This is incredible. I have always wanted to get into this type of thing, but it seems so incredibly difficult without a large amount of experience.
uctf strips away the layers of complexity related to a specific environment, giving you a clean place to learn the first principles. Whereas, if you tried this on a Gameboy, you must learn a lot of domain specific things, and learn how a computer works at a rather low level. For example: once you have built an exploit payload or two, it isn't so magical how using an inventory of items that are represented with integers can become code.
The first few levels are just to get you used to thinking in machine code, reading and thinking in hex, and used to reversing. They are a little tougher for some, depending on your background.