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Worst of the Retro Rip-Offs
1up has a piece looking at some of the worst blatant rip-offs of classic games. By retooling old ideas and putting new labels on them, a developer can make a pretty penny at the cost of our childhood memories. From the article: "Space Invaders, right? Nope -- it's actually Space Fever, one of the first arcade games produced by Nintendo. Lest certain internet forums break out into a rash of OMG TAITO COPIED NINTENDO threads, I'll be very clear: it was Space Fever that was the ripoff. Much like how America was taken over by Pong and clones in the 1970s, a few years later, you couldn't swing a dead neko in Japan without hitting a Space Invaders machine. The fad was so prevalent that all sorts of imitation machines sprouted up."
How about a list of the best video game rip-offs ? Some ripoffs improved on the original considerably. For example, Tengen's unlicensed NES Tetris is much better than the official Nintendo version. Pole Position was copied endlessly, eventually spawning an entire genre of games. There were various ripoffs of Pac-Man, some inspired by the "Pac-Man is drugs craze", where Power pellets and "fruit" (now mostly mushrooms) produced strange side-effects in Pac-Man. Last but not least are all those hacked Street Fighter 2 arcade machines. Eventually you started seeing entirely new graphics added to the ROM, with bizarre new characters and moves, and many of these were way more fun to play than the original because you never knew what the hell was going to happen.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
If someone was to copy/redo that, I'd just die!
Of a drug overdose?