Bijou Brilliance – eight modern games that do an awful lot with precious little

Old prejudices die hard. Although Ada’s hard drive is as capacious as a Zeppelin hangar, and download speeds in rural Wessex are no longer narrowboat slow, I still wince when I go to download a game and see double digits in front of the ‘GB’.

Why, this very morn I pressed Combat Directive : Napoleonic Wars‘ install button then hesitated when Steam told me that this new light wargame with its adrift colon and modest visuals, required a whopping twenty-eight of Ada’s gigs.

Whenever I encounter a surprisingly bulky title, my mind turns to the games in my collection that produce pleasure with the contents of remarkably thin folders. In JPM (Joy Per Megabyte) terms, all of the following rank as modern* miniature marvels in my book.

* produced in the last five years

Trederia charge about one pence a megabyte for the fab, regularly updated Super Video Golf. A choice of twelve eighteen-hole courses and ten different scoring systems, mean it’s likely to be months before you lose interest. Steam tells me I’ve already spent twenty-three hours reading fiendishly contoured greens, and leathering little white spheres into the middle distance.

Rush Rally 3‘s three hundred and fifty megabyte HD footprint is positively miraculous. As I mentioned in this recent love letter to Brownmonster’s delightful dust stirrer, one of the game’s space-saving secrets is procedurally-generated textures. Why don’t more devs use this approach to set dressing, I wonder.

An incident-packed 2D tank sim in which all well-known and many little-known WW2 AFVs are potential mounts, Armoured Commander II tells its detailed war stories using just one hundred and fifty megabytes of code. Disappointingly, despite being around for several years, AC2 hasn’t, to my knowledge, inspired a single naval or aerial copycat.

In return for fifteen GBP and around two hundred and seventy five megabytes of HD space, Early Access Tiny Combat Arena currently provides a custom ground and air sortie generator capable of spawning thirty-two-aircraft furballs, and the prototype of a dynamic ‘arena’ mode in which the player assists friendly ground forces intent on conquering a small multi-base island. Thanks to the efforts of modders like Viperu Zeiro you don’t have to contrail the skies above Sand Island in the default Harrier. User-made warbirds such as the F-14, F-16, F/A-18, and F-22, are also options.

There’s nothing bloated about Boat Crew. This engrossing high octane digit exerciser includes a plethora of threats and targets appropriate to the Pacific (the latest update added aircraft carriers) and the kind of sophisticated dynamic campaigns, simmers and wargamers relish yet rarely get.

The sylph-like Pavlov’s House is a superb port of a superb solo board wargame. Like its slightly larger but equally entertaining step-sister, Castle Itter, it’s historically based, relatively friendly, and tasks the player with holding a stronghold against multi-directional German attacks. Axis units advance towards their goal along a series of radiating movement tracks, while you do your utmost to halt and eliminate them. As I said back in 2021 “It’s impossible to have a dull game of Pavlov’s House”.

Czech-er than a smažený sýr lunch washed down with a couple of glasses of Staropramen, the two hundred and fifty megabyte HROT is one of my favourite first-person shooters. Unlike many backwards-looking FPSs of recent years, it balances great gun- and grenade play with uncommonly inventive level detailing and design. Unlike many of its peers it manages to be both witty and scary, and truly looks the part.

It’s a Friday night and I’m in the mood for a spot of periscopic predation, but don’t happen to have a sub sim installed. Do I A) Fall asleep waiting for all seventy-one GB of UBOAT to arrive, or B) wait a few minutes for an eventful, friendly, flavoursome alternative more than one hundred times smaller in size to flank-speed down the phone lines to Bramley End? Hmm, let me think.

Cornerites, of the pleasure producers currently installed on your PCs, which are the dinkiest?