TouchArcade.ru

This is a promo image for Solipskier, which was used when Mikengreg revealed the game to people.

When a game developer creates an awesome game, we expect its next release to be just as good. This works both ways. Greg Wohlwend and Michael Boxleiter of Mikengreg fame have told me what it feels like to have to work on something new with the expectation of past success in the background. It isn’t just noise — it’s having an effect on the development on its new title, Gasketball. From ideas to coding, the shadow of the success of an arcade skiing game called Solipskier [$.99] looms. It makes decisions harder. It ramps up the scope and quality. It’s making the stakes higher at a time when the studio is looking to do something totally different.

We discussed two kinds of pressure: external and internal. Mike and Greg said that they don’t feel any external heat as they build Gasketball. Solipskier got into a lot of hands, but that hasn’t given the studio the kind ravenous base that other great independent developers, like Team Meat of Super Meat Boy fame, enjoy. There aren’t throngs of people  expecting mastery in the follow-up from Mikengreg, in other words, so the bar feels low.

The pressure comes from inside, they expressed. Solipskier’s sales were the best Mikengreg has ever experienced, and the studio desperately wants Gasketball to outperform it in revenue, quality, and audience. Success is mutating their goals, as if the magic of Solipskier could ever be repeated.

“We really want our next game to seem like a step up, which is not actually very different from our early development days, every game we’ve made has been more interesting, more polished and more successful than the last,” Mike told us in an e-mail exchange. “The difference, now, is that we are trying to succeed in terms of a million players willing to pay us, which sets the quality bar dauntingly high for a two-man outfit.”

Gasketball's logo and the placeholder image for the game's web site.

Greg keeps asking himself if it’s even possible to have another Solipskier, and that seems like a fair question to ask. Its development, from idea to prototyping to final release, happened in brilliant flashes of creativity. Gasketball, on the other hand, hasn’t had that sort of conceptual magic. The conceit took longer to come along, and the studio had to throw out a lot of stuff in order to find this game.

“We had to resolve to getting down in the muck and doing the hard work of prototyping, testing, and scrapping everything for yet another prototype that felt like it had promise,” Greg told us. “For a game to really strike all the chords for us it has to be pretty specific.” Solipkier was initially designed as a Flash game. A lot of its systems and mechanics are designed around that platform. Gasketball is a departure, so it took longer to design as the studio learned new tricks.

The idea for Solipskier came from a brainstorming session that revolved around parallax scrolling. Speed and parallax seemed to gel well, so Mike and Greg started prototyping. In a blog post, the duo described the idea for the landscape painting component came as a watershed, “oh my god” moment. With wide-eyes, they went to work. In the end, the Mikengreg created an exhilarating skiing game unlike any other. Instead of focusing on tricks, jumps, and speed, Solipskier leverages style and the emotion that bursts from your chest when you feel like your acceleration is spiraling out of control.

Version ".01" of Solipskier

This wasn’t the duo’s first rodeo. Solipskier was created first and foremost as a flash game, just like Mike’s other titles as a part of Intuition Games. It was, however, the first game of either developer to grab major mainstream appeal. Mike tells me that he realized that this was a truly special project after publishers had entered into a bidding war for the game. An iOS version wasn’t in the picture at the time, but the reality of Flash development changed the tone of the porting conversation going forward.

“We were always looking for the next step out of the Flash world and into a more sustainable market that allowed for us to make larger, more fully formed games,” Greg told us. “The Flash market is great and gave us a way to become better developers while getting paid for it; however, it wasn’t a sustainable business.”

Mike and Greg were working “crazy hours,” and fretting over paychecks when they developed for Flash. Living by the seats of their pants did have its moments. “It was exciting in some ways for sure, but it couldn’t last,” Greg said. “We were lucky to have such success with Solipskier, as it’s allowing us to fully commit to iOS and downloadable titles in future.”

