Should game reviews mark down games for being unoriginal?

[equinox]

I’d say that Head Over Heels innovated massively on the concept given the two protagonists. It was far more puzzle based. Also, making the controls directional rather than rotational completely changed the game format for me. I just couldn’t get on with Alien 8.

Ultimate did directional controls, too. There's an option for this on the Knight Lore control menu.

[HEXdidnt]

Where do you draw the line with regards to a 'clone'?

That's basically where this topic came from: the review of MASK 3 unfairly dismissed it as a clone of Exolon, which it clearly isn't, it simply shares some - but not all - of its essential game mechanics, and adds some new mechanics. By most metrics, that alone means it can no longer be considered a 'clone'.

Is Match Point a clone of Pong?

No, but pong is an interpretation of tennis, just like Match Point

Is OutRun a clone of Pole Position?

I could honestly go either way on this: yes, in that it's a third-person 3D, against-the-clock, track-based driving game with scaling scenery. No, in that it's a single, continuous, branching track rather than a lap-based race on several enclosed-loop tracks. It might be truer to say that Sega Rally is a Pole Position clone because, aside from its presentation and the specifics of the track layouts, it's a racing game to the exactly the same basic template... albeit with the option to use manual gear changing.

Is every single fantasy text adventure simply a clone of Colossal Cave Adventure?

No, except those that are explicitly remakes of Colossal Cave Adventure (and there were several!)

You could say that ALL games are pretty much a clone of some other game with the rare exception of the likes of Deus Ex Machine, I of the Mask and a few others.

Believe it or not, that argument is made - sincerely, but mistakenly - quite often. There are some folks that insist every shoot 'em up is a clone of Space Invaders. This is clearly false, but it may be more reasonable to suggest that later shoot 'em ups may not have happened without Space Invaders (so, back to 'standing on the shoulders of giants').

[worcestersource]

Ultimate did directional controls, too. There's an option for this on the Knight Lore control menu.

On all Ultimate isometric games? Interesting, though. Maybe it was my wee brain that didn’t spot it or understand what the option meant but after Alien 8, I steered clear of the other isometric games.

I got HoH on the Magnificent Seven compilation and it came as a nice surprise. Actually, a brilliant surprise. I played it to death. I even tried making my own version for the Mac but failed terribly!

[ketmar]

tbh, i can't see anything wrong with something being a good clone of some original game. if it is at least as playable as the original, then hell yeah! give me more good things! i mean, new maps, new gfx, all that, but the core gameplay is the same… yeah, count me in! if new game adds some interesting twist, and it improves gameplay, then it is even better.

most platform games are barely original, but i love good platformers to death, so i could never understand that "oh noes, yet another JSW clone!" rants. of course, many such "clones" are inferior to the original, dull and boring. but if room design is good, hey, i have a big new adventure to enjoy! the same for SHMUPs. and so on.

that's also why i never really cared about reviewers opinions. sometimes used reviews to sort my "what to play next" list based on "this is uninspired clone of XXX" — "oh, well, then i'll definitely play it first!"

[AndyC]

Where do you draw the line with regards to a 'clone'? Is Match Point a clone of Pong? Is OutRun a clone of Pole Position? Is every single fantasy text adventure simply a clone of Colossal Cave Adventure? You could say that ALL games are pretty much a clone of some other game with the rare exception of the likes of Deus Ex Machine, I of the Mask and a few others.

It's subjective, of course, but then all reviews are. I just don't think it's wrong to say you're lowering the score you'd give something because it feels mostly derivative.

Ultimate did directional controls, too. There's an option for this on the Knight Lore control menu.

Isn't there something stupid about it though? Like it only works for the joystick? Something ridiculous like that.

[ketmar]

Isn't there something stupid about it though? Like it only works for the joystick? Something ridiculous like that.

inability to redefine keys, i think. why, oh why Ultimate didn't implemented that option?!

[uglifruit]

I don't think this question is limited to computer games.

Sequels (books, films, video games, board games) are often compared unfavourably and 'marked down' if they are too similar to the progenitor. Yet they may tangibly improve upon the original in small ways ... Objectively being 'better' but lacking the surprise and innovation that made the original a success. Iterative sequels can lead to us looking at, say, the Tony Hawk's Pro Skater series of games and trying to decipher - through 2023 eyes - which is best by reading the contemporary reviews written upon release.

Something that offers nothing especially new, but doing what it does really well, is difficult (at the time) to appreciate.

Thus every ZX Spectrum Game should be re-reviewed today. And this should be the definitive review (until a new game in the same genre is released, tomorrow).

