Recap / UFO 50 Game 47 Quibble Race

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Quibble Race is a gambling strategy game. The focus is on what is essentially a sci-fi horserace, where players bet on the eponymous quibbles to see who takes home the biggest payout. In between races, players can engage in shifty tactics to get ahead, like getting information on how certain quibbles will perform, sponsoring their own quibbles to make them more effective, or participating in shady maneuvers to enhance or debilitate any of the quibbles in the race.

Like a few other games in the collection, Quibble Race is a real, pre-existing video game, in this case one that Derek Yu released on Newgrounds for free back in 2004. The only notable change from the original is the graphics; the majority of the game was left intact.

Tropes found in Quibble Race:

• Company Cross-References: Several of the playable characters cameo from other UFO Soft games, including Pilot, Alpha, Brazz, and Woogy.
• Early-Bird Cameo: An in-universe case that is ultimately subverted; Val, from Godsblood, makes an appearance here as a playable character. However, since Godsblood was never finished, this "cameo" ended up being her only appearance in any officially released media.
• Fixing the Game: The whole point of the game is to be as much of a dirty cheater as possible, so that your "gambles" are much more assured and enriching. Problem is, the other players are cheating too, so you often have to play around their trickery to get ahead.
• No Animals Were Harmed: A tongue-in-cheek message "Only a few hundred quibbles were harmed in the making this game." appears at the end of the credits.
• No Fair Cheating: If any player is caught trying to sabotage a Quibble that is being 'guarded,' they will be caught and fined extra money.
• Transplant: The quibbles and a good chunk of the playable characters are not original to UFO 50 — they were created for the original Quibble Race game in 2004. Accordingly, the historical footnote indicates that this applies in-universe as well, with the quibbles having been originally designed for a board game before being translated into a video game.
• Wham Shot: If you've been playing the games in order and you get to the end, you'll notice this marks the first instance of UFO Soft crediting their employees by their initials instead of by their names... Except for Producer Tao Nemuru. It's the player's first clue that something clearly happened during the development of these games, because prior to that everyone was being credited by their full names.
• Winged Soul Flies Off at Death: If a quibble dies during a race, a light blue quibble spirit with wings and a halo flies from their body.