SEATTLE—Our dive into this year's PAX West expo has just begun, and there are already too many video games. The deep sea of content at this year's expo, now celebrating its 11th year at the Washington State Convention Center, may take us a while to parse and process.

The esteemed developers of UFO 50, a collection of 50 (fifty) (yes, five-zero) NES-styled games coming out in 2018 as a single retail package, aren't helping matters.

UFO 50 released a revealing trailer last month, and its team of developers, including Derek Yu (Spelunky) and Eirik Suhrke (Downwell), have followed that trailer with a massive world premiere of its playable version. That means the developers' kiosk is packed with 35 playable games.

I made the dubious decision to try and play all 35 games on offer—which appear in a giant menu, looking like a bunch of NES cartridges. Every game is designed to run within the constraints of NES hardware, too, and this doesn't just mean you have to use a two-button, NES-styled controller. While each game in UFO 50 runs on a PC in the GameMaker Studio engine, they also come with deliberate technical limits to things like color palettes and maximum on-screen sprites. (Meaning, an old-school "flickering" effect pops up pretty often.) While I didn't get to all 35 games on the PAX show floor, and a few of them were one-note gimmicks in their preview state, I found enough brilliant stuff in a 40-minute mad-dash sampling to get excited about the full package.

Hyper Contender: This two-button fighting game makes players attack each other while jumping around and dodging in 2D side-scrolling fashion. Hyper Contender assigns a gun-powered attack to your B button and a weird jump to your A button. The catch is, these two simple moves vary wildly between characters. Some guns and jumps require button-holds, charges, or quick taps to operate precisely. In one case, the "jump" button triggers a gravity polarity swap (just like the indie platformer VVVVVV), while other characters have hop-and-hover maneuvers, Bionic Commando-styled swings, or "climb-a-magical-rope" powers. Every one of this game's eight combatants has a distinct jump-and-attack combo. Anybody who is a sucker for the simple-yet-complex combat genre (Nidhogg, Divekick) should start drooling.

Attactics: What looks like a simple "attack the other base" battle game actually has a serious mix of strategic possibilities and twitchy reactions. This one's tricky to describe without showing a video in action, so bear with me.

Two players face off on opposite ends of a side-scrolling screen, and every five seconds, both sides drop one new warrior onto a battlefield. The challenge is to manage your new and existing warriors, which either wield swords or bows, by moving them up and down a series of rows while your opponent does the same. Once any of your warriors cross the arena's halfway line, you can't change their path anymore, so you're also trying to set up your warriors' eventual march to the other side in such a way that your opponent can't fend you off. Do all of this while juggling your "one new fighter every five seconds" additions, which can become hectic surprisingly quickly.

The result is perhaps the deepest NES-caliber strategy army game I've ever seen—which, to be fair, isn't a very well populated genre. But Attactics makes me wish there'd been more games like this when I was an NES-addicted kid.

Disc Lords: In recent years, the board game world has enjoyed a rise in what's known as the "flicking" genre. Games like Ice Cool and Catacombs ask players to use their fingers to physically flick figurines around a board, often to bonk and move opponents' figures around, and UFO 50 has a digital equivalent in this two-player battling game. Each side has an equal number of flickable tokens, all with their own energy bars, and when you flick your piece into an opponent's, you damage it. Simple NES-compatible controls make this easy to figure out, while a surprising "8-bit physics" model means the flicking and collisions feel like you're really a kid bonking old Pogs around a table. This may not become your go-to digital versus board game, but there's really no video game "flicking" battle quite like this.

Fragile Platforms: Think of 8-bit games like Ice Climbers and Kid Icarus, which required you to jump upwards instead of run to the right. Then add a Spelunky-esque mix of randomly generated levels and brutally tricky jumps. In Fragile Platforms, you must jump upwards and use a gun to blast holes when ceilings appear above your head and block your path. The trouble is, every platform you jump on disintegrates (hence, the game's name), and the floor beneath those platforms is always made of insta-kill spikes. The result is a frenetic arcade-action game in which you'll be lucky to live longer than 60 seconds per attempt. Thankfully, the jumping action feels incredibly smooth, so when you die, you know it's your fault, not the game's.