[HEXdidnt]

I got HoH on the Magnificent Seven compilation and it came as a nice surprise. Actually, a brilliant surprise. I played it to death. I even tried making my own version for the Mac but failed terribly!

Going off at a tangent, but have you seen Colin Porch's work-in-progress sequel? He's exhibited it RetCon over the last couple of years but, as 'staff'. I've yet to have a good opportunity to chat to him about it. It looks good, from what I've seen, but I'm puzzled as to why he's chosen to keep the 'floor' black...

I've been trying to think up a HOH clone for the SAM, but using multiple, reconfigurable robots rather than two loosely-canid creatures. So, for example, one might offer flight/longer jumps as the 'feet' component or when working solo, and then repulsor blasts as the 'head', while another might be immune to certain ground-based electrical hazards as the 'feet' or working solo, but able to hack computer terminals as the 'head'. Another might be quicker as the 'feet', and able to climb walls as the 'head', and another might be slower-moving as the 'feet' but able to carry heavy items as the 'head'... that kind of thing.

[HEXdidnt]

I don't think this question is limited to computer games.
Sequels (books, films, video games, board games) are often compared unfavourably and 'marked down' if they are too similar to the progenitor.

Very true, and there's also that phenomenon where two different studios release a movie with essentially the same plot, often within a couple of weeks of each other. Dante's Peak/Volcano, White House Down/Olympus Has Fallen.

And then there's The Asylum - a studio whose raison d'être is to make (terrible) clones of big studio movies, all of which seem to be terrible. There were certainly videogame developers on the Speccy that seemed to produce nothing but budget clones of games from larger publishers...

[Morkin]

Head Over Heels is an interesting debate - I personally wouldn't have rated it anywhere nearly as highly as Crash did.

It is an originality issue for me. Knight Lore was released in 1984, that's a whole 3 years earlier. Since its release we'd seen Alien 8, and countless other similarly-styled games from other software houses whose programmers were clearly heavily influenced by it. I remember raising an eyebrow at Batman being Crash-smashed, and both eyebrows at HoH getting 97% (IIRC). I did play HoH at the time and couldn't quite grasp what the fuss was about. I get that there are other gameplay elements but it felt a bit same-y for me, just because of its graphics style.

I suppose if you ignore the date-of-release and just line a bunch of these games next to each other, I'd probably consider it differently. Or if I'd got my Speccy after 1985. After all, Knight Lore is ultimately (ho ho) a fairly repetitive collect-em-up when it comes to gameplay. But I think you have to consider the date things are released, and what's come before it.

[worcestersource]

Going off at a tangent, but have you seen Colin Porch's work-in-progress sequel? He's exhibited it RetCon over the last couple of years but, as 'staff'. I've yet to have a good opportunity to chat to him about it. It looks good, from what I've seen, but I'm puzzled as to why he's chosen to keep the 'floor' black...

I've been trying to think up a HOH clone for the SAM, but using multiple, reconfigurable robots rather than two loosely-canid creatures. So, for example, one might offer flight/longer jumps as the 'feet' component or when working solo, and then repulsor blasts as the 'head', while another might be immune to certain ground-based electrical hazards as the 'feet' or working solo, but able to hack computer terminals as the 'head'. Another might be quicker as the 'feet', and able to climb walls as the 'head', and another might be slower-moving as the 'feet' but able to carry heavy items as the 'head'... that kind of thing.

I gather HoH’s working title was Foot and Mouth. Maybe that could work?

I’ll check out the sequel if I can find it.

[Wall_Axe]

I played those iso games and probably enjoyed head over heels the most.
The prince Charles puzzle was fun.
Although I didn't get far in any iso game lol.

I didn't like batman cos it seemed like just another iso game.
I didn't particularly like the knightlore and other ultimate games.

[ketmar]

iso/pc offtopic

i really miss good isometric arcade adventures on PC. with old-style pixelart and such. preferably in 16 EGA colors. ;-)

[Sokurah]

Head Over Heels is an interesting debate - I personally wouldn't have rated it anywhere nearly as highly as Crash did.

I agree with you. Well, I will rate HoH very highly due to its technical execution - it's big, has lots of rooms and creatures and innovative gameplay ... but I just never enjoyed playing it much. It looks amazing, but I think it's too big and too boring (imho).

