UFO 50 review: 50 games with alien concepts

UFO 50 tries to emulate the games that founded the industry. Based on all the trappings that we remember from the ‘80s, a star-studded cast of indie developers headed by Spelunky’s Derek Yu have made a collection of 50 games based in an 8-bit style and rolled them all into one unique package under the fake studio UFOsoft. The problem is that while we think we love those ‘80s games, by today’s standards, they are almost unplayable, not only because of their brutal difficulty, but because, for the most part, they were pretty bad. Nostalgia has blinded us to this fact. When we think of the ‘80s, we think of Mega Man, Mother, and Final Fantasy, but these games have endured because of their high quality. In reality, the ‘80s were full of stinkers that 99% of today’s gamers couldn’t play for more than a minute. In fact, gamers in the ‘80s weren’t particularly willing to put up with how obscure the gameplay mechanics of the day were. In 1982, the gaming industry was almost obliterated by E.T., who was then buried i