Within the first two months, the iOS version of Solipskier made a little over $70,000, while the sponsored Flash version generated $15,000. On Metacritic, it’s sitting at a 79 average across five positive reviews. Greg tells us that this success “changed the scope” of what it could do with its next game. The duo continued to pay themselves the same amount of money, but Solipskier gave them consistency and the ability to screw up.

Version "0.5." Can you spot the differences!?

“Since Solipskier, we’ve made six or so fairly polished prototypes and scrapped all of them,” Greg tells us. “We could have taken any one of those further but we’d rather call it a failure early and often than find ourselves with a less than stellar finished game that never found that magic we always look for.”

Solipskier’s success and design are weighing heavily on Mike’s mind as he executes concepts on Gasketball. He second guesses a lot and he’s finding it hard to accept praise from friends. “We’ve always seen the flaws in our work first and foremost, but even worse on this project I see things that aren’t there.” Mike elaborated: “My brain is constantly convinced that there are more features I need to discover before the game will be good, but they’re always just out of reach or vision. Every time I implement an idea and it doesn’t make the game instantly better I feel a crush of defeat. I feel a bit like I’m going crazy.”

They’re not alone in this, though.

The Other Guys

Other studios go through the similar issues. Some deliver greatness quickly. After Chair Entertainment released a brilliant Meteroid-style game called Shadow Complex on XBLA, it was able to stoke a similar sort of fanfare and praise with the launch of Infinity Blade. After Simogo released Bumpy Road, it followed it up with an equally charming rhythm and stealth game called Beat Sneak Bandit.

Some studios deliver late. Mobigame released its puzzle game Edge a couple of years ago to insane levels of acclaim and drama. The app was pulled because of a bogus trademark violation just as it was hitting critical mass, and the studio had to fight for the game to get back onto the App Store. Its follow-up, Cross Fingers, released 11 months after Edge. Mobigame’s David Papazian tells us that Cross Fingers is picking up steam. Edge has since been re-released.

Edge on MacOS

“We were very happy with this second game because it is really innovative and completely unique on the App Store. While I am writing, I can see that Cross Fingers is 5th in the Top Free in the US App Store with more than 8 million downloads. However, the game works a lot better now than it did at the start, because we evolved with the market. We added more levels and in-app purchases. Also, the fans are not the same as Edge fans, a lot of women and men from any ages love Cross Fingers, when Edge is more for gamers.”

Papazian says Edge, and its awards, gave his studio legs. The popularity led him to meeting a lot of people, and gave him a good “in” when introducing his work to press. His studio’s pressure was internal, too.

“But you have some pressure, you must do it again and you polish the new game as much as you can, maybe too much. Luckily we did it again, but we did not receive any awards and Apple never featured Cross Fingers on the US store. We had to fight for this success, by updating the game until it finally worked.”

Tiger Styles grabbed a lot of attention with its puzzle game Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor. While working on the follow-up, a Metroid-style game called Waking Mars, Tiger Styles’ David Kalina said he felt a subconscious kind of pressure to one-up Spider. It’s a similar feeling that Mike and Greg feel as they create Gasketball. “When you make a game that gets game of the year nods,” Kalina told us, “there is definitely this feeling that EVERY game needs to live up to that standard, which is sort of an impossible bar to try and meet every time out.”

Waking Mars is more about exploration than anything else.

The development of Spider had a sense of urgency to it. He needed the game to succeed so his studio could exist. With Waking Mars, Kalina said that urgency was replaced with the desire to blow everything up in its second game, which again, is something Mikengreg is similarly struggling with. “When you start approaching game development that way, the cost of everything goes up, and the more you spend, the more risky it is to fail,” he admitted.

Waking Mars, in the end, will keep his studio alive. However, Kalina said he wouldn’t pour so much time and so many resources into Tiger Style’s next game. Kalina wants to be able to fail and experiment and do bold things.

