Most Egregious Videogame Ripoffs

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Most Egregious Videogame Ripoffs
If you can’t beat em, copy them exactly.

By Scott Sharkey

It’s a touchy thing, calling something a ripoff. In fact, ’round these parts it’s practically begging for a libel suit. One man’s ripoff is another’s homage, after all, and today’s “clone” is tomorrow’s genre. It’s a phenomenon that’s nicely illustrated by this pretty little graph on Wikipedia.

Games that have been pretty unambiguously inspired by other titles are pretty thick on the ground. I’ll be cheerfully skipping over stuff like Fighter’s History and Symphony of the Night and going straight to the games we had to squint at to be sure they weren’t something else.

Hangly Man
<!– System: Wii | Release Date: 2009 | Publisher: Ubisoft –>

Hangly Man

Hangly-Man stands out from the immense crowd of 80s arcade clones by virtue of the dirty sounding name and the fact that it’s almost identical to Pac Man save for the maze occasionally turning invisible. I can’t imagine anyone looking at Pac Man and putting that on a list of ways in which it could be improved. The maze thing, I mean. The title is, in fact, awesome. Supposedly somebody in Japan was really hazy on how to correctly spell “hungry,” and it’s a source of endless disappointment to me that the new word never gained wider traction. Maybe it’ll catch on if we all start declaring how hangly we’re feeling whenever we go to lunch. Join me! This is your chance to be at the forefront of the world’s most irrelevant culture-changing movement!

Barmy Burgers
<!– System: Wii | Release Date: 2009 | Publisher: Ubisoft –>

Barmy Burgers


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