UFO 50 speedrunners complete its most opaque game in under five minutes

rockpapershotgun.com:

If you gotta go fast, you probably don't want to be a stubby-legged spearman who climbs every ladder like a geriatric walrus. Yet that's the challenge taken up yesterday by speedrunners at Awesome Games Done Quick. The UFO 50 speedrun includes an impressive dart through the retro collection's most bewildering game, the ancient and mysterious Barbuta, in which your character is a frustratingly slow hero with a fearfully short attack range. They managed to complete it in less than five minutes. Not only does the run (and its helpful commentary) serve as a short and sweet explanation of why Barbuta is so glitchily fascinating, it also left plenty of time to marathon another three games from the collection.

Barbuta itself was completed in 4 minutes 55 seconds by player "GrayGooGlitch". It's only 11 seconds short of the fastest existing run. The unrepentantly obscure game is full of old-school trickery, like specific pools of toxic slime that won't hurt you, walls that secretly lack collision, and spike pitfalls with invisible bridges. But it's the randomly fluttering bats that give players the most trouble, as they did here just moments into the run.

But the UFO 50 marathon was also a team effort. Three other players zipped through their own game choices in the allotted time, swapping the controller just like in the good old days of losing a life to a hateful chicken. The next game was Rakshasa, a tough-as-old-boots action game with lots of upsetting frogs. The runner polished it off in 8 minutes and 22 seconds. Then came Night Manor, a point and click horror game with a ton of classical item puzzling but with a killer that follows you through the rooms and will come hunting you if you make noise by doing certain actions like activating a jukebox. They got through that in 6 minutes 20 seconds.

Finally, it was Warptank, a kind of anti-platformer about a nippy space tank that can't jump but can teleblorp to the surface immediately above it. When I played it for our UFO