“I’d like to release two or three games in the next year and have them all be surprising in some way, and if they don’t happen to set the world on fire, we can be cool with that because we’re at least trying to push in new directions,” Kalina told us. “The worst thing we could do now is to say ‘we have to do something just like Spider or Waking Mars BUT BIGGER…’ If we go down that path, you may never hear from us again!”

On Gasketball

Gasketball has a chance to be stellar. It’s a basketball game that has its users matching their opponents’ last shots. It’s like a digital version of HORSE, except rendered on a fantastical 2D plane that lets you freely move the hoop and shot placement around. It also has special balls and barriers that you can set up to make your shot more Byzantine and advanced. There’s a plan in place to continually update the game as it lives on the App Store.

Surprisingly, nothing mechanically in Solipskier informed Gasketball’s creative direction, Mike and Greg said. In fact, Greg argued that there wasn’t one to begin with. He said Mike came up with the idea for a playful and fun basketball game that was “a bit more skill-based than just a slingshot or pre-mapped trajectory control scheme” game. Moving in a new direction entirely, Gasketball eschews the stark contrasts of Solipskier in favor of a more playful and fun art direction.

Mike walking people through their first look at Gasketball.

Our expectations got the best of us when we first saw Gasketball. It’s just not the game you envision this studio doing at first glance. Solipkier was speedy and sharp, and it had a very specific and awesome rhythm, tone, and style. You’d figure the next game from this studio would incorporate some of these elements. This game is exceedingly friendlier in look and behavior. It’s also more thoughtful and maybe even a shade or two less impressive from a conceptual standpoint.

The stakes are just higher now. But there’s also another reason this project is especially different for the studio. Like with Mobigames and Cross Fingers, Mikengreg see Gasketball as an opportunity to grab an entirely new audience.

“We’re both getting older and want to do more with our lives than spend a hundred hours a week in a dark office,” Mike tells us. “When you start working independently you tend to hold your breath and accept sacrifices to your happiness in the short term for long term gains and we’ve yet to really succeed in a way that really gives us the security to let go and look to the future.  It can get very nerve wracking to think that you only have one shot at releasing each game, and every time you fail to reach your goals you get one step closer to having to quit trying.”

It’s a strange world right now for Mikengreg, as the studio struggles with the success of Solipskier and thinks about a studio-wide transition. But it’s confident about Gasketball and its eventual quality. We are are, too. We’ve seen the game in action, watched the videos, and have even fiddled with a build. The title threw us off at first, sure, but now that we’re comfortable with the fact that Mikengreg are switching focus, we’ve been able to move past our expectations. It’s figuring out a way to do that, too.

[source]

At an event that was supposed to revolve around World of Warcraft’s upcoming expansion, Mists of Pandaria, Blizzard producer John Lagrave revealed that the studio is flirting with the idea of taking the still-popular MMO to iPhone. “We won’t do it until we think it’s decent,” Lagrave told Eurogamer in an interview. “But it’s interesting and the world is evolving towards that little handheld device.” He added that Blizzard would be foolish not to consider a port.

Lagrave pointed out a few key reasons why we haven’t seen WOW mobile yet, the main one being that it doesn’t have a good idea for it at the moment. As far as fundamental problems are concerned, that strikes us as a pretty big one. Still, it’s nice to know that Blizzard is thinking about us phone-shackled folk. If this ever happens, hopefully Blizzard sticks to its guns and offers up with something much more clever than these guys, who put the entire game on iOS via Vollee.

[via Eurogamer]

[source]

Last fall we took a look at Ravenmark: Scourge of Estellion [$4.99 / Lite], and it absolutely knocked our socks off. If you’re into strategy RPGs and have been holding off for any reason, now is the perfect time to jump in. A huge content update just hit that nearly doubles the length of the game, and it brings a few user-friendly features along with it.

The defining feature of Ravenmark may well be its carefully crafted world and the compelling characters that inhabit it. It’s a game you can sink your teeth into, and the characters are worth caring about. The Suneater Campaign, new in this update, brings in a whole new cast and more lore to digest. It turns the story of Ravenmark on its head and brings the perspective around to the nation of Kaysan, formerly the villains of the piece. Rather than defending the lands of Estellion, the new campaign sees players striking out to take their land back from the Empire of the Raven.

