DISPATCHES JANUARY

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Issue 404

The big five-oh

Since E397’s UFO 50 feature, I’ve been counting the days until its release. I loved the concept of an obscure, forgotten studio, the fact that the team had worked on it for eight years, the retro-cool graphics in the screenshots. And I loved the fact that the promise was to play 50 real games, not minigames. I was so naive. When I got my hands on it a few days after its release, I decided to explore each game a little to get an idea of the whole thing. What a mistake! Apart from a very small number of games, I was completely lost. I didn’t understand the controls or objectives easily (in some games, they weren’t even explained). Oh, what’s this flying thing – a bonus? Oh no, I’m dead and the game’s over. I wanted so much to love this game and my first five or six hours scratching its surface were so frustrating. I was angry – I wanted more context or clear instructions. But I kept going. I dug into the few titles I liked best and, after two or three hours on each of them, I began to understand how to progress. The real revelation came when I was browsing the UFO 50 sub on Reddit. It was then that I realised that it’s a game about community. Sharing tips, asking for help, posting hand-drawn maps of entire levels, giving clues about the metagame with the terminal… It immediately took me back to my childhood in the late ’80s, when I’d sneak into the newsagent with pen and paper to scribble cheat codes from magazines I couldn’t afford.