing the world apart. It's the sort of creativity that reminds you why computer games can be so thrilling and delightful as an art form.
Verdict: Amy did nothing wrong. She didn't bring resource scarcity into the world. To keep the heat down at home she should call me though.
Combatants
There's many ways for a game to suck but it's rare to see such a plain case of "it doesn't work!" like Combatants. It's suppose to be a Real Time Strategy game where you balance managing worker ants gathering food with soldier ants attack the enemy across far too many campaign maps. In practice the resource gathering doesn't work, managing crowds is far clunkier than even Herzog Zwei and the only strategy which works is to obtain one or two soldier ants and slowly kite every enemy on the map one by one because of how terrible the computer is at dealing with that. What's impressive about Combatants isn't that it sucks, but that the quality of every other game is so much higher. I may hate Lords of Diskonia but I can appreciate that it functions. This is a special type of bad game, one almost inspiring in how poorly it functions.
Verdict: The Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing of faux-retro strategy games.
Quibble Race
You can actually still play the original Newgrounds version of this game, so its inclusion here is almost cheating. Still, it's a way to lure more people into fictional horse gambling. 2025 was the year of Uma Musume Pretty Derby's global launch and 2026 is Year of the Horse after all.
As a single player game, making a great deal of money is about working out exploits. As a multiplayer game, the joy comes from the deep paranoia every player develops as they try to work out whether to bet on obviously better horses, or if the other players have already conspired to assassinate said horses. It's a great 40-ish minutes of yelling at each other if that's what you're into.
Verdict: LavaMind wish they had an "umapyoi!" sample to work into their next Gazillionaire re-release.
Seaside Drive
This is the only game Ojiro Fumoto worked as a designer on and it's so obvious he understands shooting games better than anyone else at Mossmouth. While your shots don't obliterate cannon fodder the way your average CAVE Co. Ltd shots do, there's a sense of professionalism that the other arcade shooters lack. Your hurtbox is smaller than your visuals so you have narrow escapes that feel like cheating. The shot energy system (a steady drain which only refills if you "drift" leftwards along the screen) naturally teaches players to stream patterns and manipulate aimed shots. The enemy variety across stages makes its short runtime feel so creative and varied in an outsider art way fitting for the collection. Not for the first time, the influence of Pang! of all games makes itself felt.
The theming is such a hoot. "What if Outrun played like Silk Worm but had the energy system from Buck Up & Drive's weird Vs mode?" The initial vibes steadily become stranger and sillier across stages, with the final punchline being our Cool Guy With A Ferrari is just visiting his mother for lunch.
That said, it commits a scoring system crime worthy of Tsuneki Ikeda. The only way to gain extra lives is to complete the bonus stage at the end of each level. The problem is, you can only access the bonus stages if you no miss said level. Thus, you only gain extra lives by not dying, thus proving you have no need of the extra lives. This feels like a situation where the game originally just sent you to each bonus stage by default, but gameplay testers said that gave them too many lives too easily. Some other bonus stage condition would've worked far better here.
Verdict: No there is not an Amiga game called SDIV mistakenly considered a sequel to this.
Campanella 3
It's Space Harrier! What's not to love? There's even a code to unlock 50 microgames for your lover to play next to you on the couch while you focus on trying not to die!
Verdict: For those who love Panorama Cotton until they remember its atrocious framerate.
Cyber Owls
In kayfabe this game was an overly expensive, overly ambitious title rushed to release by a company on the verge of collapse. While Combatants was likely a failed idea and implementation left untouched by Mossmouth as an unintentionally bad game, Cyber Owls feels much more intentional. The presentation is incredibly cool and the systems are all so agonisingly close to being a good game. The best bad art comes from the gap between passion and logistics or skill issues and this is such a hoot to experience.
Verdict: Best worst game of the collection.
Miasma Tower
As of writing this, we have not interacted with this ARG aspect of UFO 50. Perhaps another time I will be able to give thoughts but I think we're both exhausted of the visuals and soundscapes the collection provides. There's a incorrect/buzzer type sound effect which has infected our minds and we just make the noise on our own all the time and that may well be the lasting legacy for Hayley and I. Not as a complaint, but as extremely efficient shorthand for reminding us of the memories we made with the LX Microcomputer System.
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