The update adds eleven new chapters, bringing the expected length up to somewhere near the 20 hour mark, no small feat. It also mixes up the gameplay, as the swarming Kaysan must use different tactics than the organized armies of Estellion.

There are several other big changes in this update, including iCloud support and a lower difficulty mode. The latter increases the health of player-controlled units, making it a little easier to stomp all over the enemy. There are also new challenges to complete in each chapter for players looking for more difficulty instead of less.

Witching Hour Studios has mentioned two crash bugs that slipped into the Suneaters update. If you get either of them, simply load the chapter you’re trying to access from the Campaigns menu. The studio has already submitted a fix, so you’ll be able to get your epic strategy RPG on without a hitch in no time.

[source]

Conceptually, it’s hard not to fall in love with this one. Graeme Devine, and his studio GRL Games, are working on a… spiritual successor of sorts to dance game Space Channel 5. It’s called Dance City, and it’s looking to leverage story, attitude, and dancing. In our meeting with Graeme today, he expressed his extreme love for narrative-led games, as well as quick-to-play titles with “one more time” hooks. Extrapolating, we’re guessing Dance City is going to try to have all of these things.

It’s early, so we don’t know much. On the other hand, we do have the following image, which clearly reveals that Dance City will feature a strong protagonist, and a dance-for-followers mechanic, which should be pretty radical:

We’ll keep our eyes on this as it hurdles to release and bring you much more as soon as possible.

[source]

Music games that use your own songs and then procedurally generate content based on the tones, beats, and melody aren’t new. We see a few promising ones every year, but that’s kind of the thing: they helplessly remain promising. In large part, this is because the procedural part of these titles, in motion, can feel cobbled together. You can almost see these games’ logic piecing together the experience.

Wicked Games‘ InSong might fix this. It’ll use your own music, but it also touches base with a database of over 30 million songs. With this, Wicked will get some measure of control over parts of the experience. With the visuals, for instance, the game will wrap in album art, as well as present interesting tonal elements, to the background as you play.

In the game, you’ll be charged with playing alongside the beat of songs by tapping and dragging virtual guitar picks. The more beats, the more lines you’ll need to keep track of and strum along with. As the music plays, little blips and blobs spawn in the grid-based tonally themed playing area. Collect these and you’ll gain points. If you screw up the beat or run into a red “enemy” blob, you’ll lose any combos you’ve built up and the quality of the song suffers, too.

The database idea in particular strikes us as cool — video games rock because they’re curated experiences. Most procedural games never feel up to snuff. If this database can pull everything together in a cohesive way, this might be something to check out.

We’ll have more in the future. InSong is currently slated to launch during PAX East.

[source]

I personally never felt like I was good at shooters. However, being good at them and loving them are two entirely different things. While I marveled at friends that could blast through Ikaruga from start to finish without ever coming face to face with the game over screen, I plugged away at old classics like Konami’s Life Force and Sexy Parodius, hoping each time I’d improve by some miniscule increment. Practice makes perfect, they always say.

Seeing Orange Pixel’s latest title, Neoteria [$1.99], made me realize my days of shmup practice back in the day would be tested once again. A smart-looking little game with retro-inspired graphics, it foregoes deep story in favor of what we’re all here to do when it comes to shooters: blow things up.

You’ll start in easy mode, but don’t be fooled — there’s challenge to be had, even early on. Controls consist of an up and down arrow on your far left (there’s no forward and backward) and a single button for shooting on your right.

One thing I noticed during play is that my finger kept slipping north of the up button and I only realized it when my ship stopped moving (you drag your finger up and down to control these). Once I got a handle on how far up I could slide, though, this stopped being a problem.

It is worth noting about the controls that the arrows and shoot buttons become transparent as you play. Some people in the forums mentioned this and disliked it, others were not bothered by it. It never presented an issue for me, but its worth being aware of.

