It's another part of my trio-based format for December's Desura Dementia, wherein I look at Desura games that are the niche-iest bunch of niche titles that ever niche'd. So tuck into some quiche as I unleash the niche by clumsily swinging my critical eye over these three Desura games like its some sort of judicious bardiche. This is awful wordplay. I don't know what to tell you.

Is it Asteroids? Is it Contra? Is it the Shoes?!

The game: Studio Bean's BasketBelle

The source: The Indie Royale Harvest Bundle

The pre-amble: BasketBelle is a basketball-themed platformer/action game in which a young man attempts to rescue his sister, Belle, from the shadowy forces that kidnapped her, using nothing but his prodigious basketball skills and the wise musings of his father. The gameplay tends to switch up between levels, but usually revolves about basketball in some way. Aesthetically, the game looks (and sounds, with its ambient soundtrack) like And Yet It Moves, with the same kind of cardboard cut-out/sketchbook look and European whimsy.

The playthrough: I kind of liked this game. It was pretty cute, had a few neat ideas for what it could do with its core basketball mechanic and ended quite satisfactorily after a couple of hours. Yep, I may have finished one of these "jump in for a first impression" games in a single setting, but it was a sweet couple of hours.

I'll start from the beginning: the initial goal of the game appears to be to beat various amorphous blobs that vaguely resemble creatures at basketball, by sliding and dodging and faking jump shots in order to make the net clear so you can score. Apparently, all one-on-one basketball games are to 11 points; and because that's kind of a lot of repeating the same boss-defeating process (if you think of how "boss puzzles" in games usually work, the magic Miyamoto method of only needing to score three hits is usually preferable because the enjoyment was in figuring out the method) the game finds interesting ways to subvert your expectations. For instance, it might magically allow you to score three baskets at once, or let a match continue while a small story snippet plays out and when the player resumes the game it's moved on a little and each player has scored a few more baskets apiece. Clever little touches like that persist through the whole game.

It's not all one-on-one matches either: early on, you get eaten by a snake and have to fight your way out through a bunch of puzzle rooms that require some clever use of the running/juking mechanics you've just been taught. Later, you'll learn to fly (must be the Air Jordans) and have a few stages floating through a lightning storm. The way it keeps surprising you right up until the end, and layers in more and more of the backstory as it goes on, kept me glued to the game until its conclusion. I wasn't expecting a whole lot, but excepting a few rough spots I was pleasantly surprised with how much fun I had.

The verdict: I beat the game so I won't be going back. A short and sweet Indie puzzle-platformer.

The game: Slakinov Games' Super Space Rubbish

The source: Reward for buying at least 10 Indie Royale bundles.

The pre-amble: Super Space Rubbish is a 2D space shmup that deliberately evokes the Atari Arcade classic Asteroids. While the presentation is all blocky rocks and triangular ships, the player is mining the rocks and collecting money to upgrade their craft. They must be on the look out for the spacecraft of competing claim-jumpers and bizarre astronomical phenomenon.

The game's optional backstory reveals a Douglas Adams-esque plan to "deconstruct" the Earth in the 31st century after it was deemed unprofitable to Tesco's, the megacorporation that owned it. Various enterprising types, such as yourself, are attempting to mine what few resources are left in the Earth's remains: an asteroid belt filled with debris and odd lifeforms.

The playthrough: Super Space Rubbish has some interesting ideas, chief of which was taking the sort of acquisition-mining and space combat 2D space-faring games like SPAZ, which all kind of began with Asteroids and its multi-directional movement so long ago, and returning them to their ancestral home. While it's about as fun as Asteroids usually is, the game moves extremely slowly: for whatever reason there's a shop drone that allows you to spend money and a completely separate one that lets you sell off all the materials you've been mining. Which means you can only upgrade every two "stages", and it takes a lot of money to upgrade essentials like weapon strength, armor and energy regeneration. Most vitally, extra lives (actually escape pods) cost a prohibitively high number of credits for the early game and don't come back if you try continuing after a game over - you have to make it through the rest of the game on one life. You keep everything you've upgraded/earned up until your destruction, so there's always a chance of scraping through or simply grinding for new upgrades if a particular stage is too tough, but as I stated before: it's a pretty glacial process.

I did want to like this game though. I can't even imagine how many hours I spent playing Asteroids back in the day. Probably as much as I spent playing Elite, which is itself a big influence on these types of "mining/trading/upgrading in a constant loop" space game. Maybe if I sharpen my skills a little, I can survive one more stage with the single life each continue gives you. Or I can start over and just try to hold onto them until I can afford some better upgrades. Neither sounds particularly palatable though.

The verdict: See above. It's a neat little game that does some interesting things with Asteroids' very basic model, both graphically and mechanically, but it's just too incremental for its own good. Thousands of dollars for a new weapon when I'm earning a couple hundred every other level? Who does it benefit to make the player wait that long between major upgrades?

The game: 2DEngine's 8-Bit Commando

The source: The Retro Groupee Bundle

The pre-amble: 8-Bit Commando is a throwback side-scrolling run and gun very much in the style of Contra, or the many other games of the period with the same type of gameplay. Your shirtless dude can run, jump, shoot in multiple directions and basically die a lot. Everything in this game, from its graphical presentation to its music to its title screen art, is evocative of a time when this is what we (well, let's say those just hitting their 30s) did as adorable little tyke gamers holding NES controllers and cursing at a seventh-grade level. Which is to say, play as buff army dudes shooting everything in sight with very little plot to follow. It'd be hard to imagine games with that sort of description being popular today, I'd bet.

The playthrough: No, no, I get it. Everyone liked Contra a whole lot and we haven't really seen a resurgence of that mix of balls-hard difficulty and endless amounts of giant vehicles and goofy army drones to blow up. At least to the same extent as, say, 2D platformers.

8-Bit Commando does have a few ideas up its non-sleeves, such as enforcing a strict time limit that allows the player to resume their game as often as they'd like from checkpoints in lieu of a lives system, but should that time limit run out it's back to the very start of the stage for Mr Ersatzenegger: this ensures that the player won't get frustrated by losing the scant few lives they have on a couple of dumb errors, but is still required to practice the stage old-school style until they're able to reach the boss and beat it before the (admittedly quite generous, considering) time limit expires.

It's just... we've moved on a lot since those days, and there's no reason why you can't make a modern game that just so happens to have that same style of frantic 2D run-and-gun action. Something as sharp-looking as Hard Corps: Uprising or as mechanically in-depth as Mercenary Kings are what I want to see from this genre going forward. I mean, that's assuming I wanted anything from this genre whatsoever, which I generally don't (sorry @pollysmps); I get my ass handed to me enough by games like Dark Souls already, thanks. It's fun to look back, but why not play Contra if that's the case? Why make 8-bit games in this day and age? Make modern games with an older generation's ideas and attitudes if you'd like, but leave the past in the past.

I suppose I don't really get it after all.

The verdict: Nah. It's not a bad game for what it is; as throwbacks go it's remarkably faithful and its graphics and animation are suspiciously good for a supposed 8-bit game. But... I'd rather just play Contra. Or anything else, really.