It completely baffles me that (continental) Europeans have such a strong desire for dubbed TV shows and movies. I can sort of see it for animation, since there's an inherent gap between the visuals and the audio and it's somewhat more likely to take place in a setting that's kinda unmoored from cultural context. But for live action it's totally befuddling. The language is an inextricable part of the world which the show creates, not to mention a crucial part of the actors' art and the rhythm of the scene! Drives me absolutely batty

I love when I send a commission artist a bunch of references and they end up reinterpreting a dress as a top or vice versa. My secret wardrobe that only exists in the fictional world.

goin' wild with my discord friends at 9pm gettin' twisted on choccy milk

who called it slow burn yaoi and not burt and yearnie

in Muppet Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, are the two leads:

• Kermit & Fozzie
• Gonzo & Rizzo
• Kermit & a human actor (who?)
• other (tell me in the comments)

*waking up after bumping my head and vividly hallucinating the entirety of Wicked (2024) to find myself in bed surrounded by the concerned faces of my dear friends Ariana Grande, Cynthia Erivo, Jonathan Bailey, and also Ariana Grande's boyfriend for some reason*

But it wasn't a dream — it was a musical. And you, and you, and you, and you were there!

See also my review of the collection itself on Backloggd.

Barbuta: An appropriate introduction to the collection in more ways than one. Much hay has been made in my earshot of the "kaizo-like" trap in room one, and to a degree that's emblematic of the logic of UFO 50—it does ask you to take your lumps and learn what it's teaching you without focusing overmuch on a concept of "fairness"—I think it's not the heart of what either the game or the collection is about.

A stronger indication of what's to come is found in the game's pacing, the slow walk speed and deliberately long load times between screens, the way the game is structured like a search action game but doesn't have internal saves, asking you to replay it from scratch each time and thereby map out your preferred route rather than just passively accumulating everything in one run. Stronger still is the sense of mystery: even with a cherry in hand, there are rooms I haven't found and mechanics I haven't used. Barbuta challenges the player to dig deeper if they so choose, and in doing so presages the deepest puzzles the collection as a whole has to offer.

Bug Hunter: My arc with this game presaged my own personal experience with a lot of UFO 50. When I first picked it up, I got so overwhelmed that I put it right back down and wasn't sure if I was ever going to go back. Every decision has so many cascading outcomes that it was hard not to feel like I wasn't drowning in opportunity costs. But Cera loves it and coached me through the basics enough that I began to get the hang of it.

One of my favorite things about UFO 50, the thing that made it a slam dunk for my game of the year, is the way it gets people swapping hints like they're all hanging around a cabinet in an arcade. Almost every single one of these games had someone I knew championing it, someone who was also willing to sit down and help me not only beat it but understand what they saw in it. The true joy of the collection is the community it inspires.

Ninpek: I started out so bad at Ninpek, but what really got my goat was that as I kept attempting it I could feel myself getting better. It's not fair of it to be so fair! And the better I got, the more fun I would have just jamming it over and over again, and the more I jammed it the better I got... I went from “no way am I golding this” to getting a cherry within a couple weeks, and it felt so good.

I never actually played a run-and-gun enough to become good at it before Ninpek. Once again, an early illustration of the theme of the collection: the presentation itself encourages…

sometimes the dishwasher sings to me
a tiny song, three or four notes long
no clear reason, when it's empty or full
I think it's just happy to be alive
(I know it's not alive
but it doesn't know
why spoil its little joy?)

Obviously "All Cherries" as a category is essentially infeasible due to games like Rail Heist, Rock On! Island, and Grimstone taking over on the order of hours individually, but just choosing a subset of games feels very arbitrary. So instead, maybe select a chunk of time arbitrarily (two hours? three?) and say "the best run is the one that gets the most cherries within this time". That way, if a given game gets a way faster strategy, it can be routed in; there's also a lot of toothsome choice between which of the games you do or do not include, maybe even with differences between runners