As you progress through Neoteria’s levels, you’ll see a map that plots out your path. At some point on each level you can choose one part of the route which takes you the high or low road. Regardless of which you take, you’ll be challenged quickly, as there’s lots of dodging and blasting to do. Enemies will leave behind little blue diamonds for you to collect, which will make your weapons more powerful if you pick them up. However, dying can cause weapons to downgrade, so keep it in mind as you go hurtling through space. You have infinite lives here, so that is a great plus.

You’ll have an option to score up to three stars on each level you play, and also get a readout on your accuracy and kills along with a score. You’ll get a single star for beating a level on easy, two for normal and three for hard. If you want to brag on your scores, OpenFeint and Game Center are built right in too, so you can do so with ease.

Fans of classic shooters like Gradius ought to get a lot of fun out of Neoteria. It comes up with plenty of challenge and gives the proper nod to the old games it’s clearly inspired by, but it delivers the action in bite size pieces and is easy to pick up and play at anytime. Even the bosses, wile not as epic of some of the shooters of yore, have a great feel and have you tapping that blast button at high speed just like the good old days.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

The first time I booted up ZiGGURAT [$0.99], I was lying in bed, in the dark. I was hoping for something relatively simple  to unwind with, but the pulsing music and unending creep of monoptic aliens made that impossible. Just playing Ziggurat felt clunky the first time I tried it, forcing me to sit upright in bed.

There’s no pause button in Ziggurat, which speaks volumes about its design. Ziggurat demands attention.

Tim Rogers — a game designer under the Action Button Entertainment moniker and professional Kotaku.com word-puker — also demands attention, or at least an attention span. His reputation is for sharp criticism (his own reviews site is particularly brutal) buried under sprawling, maximalist writing, but Ziggurat is beautiful in its simplicity. In its own way, it reinforces all of the fundamental, paradoxical truth of the “endless” genre: infinite potential married to inevitable failure.

The best endless games give players just enough atmospheric window dressing to keep them wondering: where did those giant robots in Canabalt come from? What are they researching in that lab in Jetpack Joyride? Ziggurat’s pitch: You play a woman perched at the very top of the eponymous ziggurat, armed with a laser shotgun and nothing else. High above the swirling clouds, you can see other structures in the background, each one perhaps topped with another human fighter. It’s tempting to hope that, should you actually survive the alien horde, it might be possible to rebuild society in these pyramids, but it’s a false hope.

As the sun set behinds her, our soldier is trapped on a few bricks, with no place to go. The only things that move in Ziggurat are the bullets and the aliens; the soldier is firmly grounded. Even before the aliens start climbing up the pyramid, the soldier’s sprite falls into a little heaving motion, bloodstream pumped full of adrenaline like a cornered opossum or feral dog. The sprite work in Ziggurat is excellent — particularly on the iPad — and it’s packed full of small details that reinforce the design of the game.

The detailed sprites are functional, too. As the aliens climb up the sides of the ziggurat, their cycloptic heads swell and deflate; as the soldier charges her shotgun, the energy ball moves through three different phases. A fully charged bullet against a fully inflated alien face sets off a generously large explosion, which can catch other aliens in its blast. Ziggurat is about efficiency and timing, about shooting the least amount of bullets to set off the largest chain reactions possible, about imposing order on chaos by … unleashing enormous explosions.

The mechanics would be impossible without Rogers’ art direction in place, but they also tend to get buried in the explosions, the chiptunes, and the bullets. There’s no tutorial, but the game is paced so that players can subconsciously learn the design, even while they’re fighting for their lives.

Ziggurat might seem difficult or unwieldy until you realize how the explosions work, until you tap into the game’s internal rhythms. Some aliens jump, others climb, and still others just seem to float, but they all expand and deflate and explode all the same. The joy of Ziggurat, for me, is that cycle of tension and release. When the soldier dies — which happens when one stray bullet or alien claw touches her — the screen flashes red and a discordant guitar riff screeches out. In Gears of War, a guitar riff meant sucess; in Ziggurat, it means failure. In both cases, it means you can start breathing again.