I enjoyed Monster Max on the Gameboy a lot more (also a Ritman & Drummond collaboration, in case you didn't know). Still big, but the levels were smaller and more puzzle-like, but although I found an infinite lives poke for that version and played the hell out of it (on an emulator, although I have both a GB and the cartridge) ... I still got bored with it before I completed all the levels. I think I was close to the end though. Hmm, perhaps I should pick it up again and see if I can finally finish it.

[SteveSmith]

Isn't "isometric" just another viewpoint, like 2D side-view, 3D first-person etc.? By saying "HoH is just a clone of Knightlore", doesn't that make any 2D platformer a clone of whatever the very first 2D platform game was. Is there any other way to do an isometric game where you control a walking character? Have I finished asking questions now?

[AndyC]

Exactly. HoH and Batman both play very differently from, say Knightlore or Sweevo's World. The Ritman games are much more progression focused, once you learn how to "get past" a certain bit you've got closer to your goal. Whereas the others have a lot more back tracking as they're mostly based on finding things in a maze.

[Timmy]

I guess the good news is, if you think that everything is unoriginal, then you're like a reviewer. All reviewers do this.

In fact, all reviewers will try their utmost best to compare any game to at least a random game, even if they are apples and oranges. And they say "it's like that other game but..."

Not only because they have to give a score of a game. But also because they need to explain to random readers how the game works. "Alternative key controls? It's like regular games' QAOPM but now all those keys are in a row on your keyboard instead."

So if you think like a reviewer then you will think nothing is original, and even if something comes up, you can't because of the mindset.

Fortunately for the question in this thread it's not a problem, when all the games are unoriginal then every single game has the same markdowns.

And this would then be a very short discussion and thread.

[equinox]

Isn't "isometric" just another viewpoint, like 2D side-view, 3D first-person etc.? By saying "HoH is just a clone of Knightlore", doesn't that make any 2D platformer a clone of whatever the very first 2D platform game was.

Not really. If you invented the engine independently, on the Moon, without seeing any other game: that would be original (and I doubt it would look the same as Knight Lore: you might have tall characters, instead of squat "1x1"s, or you might have scrolling, or --).
The general idea of "isometric game presented at certain angles on a grid, with characters fitting exactly into one 3D grid cell, and doorways 50% along the wall" -- come on, this was clearly someone who saw it and copied it. Head Over Heels is absolutely unarguably based on the Ultimate games (as I said, i wouldn't personally call it a clone, but it's closely based...)

Rather more interesting to look at Fairlight, which again has some basis in the earlier attempts (I suppose) but looks and feels quite different. It's not presented to you in the Ultimate or HoH visual scale, where you get fat bricks and doors in the middle (did we ever have 2 doors in the same wall? probably not, but that would suggest originality too) -- rather, it's a castle with tall characters (not just squat 1x1 cell!) and doors all over the place. It looks and feels like somebody thought "try new isometric" rather than "copy existing isometric".
[My dad did CAD, and it strikes me that maybe "isometric" refers to specific angles and this needs a different term; but it doesn't matter, as the idea is still: side-on 3D game with depth and one thing behind another. This is the point: were games created independently, or by copying ideas?]



The traditional Ultimate-style isometric can be seen in a zillion games across many, many years, right down to (at the end of Speccy's lifetime) Escape from the Planet of the Robot Monsters, and that stupid Indiana Jones game that was one of the last commercial Speccy releases ever. (Of course EFTPOTRM was an arcade game first, and I'm not sure where they would have got the layout idea exactly — quite possibly an 8-bit, but probably not a Speccy — so anybody with historical info may prove me wrong on that one. Actually very unusual to do that kind of 3D on an arcade machine.)

[HEXdidnt]

I agree with you. Well, I will rate HoH very highly due to its technical execution - it's big, has lots of rooms and creatures and innovative gameplay ... but I just never enjoyed playing it much. It looks amazing, but I think it's too big and too boring (imho).

I'm very much inclined to agree on this particular point... There comes a point where a vast, sprawling map takes away from the effectiveness and enjoyment of the game.

You spend ages walking through rooms that serve no purpose other than to increase the distance between A and B (and, often, straight back to A again), many of them without enemies, hazards or important items to obtain. At that point, the size of the map just becomes padding... And considering the incessant beep-boop sound effect of the player characters' movement, that could quickly become maddening.

Isn't "isometric" just another viewpoint, like 2D side-view, 3D first-person etc.? By saying "HoH is just a clone of Knightlore", doesn't that make any 2D platformer a clone of whatever the very first 2D platform game was. Is there any other way to do an isometric game where you control a walking character?

