Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style
Imagine the world of mobile gaming as a fairytale land. At its heart, a sunlit castle surrounded by glittering fields. Happy peasants, singing birds, princesses dancing barefoot with talking animals and challenging them to a round of Words With Friends... Just heavenly, right? Then look to the south of all that, towards a forest black as night and barbed with gnarled old trees, where wicked witches lure children into their cottages with the promise of something called "Candy Crunch Story". That's the world that new blog I Want A Clone will show you, and it's not pretty.
The popularity and bite-sized format of iOS and Android software allows developers to take risks and experiment with things that would otherwise be too risky to make, and the fact that consumer expectations are different on mobile platforms means that even the most bizarre and unlikely games can become overnight sensations. This promising environment has also created an epidemic of game cloning, where some developers are more interested in making multiple versions of the same app (even if that app isn't theirs in the first place) than they are in innovating.
I Want a Clone showcases a mix of some of the most brazenly unoriginal games in the App Store, as well as quite a few examples of developers soliciting programmers to make "a game exactly like x, but with a pig instead of a bird". It's awful, it's shameless... And it's actually pretty hilarious, too. I mean come on, "Candy Crush Game"? Please. Check I Want A Clone out for yourself here.
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