And unlike other “endless” games, Ziggurat is designed tightly enough that I never felt like I was plateauing. I am undoubtedly bad at Ziggurat — my Twitter feed and GameCenter leaderboards make that clear enough — but I’m always getting better. This isn’t a game of masochism, it’s a game of evolutionary improvement, of making the last woman alive stronger and better, one death at a time. There will be good sessions and bad sessions, but my scores are constantly climbing upwards. The title, Ziggurat, doesn’t just describe the setting of the game, but the dominant metaphor: a series of steps, arduously climbed.

Thinking of a structural ziggurat might also the best way to conceptualize the game’s controls. Aiming the soldier’s gun is done by sliding your figure along a horizontal axis at the bottom of the screen, left to right. At the outer edges, the soldier aims her gun down, at an angle. As you slide closer to the middle of the screen, the reticule moves up, until it hits 90 degrees. Everything from the alien freaks to the bullets they shoot to the soldier’s own shotgun coalesces in one spot, at the top of the ziggurat.

(There’s another, Angry Birds-esque control scheme in which your gun acts as a slingshot, but it’s slower and more imprecise than the originals. It also forces players to tap and slide their fingers all over the screen, obscuring the action. And, frankly, it lacks the thematic cohesion afforded by the “precision” controls. Avoid it.)

My favorite thing about Ziggurat is that it dismantles the hardcore-casual myth that has so long plagued videogame culture generally, and iOS gaming specifically. An “endless” shooter with Peggle controls doesn’t make for good advertising, but Ziggurat is a game that forces its players to pay attention, to process and react to constantly shifting situations, to do the (literally) impossible. It’s got GameCenter and Twitter functionality that encourages pro-social competition and discussion without asking players to pony up for more bullets or a different-colored spacesuit. It’s judiciously designed and takes the platform seriously, and Ziggurat speaks for itself.

As I broke the three-digit mark for the first time and saw the sun sink below the clouds, an orange alien behind a force field sneaked behind the soldier and killed her. The screen flashed, a discordant note erupted from my speakers, and I started over.

I’ll see you at the top.

TouchArcade Rating:

[source]

EA is continuing down its dark path with The Simpsons: Tapped Out, a free-to-play game that puts you in the shoes of Springfield’s re-designer after Homer blows up the iconic place inadvertently. In an exclusive interview with CNET, EA laid out the premise and it shed a bit of light on the re-building effort, which is set to require the usage of the game’s purchasable in-game currency, doughnuts. Awesomely, the title will use both voice and text provided via the TV series’ actors and writers. Expect some commentary on the genre, as well as the usual goofy stuff.

Sound great, but it’s best keep your expectations in check: EA treats its free-to-play users just about as well as Zynga does. Games like Theme Park, and now the re-designed Tetris, are specifically designed to exploit the people who love the idea of the IP the most. It’s a weird and sudden turn of philosophy for a publisher that, just about a year ago, seemed much more interested in doing meaningful things like pushing the quality bar with games like Dead Space and challenging others to make titles with as much depth as a Madden or FIFA.

That said, here’s what EA’s Bernard Kim told CNET:

“People that don’t want to pay can still enjoy the title. People who are more impatient can throw a little bit of money at it.”

We’ll have to see about that. Tapped Out is expected to hit iPad and iPhone “in the coming works,” and it’ll just be one of many free-to-play titles from EA to come. In another article, CNET estimates that we’ll see a dozen or so by this March.

[via CNET, image via smtexas]

[source]

We don’t talk about Nintendo much. The publisher does its best to pretend that the App Store doesn’t exist. On the rare occasions when it does acknowledge the existence of iPod Touches and iPhones, it’s just either to (a) re-state that it isn’t interested in moving into the mobile space or (b) take a shot at the App Store’s pricing model.

