Part Time UFO is a “puzzle game” about piling up things (not necessarily objects) where the challenge is not in the puzzle itself but in the character movement. In my head it’s like a “construction” flash game with the physics of the first Super Mario.

Why Super Mario? Because contrary to what one might think given the physics-based premise, the game isn’t really about finding the perfect balance when placing the pieces on top of each other, but about maintaining control of the UFO. Each piece you carry has an impact on the controls: its weight makes you loose speed and gain inertia, making it hard to carefully place the piece in the right spot. Basically, the piece is dragging you, not the other way around. The faster you go, the more you swing, which means there’s a chance that the piece will slip and fall, causing you to fly down to pick it up again or even worse, destroying the tower you had already built. You also have to be careful when dropping it in place since if it carries too much momentum, there’s a high chance the tower will lose its balance and fall.

Well then, play slowly and that’s it, right? Fortunately it’s not that easy because there is a timer.

I wish the progress didn’t depend on getting extra badges from each level’s additional challenges, and I’m also not a fan of the cosmetics (though purely visual and paid only with in-game money) but other than that, I’ve got to say it’s pretty brilliant.

Day 982: The grape's smug face still haunts me. He knows what he's doing. He knows he's blocking my lanes, my fruit evolutions. And he sits right there, that same smug smile on his face, challenging me. He knows. I know he knows. He knows that I know he knows. We sit locked eternally, forever enemies. High Score: 2558. Still not 3000. My goal of hitting that 3k? Not going grape.

Edit 10/29: I have done it. On this I have reached a score of 3090. There comes a time in most pros' lives when they realize it's time to hang em up, time to retire. The game's passed him by. But others? Others retire at the peak of their game. They know they've accomplished all they set out to do. And that is today.

In my mind this forms a duology with Bart's Nightmare, so I should take the opportunity to talk more about that one as well. Both are crap and I didn't have it in me to finish either of them, but out of the two Bart's Nightmare is far more difficult, obtuse, ugly and all around putrid in every aspect. Probably one of the worst games I've ever played.

To actually get to the minigames in Bart's Nightmare, you have to wait for papers to spawn on the road and jump into them, but they spawn randomly and only occasionally, so you can (and I did) spend like 30 minutes in real time just fucking waiting around on the side of the road for one to show up. There are enemies, too, so you can't just sit there idly. When you actually do reach the minigames, they're horrible, clunky, and sometimes unwinnable with just a tiny mistake, meaning you have to go wait on the fucking street again. There's also no music half of the time, and what actually is there predictably sucks ass. It has this outright unfinished feel to it, which is worth noting because the main programmer fucking hated working on this one and actually walked out and left the game industry before it was done. I think they outright shouldn't have released it, personally.

Virtual Bart has better minigames and no street level or anything of the sort, but it's still pretty awful. There's really less to say about it honestly, one of them has you as a pig and the sprite work in there looks nothing like the rest of the game which was kinda funny. There's also one as a dinosaur with annoying sfx, and that's about as far as I got before I was just completely burnt out. I did skim through the other minigames, but I couldn't get the hang of them and I definitely couldn't make myself at that point. So instead I just looked through a full playthrough on youtube, in which NintendoComplete called it "waterboarding in a cartridge", so I'm not convinced this is just a me thing.

So all in all, fuck both of these games. Worse than the NES ones honestly, which is a really low bar. Don't play these, and don't play those. I guess if you tried REALLY hard, or were a Simpsons fanatic, you could find some charm in them (except Bart's Nightmare lmao), but not me unfortunately.