30 hours into Order of the Sinking Star: "I should cherry every game in UFO 50."
What an irritating thought to have
after the game I've been waiting so long for finally came out! This could have kept me occupied for months!
But before embarking on this impulse, I decided to do some research to see if it's actually worth it. I listened to the first episode of
Year of UFO 50, and one of the hosts had a thought that stuck out to me, which I'd summarize as:
In our era of AI, UFO 50 clarifies the purpose of art. A game exists inside of a context, a metanarrative, and that web of connections and interpersonal relationships is a massive aspect of one's experience playing a game. UFO 50 makes that sinew explicit and is ultimately an exploration of its strength.
I then listened to
The Electric Underground's podcast about UFO 50, and Mark and BogHog's position was:
Derek Yu's concept of "
bigness" is financially savvy, but it's the opposite of the direction games should be going in. An elegant game is small and deep; throwing in a bunch of additional mechanics to overwhelm players and confuse reviewers only tricks everyone into thinking the game has interesting replayability. UFO 50's games aren't as deep as the arcade originals (did you know Ninpek is an homage to Capcom's Sonson?), so they make up for this with gimmicks, quantity, and a metanarrative. Derek Yu's thesis that simple-but-endlessly-deep arcade games like Dodonpachi can't succeed standing on their own two legs is unfortunately correct, and it's a bad sign for our medium. Game developers have lost the ability to improve on and invent new elegant designs; they only know how to take existing designs, add "alternate history"-style twists to them, and package them up nicely. One UFO 50 reviewer praised the game for feeling like TikTok; that's where we're at now.
...I thought this juxtaposition was funny. On one level, the two podcasts are agreeing with each other and just personally value metanarratives differently. On another level, the question of whether or not UFO 50 is slop fascinates me, less because I have a specific position on it and more because it exposes how our industry has zero ability to critique games on a deep enough level to offer a clear answer. I don't want to have to put 200 hours into Bayonetta 3 only to come to the conclusion myself that it was a waste of time; that's what reviewers should be doing, and they don't, they just assume that if a game seems complicated enough ("bigness!") then, well, there must be a there there for veterans.