On the other hand, you can’t have a conversation about an unofficial Pokemon app without at least referencing the company. On Friday, a clone of Pokemon Yellow hit the App Store, and even though it doesn’t work at all, people have been scrambling over the thousand or so one-star reviews in order to give it a spin. It’s the number three paid app, in fact.

Undoubtedly, most people downloading this know that this game isn’t official. But, this isn’t stopping them from giving it a spin. Bigger picture, this is a great example of how many consumers want Nintendo games on their phones, and how they’ll try to get it anyway they can. Usually, we talk about this in the context of people going nuts over a highly derivative title, like a 2D platformer with plumbers and squishy monsters. This scenario is different.

To be clear, Pokemon Yellow is beating out Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Cut the Rope, and the world’s latest darling, Clear. Money is being made here, and it’s the significant variety. Oh, how we wish this could be used to lure the Big N to the Store. We wish we could just scream, “Hey, guys, look at this, you could be making this instead of some guy who couldn’t even release a clone correctly! Let’s do this!”

That’s dreaming crazy dreams. This won’t persuade it to join mobile. It’s too married to hardware, too convinced that continuing to release new platforms and supporting them with the Zelda, Pokemon, and Mario are the only way to be profitable. It’s a bummer, really.

Nintendo or the Pokemon Company doesn’t seem to be too concerned with pulling Pokemon apps, by the way. There are more than a handful on the store, all unsanctioned, and from what we can tell, unchanged since their initial appearances. The chart positioning is ultimately going to get Apple’s attention, however. We expect Pokemon Yellow to disappear within hours of this posting.

Pokemon Yellow on Gameboy.

We gave this a download, and can happily report that it crashes out immediately after its splash screen crops up. Users in its reviews have reported that it crashes on every device under the sun, so please don’t even try this out.

We actually wouldn’t be too surprised to learn if the game’s code even had anything to it beyond that splash screen and a buggy bit of UI. It makes more sense, if you know that you’re going to get your app pulled, to spend as little time as possible on it. Why bother with more than a splash screen?

We’ll keep our eyes on Pokemon Yellow and the game’s developer, who has a blog right here and has a history of publishing broken apps pitched as clones, as evidenced by its publisher page on iTunes.

Again, though, don’t download this, or hey, even the other Pokemon app that cropped up recently. These people are preying on you, and when you download these blindly or in some silly hope that they’ll magically work, they win.

[source]

The clone conversation is getting pretty heated of late, so we thought we’d bring you a more chill take on cloning from a developer that has had its game ripped off more times than we care to count. Specifically, we wanted to point out what Mojang business head honcho Daniel Kaplan had to say about the swarm of Minecraft clones out there.

“As long as [cloners] don’t use anything we MADE, we don’t care,” Kaplan told Eurogamer in a chat the other afternoon when asked about possibly suing a cloner. “Like, would the Doom creators sue everybody who has done an FPS? Don’t think so,” he said, hopefully with a hrumph.

Minecraft gets ripped off in a pretty wild variety of ways. Some titles just take the look. Others just nab the specific crafting and building mechanics. Of course, there are other games out there that steal whole hog, while carefully adding the slightest touches in their code to differentiate the look.

That said, there’s a fine line between iteration and cloning. The Doom-to-FPS example Kaplan threw out there isn’t a good one; a lot of games built on what Doom did, sure, but most of those games brought something new to the genre.

“I’m really bored by the clones,” Kaplan said in the chat. “They don’t bring anything new to the table, which is really sad.”

Zynga and Glu Mobile recently released a total of three Tiny Tower [Free] clones between each other in the last couple of weeks. Tiny Tower creators, NimbleBit, and the game’s fans, are rightfully still outraged by these games. In the iOS universe, the last big pseudo-clone we saw was a poor attempt to capitalize on Temple Run’s [Free] success. That title was removed from the App Store by Apple.

[via Eurogamer]

[source]