UFOMO - UFO 50 & The Fear of Missing Out

I was looking forward to playing UFO 50.

An anthology of 50 fictional 8-bit-style games, it sounded like the perfect thing to dip in and out of between the longer, more demanding games that seem to eat up so much of my time these days.

I consider anything over 15 hours to be long and demanding, and am right to do so.

Anyway, I'm not playing UFO 50, and that's because it's currently PC-only and I don't have a gaming PC. I just assumed that it would, at the very least, already be on Switch, but I was wrong. I'm sure it'll eventually land on consoles but, right now, I've got serious FOMO. 

Or UFOMO, if you will.

In an age of dwindling platform exclusives, and as a multi-platform owner, I rarely find myself missing out. But back in the day, things were different, and that fear led directly to hardware purchases that I wouldn't have otherwise made, or asked my parents to make come Christmas or birthdays. Some of these purchases were inspired, others less so. Let's nostalgia!

Nintendo Game Boy - 1993-ish

Everyone at school had a Game Boy. Well, nearly everyone. There was that one lad who had an Atari Lnyx, but I think he's in jail now? Our school was aggressively pro-Sega, yet everyone agreed that Nintendo was the king of the handhelds. Also, none of the parents wanted the hassle of keeping a Game Gear child flush with AA batteries, so the Game Boy was standard. So, one Christmas, I got a Game Boy, just because everyone else had one. I can't say I played it very much, but I was relieved to have conformed. FOMO averted.

A Sony PlayStation and Resident Evil 2 - Summer of 1998

This was a far more reasonable case of FOMO.  I had put it off as long as I could, but I knew I'd eventually have to ditch my Saturn and join the PlayStation masses. I was sick of listening to friends chat about their PS1 escapades, fed up of failing to generate any interest in Sega Rally or Virtua Cop 2 among my peers, and annoyed by game after game failing to release on my console of choice. Resident Evil 2 was the final straw, and that's when I sold my Saturn for a pittance to partially fund my new console. I regret giving it up, but I don't regret the switch, as I would go on to enjoy RE2, Metal Gear Solid and of course the golden age of Final Fantasy over the next couple of years.

A PSOne and Imports - late-90s to early-00s

We missed a lot of seminal RPGs in the PAL region. Our reputation as a market full of football-game and mascot-platform likers gave publishers pause. "They like James Pond. Dragon Quest will be wasted on them" said an Enix executive in 1992, probably. I lusted after games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Xenogears and Chrono Cross, knowing full well they'd never appear in my local HMV or Electronics Boutique. So I saved up, bought a region swapping disc complete with spring and sticker, and imported a couple of titles from one of those mail-order listings at the back of my game mags. Unfortunately, my original PS1 almost immediately packed in, so I had to invest in a PSOne so that I could play my imports. And that's how I experienced FF IV-VI, Tactics, Xenogears and Chrono Cross.

A Game Boy Advance SP and Final Fantasy Tactics Advance - Christmas 2003

In 2003, I was still at the peak of my Final Fantasy fandom and was not going to miss out on a new Tactics. I enjoyed Tactics Advance, but I can count on one hand the number of games I subsequently played on my GBA and still have fingers spare to count other things. Things like friends who are still on Twitter, and onions, for example.

A Bunch of Upgrades for our Family PC - 2004 

My Dad's friend worked in IT. For mates' rates, he kept our family PC powerful enough to surf the web, run Encarta, and even play Age of Empires, while crashing every ten minutes. But I needed it to run Final Fantasy XI, a game that I was horrified to learn would be online-only, and that required several upgrades. With minimal effort on his part, and minimal cost to us, our family friend got our PC up to spec. I spent much of that winter making my first forays into online gaming. That was the last time I had a PC capable of running anything even remotely contemporary.

I'm not going to ask my Dad's old friend to put together a computer tower full of second-hand components, and then send it halfway around the world, just so that I can play UFO 50. That would be weird. Instead, I'll bear the FOMO and patiently wait for a home console port, knowing full well that once it finally arrives, the moment may have passed, my enthusiasm lessened, and my time for gaming already claimed by whatever is coming out next.

Can't complain, though. It's nice to have games to play.