04/07/2007 - Article - Unlicensed Homages Through The Ages

I love naming and shaming. If I can point out that something is a disgraceful rip-off of something else and engender some bad feeling into the bargain, then it's a win-win situation.

It's probably the scurrilous gossip in me and while I know it's a terrible trait, I don't care. And so I though it'd be nice to take a trawl through the annals of shareware to find five of the most disgraceful rip-offs yet released.

Of course, now it's all the rage for shareware developers to rip each other off, but where do you think they got most of those ideas in the first place, eh? Their own brains? Oh, you're such a card!

You'll probably have heard of a lot of these games, but hopefully some of them will be news to you, causing gasps of horror as you realise that if morale compasses were real compasses, then most of these developers would have died from exposure whilst orienteering.

Puzzloop

We're going to start with an easy one that everybody knows about, and that's Zuma, the game which has done a better job wiping Puzzloop from history than the Spanish Conquistadors did with the Incans. Who, ironically were then made famous again by Zuma. And every other third rate design hack who'd already finished plundering Egypt for ideas.

As a result of Zuma's ubiquitous nature, When your average pleb sees something like Tumblebugs, Karu, Luxor, Pirate Poppers, Tropix, Atlantis, Chameleon Gems, Atlantis Sky Patrol, Dynasty, Sweetopia, Sparkle, Butterfly Escape, Aqua Pearls, Beetle Bomp or Inca Ball they think "Oh look, there's a clone of Zuma". Instead of "Everyone involved in those games is a shit".

How Popcap, the makers - and I'm using that term fairly loosely - of Zuma didn't get sued into the stone-age by Mitchell, I don't know[1]. Now, if you'll excuse me I'm going to go and play an Arkanoid clone.

Crap! No! I mean a Breakout clone!

Such is the similarity between the games that if you where to place this image...

...to the left of this image and then squint, your brain would interpret it as a single three-dimensional object.

STOP PRESS: See hyprocrisy in action as Popcap moan about people ripping off "their" ideas. Then read the comments for lots of juicy swears.

Kings Valley 2

Next on our list is an old favourite of mine, Kings Valley 2 by Konami. This game was released on the MSX home computer and has a very distinctive look and feel. If you were to rip this game's design off you'd have to be very clever to disguise the origin so that sharp-eyed retro gamers wouldn't spot where you'd cribbed your ideas from.

Or - if you're the author of Pharoah's Curse - you could just say "fuck that" and not even bother trying to hide your shameful deed. Pharoah's Curse is one of those delightfully indefensible rip-offs where every detail of the game's design has been faithfully reproduced with the exception of the level layouts. And even then they might have been ripped off as well - I'm damned if I was going to buy the full version to find out.

Of course the main reason I'm mentioning Pharaoh's Curse in this list is because I remember having a particularly acrimonious discussion about it being a rip-off on a forum many years ago. Sadly the thread has turned to dust, so I can't dig it out and use it to illustrate my point. So instead I'm using a pair of screenshots which I'll humourously label the wrong way around.

This is Pharoah's Curse...

...And this is Kings Valley 2.
Wait a minute... I've made a hilarious mistake!

(Here's a link to Pharoah's Curse, although bizarrely no matter how much you try, you can't select Pharoah's Curse in the menu at the left. Perhaps... that is the real curse!

Or maybe it's just shitty web design.)

Solomon's Key

Sticking with platform puzzlers we have the arcade classic Solomon's Key, one of the finest ever arcade platform puzzlers which, unlike Kings Valley 2 was ported to nearly every machine under the sun and so it's very well known. Which means that you'd just have to disguise it if you were going to rip it off.

But once again people couldn't be arsed and so when Phelios released Abracadabra the only thing which had changed was the level designs and handling, both of which had been made far worse than the original. Oh, and it was missing some of the enemies from the arcade version which would probably have been too hard to program.

If this was a free remake, I'd say it was crappy. As they actually have the gall to charge for it, it means it's as welcome on my hard drive as blood is in my stools. Normally I'd advise you to keep well away from such a game, but I do recommend paying a trip to the website to see exactly how not to make a trailer. It's not often you see such a terribly thought out combination of music, visuals and dialog.

Solomon's Key features levels which have been carefully crafted to provide challenges both dextrous and cerebral.

Abracadabra features levels which look a bit like things you might see outside a window.
NB. Levels which exist purely because they look like things are a bit like crates in first person shooters. They indicate the precise moment at which the designer ran out of ideas.

