Cheap Clones Roundup
April 30th, 2011
The Cheap Clones games seemed somehow…familiar. While a few played things pretty close to the vest, a few managed to stray quite far from the source material – making, dare I say, ORIGINAL titles.
For shame, people! Even when you’ve been asked to rip somebody off, you come back with something creative. Still, a lot of people used the opportunity to poke fun at some of the quirks and often confusing conventions of the games industry.
Let’s see what these 18 games brought to the table this month, shall we:
Hero Test, by Steve Gargolinski
Makes fun of a lot of modern conventions. An evil, evil game indeed.
Super Paper Space Invaders, by Ben
Really improves upon the formula – the music and SFX choices are perfect. Would love to see this expanded upon.
Prism Light, by Roan Contreras
A really well-made maze game with some nice light elements.
Escape Cage, by Aaron Oldenburg
An Escape-the-room clone with a great networked twist. Was I playing the game with myself at some point?
A pretty difficult Columns clone. Match the movement of the shapes instead of their colors.
A pet-sim clone played entirely in Youtube. Some great choices and I love the Tamogotchi aesthetic.
I actually enjoyed this game. Does this make me a bad person?
Vexed Hedgehogs, by Barry Atkins
Protect indie gaming from evil, evil cloners. On an iOS platform, it would make MILLIONS.
A flight control clone that bizarrely has a lot of Mario 64 noises.
A nice clone of Tiny Wings, which is itself a clone of Nathan McCoy’s Wavespark if you want to get into all of that.
Commander Clone, by Zachstronaut
A run-n’-gun Contra style game. Make sure to play all the way through the tutorial level.
A Diablo style clone. Looks like you’ll need a pretty decent computer to run this one.
A Metroid/Blast Master hybrid clone – the world seems pretty huge.
Ultimate Pong, by AizenSousuke and Mok Swee Hoe
An intentionally buggy Pong clone.
A Breakout clone. There’s so little to Breakout, that it’s almost hard to determine where cloning begins.
A well made Tetris clone. Though as a fairly competent player I miss the instant-drop button.
Dead Bunny Soup, by MisfitByte
A clone of a ByteJacker game, though I’m not entirely sure which one.
Super Skill Jump, by Breakdance McFunkyPants
An intentionally evil Mario clone – this could give the one on the app store a run for its money.
We're a group of indie game developers, running a friendly competition every month. The rules: Make a game based on the month's theme, and don't spend more than 7 days. New games posted at the end of every month.