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| Balatro, UFO 50 by Rafiki 03/27/2025, 8:46pm PDT | ||||
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| Two good pick-up-and-play casual games.
Balatro A deck-builder loosely based off of poker. The goal is to earn a particular score each round, with the target increasing every round. 52 card deck, draw 8 cards by default, and you can play up to 5 cards at a time. You can also discard up to your entire hand 3 times and draw new cards before playing anything. Scoring is based off of the value of the cards + multipliers for poker hands, like two pair, full house, flush, etc. To boost your score, you can buy jokers with various effects that give bonus score or multipliers, with something like 150 possible jokers. You can also buy cards to add to your deck, buy cards that apply bonuses to individual cards, bonuses for playing certain hands, destroy cards, convert an entire set of cards to an entire suit, duplicate cards, and on and on. So basically, in addition to trying to boost score and multipliers, you can work to stack your deck. Simple concept, but very addictive. You start out earning like 100 points for playing a hand and then eventually you're scoring 50,000 point combos. A Slay the Spire replacement if you need one. UFO 50 Some indie group made a game riffing on the Chinese knock-off NES cartridges that would cram 1,000 games onto a cartridge. The difference is that there's only 50 in this, and a lot of them are shockingly good. They presented it as though they're a fake company that's offering their entire back catalog into a single collection, and every game comes with a short little fake history of its development and release. It's kind of novel and genius. They're styled after old NES and computer games, so of course they have retro pixel graphics. Every game uses exactly two buttons, they're all extremely one-note, and some of them are way better and more creative than most releases. I think my favorite concept was Mortol, where you have to work through a sidescroller by spawning dudes to commit suicide so that subsequent dudes can advance through the level. Some games are total shit, like an RPG where you play a golf ball and only get 20 strokes to move around before a game over. They're all short enough that they're over before their simplicity makes them dull. Overall, there's enough quality here to make it a worthwhile purchase. Steam says I put 42 hours into it, and I only completed 10 out of 50 games and I've played less than half of them. |
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Balatro, UFO 50 by 03/27/2025, 8:46pm PDT  Side-note by Today, 8:48am PDT =( NT by Today, 11:50am PDT |
