The UFO 50 Diaries: Paint Chase

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah!

For those of you following these diaries more intently, you might also be listening to the Eggplant podcast’s Year of UFO 50. It’s the catalyst for my own method of working through these games, but I’ve made a point to ensure that I play enough of each title AND get my thoughts down AND published on here before I listen to what others have to say.

However, in the waning tail of last week’s episode on Ninpek, from the show’s hosts there were more than a few groans of negative anticipation about the next game on the list. Paint Chase, a competitive push-pull of territory marking akin to Splatoon. A title that I played a few minutes of during that first weekend after launch, and immediately chalked it up as a big fat not-for-me.

So needless to say I didn’t have high hopes for my enjoyment of this particular game, however, returning to it this week, not only am I surprised to say my initial assessment was wrong, but I think this game will end up being the poster child for the entire justification of playing UFO 50 this way.

You need to give these games breathing room. I had a blast with this.

Paint Chase is a deceptively simple game. Top down perspective. You control your car only with the arrow keys. You navigate bespoke courses each with their own ideosyncratic topographies. Corners and channels, spawn points for your opponents and power ups that even in the scant few courses I’ve managed to best, offer up a surprisingly wide array of benefits.

But in each track, each individual encounter, Paint Chase proves time and time again that it’s not what it seems, and that despite carrying itself as a racing game of sorts, and a turf war of sorts, what this really is, is a strategy game, one that weirdly has more in common with Bug Hunter than I was expecting.

Very early on it became clear to me that I was pursuing the wrong goal. By focusing on laying down track in the alloted time I was quickly overwhelmed by what the game was really doing. I learned my lesson swiftly.

Your opponents start to take on a life of their own, not just as a variety pack of annoyances trying to undo all your hard work but as entities with a very particular set of behavioural patterns that you must learn in order to get the better of them.

The game then becomes a savage lesson in ludolic mixology as you juggle the organised chaos spewing forth on the screen, attempting among the noise to make a plan on the fly, to route yourself towards success by anticipating your enemies moves and recognising in which order they need to be addressed.

Get that order wrong, and you can find yourself fucked out of a victory at the very last second. I know this because right before writing this sentence it happened to me. The noise I made woke up my neighbours newborn.

While not completely obsessed with Paint Chase, I find within it a wonderfully compelling idea. It’s the thing you think it is, but at the same time it’s not. Bold enough to know what kind of game it is, but devilish enough to refuse to tell you.

I like it a lot.