Kick Club: Bubble Bobble charmed a generation of '80s arcade gamers, but I always found that its "kill bad guys by blowing bubbles" system was too simple for my tastes. Kick Club reimagines the arcade classic by replacing your bubble-blowing power with a very different "weapon": a soccer ball. Meaning, instead of aiming little floating bubbles to snag bad guys, you now have to aim and kick a fast-moving, wall-bouncing soccer ball to take them all out. This is made extra tricky in this UFO 50 game by how platforms and walls are set up, so that you have to account for all kinds of wall bounces while racking up points.

Sacrifice and Sacrifice 2: UFO 50 started when multiple developers got together and began trading each other's prototypes of small, NES-styled games. Two of those prototypes, made by different developers, involved players killing themselves as a mechanic. Meaning, you'd sacrifice one of your Mario-styled character's lives to turn a corpse into, say, a platform, a bridge, an ammo pickup, and so on. Then you'd come back to life and use that corpse's bonus to get past a tricky section. Instead of combining these prototypes, the UFO 50 team decided to release both as individual games, and they're each clever and action-packed in surprisingly different ways.

Camouflaged: You're a little chameleon, and you can only get past laser-shooting monsters by turning yourself into the color of whatever ground any of the monsters is surveying. This game's puzzly trickiness comes from having to walk over terrain of a given color in order to absorb its color, then walking a perfect path so as not to trigger any other mindful monsters nearby. I'm taking to calling this cute-yet-stealthy game "Metal Gear Yoshi."

UFO Racers: In this tribute to Super Off-Road, you're not racing in suped-up trucks, but rather gun-equipped spacecraft. Not a big difference, right? Turns out, this changes how you "throttle" your racer, so that you tap a single button to boost upward (kind of like when Mario is in an underwater level and taps the A button to flutter up... just, you know, now with jet thrusters). Between this tweak and a welcome laser-blasting power, UFO Racers delivers an NES-styled racing game that feels wildly different than classics like Super Sprint and RC Pro-Am.

Pingolf: I went kind of ape over the August video's tease of what something that I simply called "cyber-golf," and I'm happy to return with actual impressions of this NES-styled twist on the lovely mobile game Dangerous Golf. You bonk a golf ball across enemy- and obstacle-loaded side-scrolling levels, using a simple system of aiming your shot, then holding a button to determine your shot's power. The fun part comes from managing a combination of strange level designs and funky obstacles. This isn't an incredibly deep action-golf experience, but it's tuned to feel fast and zany.

Golfaria: Speaking of: someone working on UFO 50 is obsessed with golf, because the collection also includes a complete 8-bit RPG in which your character is a golf ball. Getting around the world map requires hitting yourself around, up, over, and through golf hazards. I barely played this one, but I look forward to a golf-ball RPG (and wonder how it will compare with a modern "pinball platformer" called Yoku's Island Express, which we loved at E3).

Cyber Owls: Hilariously, UFO 50 includes one intentionally bad game as a tribute to the bizarre NES curio Cheetahmen. (Cheetahmen, it turns out, was packed into its own oversized multi-game collection on the NES, called Action 52, so this tribute is an interesting full-circle creation.) I love that Cyber Owls exists, as this mini-game lets you run around and punch things as a muscular man with an owl's head, but I'll probably never play it again.

























Long list already, right? Well, UFO 50 comes packed with even more games of varying styles, including beat-'em-ups, shoot-'em-ups, tower defense, city-building strategy games, and, er, a "party simulator" in which you have to throw a party that is somehow super-fun yet not so wild that the cops show up. There's a lot going on in this 50-game package, and I am already excited to see how the full set turns out when it launches "sometime in 2018."