It took nearly a year, but UFO 50 is finally on Nintendo Switch. The news — an announcement that was unceremoniously shoved into a montage during last week’s Nintendo Indie Showcase — is a cause for celebration. The retro tribute is a staggering accomplishment that packs 50 original 8-bit games into one polished package. It’s a perfect companion for a portable console that every Switch owner should consider checking out.
I’ve spent a lot of time with UFO 50 since its launch, putting nearly 100 hours into the collection on Steam Deck. In that time, I’ve had countless debates with friends about which games are the best in the bunch. No two lists are ever the same, and that’s the beauty of UFO 50: It’s an eclectic package that satisfies several personalities at once. You can tell a lot about a person based on their favorite game in the pack.
So, what does your favorite UFO 50 game say about you? After analyzing each game extensively, I am now able to clock the core essence of your personality with 99.999% accuracy based on which one you love. It’s just science. And if you’ve yet to dig into the daunting collection at all, consider this an easy guide to figuring out where to start, organized by the “chronological” order in which they appear in the game. You can’t go wrong with any game, but there’s something in UFO 50 that’s specifically for you, I promise.
- Barbuta: You have a keen sense of mystery that was shaped by early PC games that you swear are real, but you can’t find any trace of them online.
- Bug Hunter: Into the Breach fundamentally changed your personality in 2018 and now your personal brand is evangelizing indie games.
- Ninpek: You used to get excited about family parties because it meant that you got to sneak down to our aunt’s basement and play NES.
- Paint Chase: You don’t intentionally seek out “satisfying videos” on Instagram, but you don’t scroll away when the algorithm serves you a soap crushing video either.
- Magic Garden: You have been called a “casual gamer” on multiple occasions but you have 100 hours logged in several versions of Puyo Puyo.
- Mortol: You’re into death as an aesthetic, but in a Donnie Darko way.
- Velgress: You have been arguing that the best Metroid game is the first one for so long and so fiercely that it’s too late for you to reassess your opinion. You have also only played the original Metroid for minutes at a time within the GameCube version of Animal Crossing.
- Planet Zoldath: You love using the term “hard sci-fi” but you’re not actually sure what it means.
- Attactics: You’re the direct target of the “How often do you think about the Roman Empire?” meme.
- Devilition: You grew up in Massachusetts and had to learn about the Salem witch trials, and now you’re always looking for an excuse to flex your knowledge on it.
- Kick Club: You have redirected a conversation about a hot new AAA game into one about the history of Taito in every Discord server you’ve ever been in.
- Avianos: You know what all the X’s in “4X strategy” stands for and don’t understand why everyone else can’t keep it straight.
- Mooncat: You have done LSD. This week.
- Bushido Ball: Shogun was appointment viewing for you when it was airing, but you have never heard of Yojimbo.
- Block Koala: At any given point, you are the only person in a room who knows what the word “sokoban” means.
- Camouflage: Puzzles are kind of your whole thing, but you’ll take the fact that you look up solutions every once and a while to your grave.
- Campanella: You’re the kind of person who intentionally picks up hobbies like knitting because you get a rush every time you thread a needle.
- Golfaria: You’re a sucker for a great elevator pitch and can reliably decide whether or not you will like something based on one. Also, you’re into golf “intellectually” even though you’ve only been to a driving range once.
- The Big Bell Race: If you are casually scrolling a streaming service looking for a movie to watch, you will not even consider putting something on that is over 100 minutes.
- Warptank: You’re morally opposed to the very idea of war, but you still think tanks look pretty cool and don’t quite know how to square those two feelings.
- Waldorf’s Journey: Your favorite TV show is Adventure Time.
- Porgy: You watch Jaws on the 4th of July every year without fail.
- Onion Delivery: You’re all about gross out humor. Smelly farts, belching — that’s the pinnacle of humor for you. Wario is your style icon.
- Caramel Caramel: Art kid.
- Party House: You’re that person who invites people over to play board games and then breaks out the most complicated one possible and spends two hours explaining the rules.
- Hot Foot: Middle school gym class was the peak of your life and you’ve been trying to recapture your glory days ever since.
- Divers: You also watch Jaws every 4th of July, but it’s because you’re a marine biologist.
- Rail Heist: Any time you walk into a room, you look around and try to figure out what you could use as a weapon if it came to that. It never has.
- Vainger: You’re a traditionalist. You have a firm idea of what a video game looks like and it involves getting power ups and robots.
- Rock On! Island: You spent a lot of time in your youth sneaking onto Addicting Games on the school computer.
- Pingolf: Minigolf is your go-to date idea, and honestly? It always works, because you know the cool spots.
- Mortol II: You are an academic who is a little self-conscious about the fact that you like games, so you make a big point to intellectualize them.
- First Hell: You talk about how much of a cinephile you are, but all of your favorite movies are things like They Live and RoboCop.
- Overbold: Everyone you know quietly has made a pact to never let you near a card table because they know that you will always double down when given the option despite the fact that it almost never works in your favor.
- Campanella 2: You know that children’s toy where you’re tasked with tilting a wooden board to move a marble, avoiding a maze full of holes en route to the other side? That was your favorite toy growing up.
- Hyper Contender: Anytime a new platform fighting game comes out, you make a big deal about how much better it is than Super Smash Bros. solely because it has a hyper specific bit of movement tech that is impossible to execute.
- Valbrace: This one is too easy. You know what your deal is.
- Rakshasa: You’re not a spiritual person, something that you make a big show out of any chance you can get (but you secretly hope that reincarnation is real).
- Star Waspir: You just like shmups. That’s it. That’s the only way that Star Waspir is your favorite UFO 50 game. Shmups are just your whole thing, to the point where you actually call them shmups.
- Grimstone: You only bought UFO 50 because someone told you that there was an ode to Dragon Quest in it. It is the only game you’ve played in the collection and you are preparing a three-hour YouTube video about it.
- Lords of Diskonia: You were all about Pogs and Beyblades as a kid even though you didn’t really know how to actually play with either correctly.
- Night Manor: You are constantly asking your friends if they’ve seen this great new horror movie on Shudder, and when they tell you they don’t have Shudder, you are genuinely taken aback by it.
- Elfazar’s Hat: You’re an amateur magician, and you always wait until at least six months into a friendship to reveal that fact.
- Pilot Quest: You’re an aggressive multitasker and that skill has allowed you to always make it look like you’re very busy at work when you’re actually playing three games at the same time.
- Mini & Max: A lot of these have been fairly backhanded dunks, but I honestly think that anyone who’s favorite UFO 50 game is this one is just a nice person. Good-hearted, whimsical, pleasant to be around. A real bundle of light.
- Combantants: You have eaten a bug before, on purpose.
- Quibble Race: Look man, we need to talk. The sports betting is getting out of hand. I didn’t mind putting down $10 on the Browns to win an underdog game here and there, but I thought we were just goofing around. You’ve got to stop texting me and asking if I want in on your Bruins parlay. Since when do you even watch hockey? Is hockey even on TV anymore?
- Seaside Drive: You think Miami is the coolest city in the world because you have only ever seen it in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
- Campanella 3: Your only goal in life is to ride Star Tours one day.
- Cyber Owls: You’re a self-proclaimed amateur birder who is always confidently identifying warblers as sparrows.
UFO 50 is available now on Windows PC and Nintendo Switch.