Bubble Bobble

But for the some of the most shameless of all rip-offs we have to turn to Alawar Games. Nowadays they're known for their insipid titles starring Snowy The Polar Bear, who was tragically born to the least imaginitive parents in the whole of the arctic, but in the past Alawar were better known for releasing several games based on the Bubble Bobble series from Taito.

Now, I know that the recent handheld versions of Bubble Bobble and Rainbow Islands have made it seem like Taito would happily slap a picture of Bub and Bub onto a fresh turd in a greasy napkin, but once upon a time they actually cared about the series, and so it's really quite surprising that Alawar got away with not only releasing a game called Bubble Bobble Nostalgie, but that the game contained the arcade game's level layouts, characters and bonuses.

Had it looked nice and played well, then there might have been something to admire about their deed, but the final slap in Taito's face with a wet cock is that Alawar's version of Bubble Bobble is shit, with horribly wrong movement, faulty collision detection and background graphics straight from satan's arsehole.

Nnnnnghhh... *splash*

These days, though, Alawar don't sell their Bubble Bobble rip-offs and instead deal in completely original titles. Like a game where you dig holes for treasure and attempt to drop objects onto other enemies call Dig McDug. Another game where you're constantly chased by enemies over a series of platforms which you can dig holes in called Pyramid Runner and finally a game where you jump through gaps in a series of moving platforms in order to reach the top of the screen called Foxy Jumper.

Fucking hell.

"Hmm, what's the very least we can do to Dig Dug's name in order to make it drop out of copyright?"
EDIT: Thanks to Tomas Schonbeck and Dominic White I now know this is actually a rip-off of Digger, which itself is a rip-off of DigDug.

Aah, another classic results from the "take someone else's game and stick it in Egypt" approach.

To be honest, I don't mind Foxy Jumper ripping off Jumping Jack.
Because it was shit.

Bust-A-Move

Our last game which has been ripped off is also from Taito and it's Bust-A-Move, the bubble-popping arcade game which isn't Pang.

As with Puzzloop, there have been many companies which have ripped this off, setting it in such original locations as Egypt (as in Phlinx) and Maya (as in Inca Quest). Some rip-offs of it haven't even bothered changing the main characters much, as in Bubble Oddysey which just stuck goldfish bowls on Bub and Bob's heads and moved the setting to outer space.

But the worst of all the Bust-A-Move rip-offs is the one that defies all explanation, and that's Snood, which despite looking like everything about it was produced by monkies using only twigs and their own faeces, has somehow managed to spawn not only three sequels and innumerable bastard offspring, but has also resulted in handheld console versions for the Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS. Games, which at his very moment are cluttering up bargain bins, their packaging bedecked with screenshots which are so infectiously bad that I'd recommend putting on a condom before you look at them.

Stop reading this for a moment and check out the images down there, because I find it just inconceivable that something so ugly could be taken seriously by what I assume was a professional publisher, despite this particular choice of license making them look more like a group of absinthe-crazed tramps with wads of cash to burn.

Now there's a menu screen only its mother could love.
Hmm... Maybe it's just a one off and all the rest of the screens are lovely, though?

Oh sweet merciful God, no! Kill it! KILL IT!
JUST STAMP ON THE FUCKING THING!

Now, I know that graphics don't make a game, but Snood just takes the piss. In a world where most games display at least some semblance of artistic ability, Snood sticks out like Joseph Merrick at a beauty pagent.

"Remember, games as ugly as Snood are still rare. So goodnight. And don't have nightmares."

And I think that's why Snood inspires such ire in me. It's a barrel-scrapingly awful rip-off which strips away all the charm from the original and yet it's obviously generated enough cash that its author, Dave Dobson, has been able to spin-off its badly crayoned "characters" into other products including Snoodoku, Snood Solitaire and a staggering range of poisonously garish t-shirts, posters, mugs and key fobs.

For me, the mere existance of this assembled rotteness is a blight on an internet known for far more pleasing sights, such as women with beards made of poo and men with wine bottles poking out of their distended sphincters.

Of course I've only managed to cover a small amount of the unlicensed homages out there, but this list wasn't meant to be exhaustive, it was just meant to be an opportunity to say rude things about a big list of unscrupulous people who think it's perfectly okay to sell wholesale rip-offs of other people's games.

Goodnight.

Graham

[1] But thanks to a link on TIGSource you can gain some insight.