There are certainly some who would insist that, yes, all 2D platformers are clones of whichever came first... but it's only true at the most fundamental level. As for how to do isometric games, there's the 'room-based' approach, where you walk through single-screen locations (Knight Lore, the Ritman/Drummond games) and those where you're traversing a continuous, scrolling 'landscape' (The Great Escape, Where Time Stood Still, Gunfright).

[equinox]

I guess the good news is, if you think that everything is unoriginal, then you're like a reviewer. All reviewers do this.
In fact, all reviewers will try their utmost best to compare any game to at least a random game, even if they are apples and oranges. And they say "it's like that other game but..." [...I snipped the rest, but read it...]

Huh, this is extremely perceptive.
And perhaps makes us think about film reviews (well, "Girls in Space" is just like the western "Cowboys in the Desert", except...)
And the idea that there are only seven distinct literary plots (or whatever...)

Most PRE-1985 (??) video games cannot be said to have a plot because it was enough to fill the memory with aliens and zapping. So it's quite reasonable (NO) it's quite plausible -- to say "oh, Bomberman is like Pac-Man, but you can blow up your enemies" (even though the bombing makes it totally different -- the first thing you saw was the maze, and you recognised the maze). This is different from a 2023 game where potentially you could start with a detailed story (cut-scenes) and almost fill in gameplay as required — if you had to.

I don't think that's an issue around game reviewing though, or even journalism. Just the fact that the human brain, evolved over thousands of years, is good at recognising patterns, and tries to understand new stimuli in terms of known patterns.

P.S. I hope SteveSmith doesn't mind that his thread ("can we mark down unoriginal games") turned into "what is a clone" — lol — it is very interesting. And these are innately related topics (the so-called "clone" is the epitome of unoriginality, right?). And unlike the online chat you can't immediately kick people into another channel.

[HEXdidnt]

Most PRE-1985 (??) video games cannot be said to have a plot because it was enough to fill the memory with aliens and zapping. So it's quite reasonable (NO) it's quite plausible -- to say "oh, Bomberman is like Pac-Man, but you can blow up your enemies" (even though the bombing makes it totally different -- the first thing you saw was the maze, and you recognised the maze). This is different from a 2023 game where potentially you could start with a detailed story (cut-scenes) and almost fill in gameplay as required — if you had to.

I think, if nothing else, a lot of Japanese developers would take exception to the idea that even pre '85 games hadn't a plot, even coin-op arcade games. I'd also suggest that the people who wrote the inlay text for Spectrum games of that era would disagree. Certainly, the plot was largely irrelevant, since the game itself would do little to convey or advance the plot, and the graphics often bore little resemblance to what the unsuspecting player might have imagined after seeing the cover art and reading through the inlay... but the plots were usually there, to one degree or another.

[ketmar]

"Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."

;-)

[AndyC]

You spend ages walking through rooms that serve no purpose other than to increase the distance between A and B (and, often, straight back to A again), many of them without enemies, hazards or important items to obtain. At that point, the size of the map just becomes padding... And considering the incessant beep-boop sound effect of the player characters' movement, that could quickly become maddening.

For Knightlore, sure.

But Head Over Heels isn't like that at all. With the exception of the bit in the moonbase where you can choose to go liberate one or more planets, it's incredibly linear. It gives the clever impression of not being so, in a few points where you cross Head and Heels separate paths or where you pick up one of the items then backtrack a couple of screens to pass something you previously couldn't, but for the most part it's go into the next screen, solve it, move on. You're being guided along a fixed path, even if you're given the impression you could wander anywhere.

[equinox]

I think, if nothing else, a lot of Japanese developers would take exception to the idea that even pre '85 games hadn't a plot, even coin-op arcade games. I'd also suggest that the people who wrote the inlay text for Spectrum games of that era would disagree. Certainly, the plot was largely irrelevant, since the game itself would do little to convey or advance the plot, and the graphics often bore little resemblance to what the unsuspecting player might have imagined after seeing the cover art and reading through the inlay... but the plots were usually there, to one degree or another.

Well, I knew I was over-simplifying when I wrote it... and I can't say I know much about Japan — even today, there are whole genres like dating games that have got very limited exposure in Western markets, and it would be a joke to suggest they could have existed on a Speccy. (Actually, is there any dating sim on a Speccy? They are pretty damn easy to code. And we have enough bad text adventures. I can only imagine the problem is that all Speccy users are old beardy men drinking a pint of craft, and you really want teenage girls who haven't quite decided their sexuality yet. Ohh anime images help too.)

"Inlay text" is a whole other story. Firstly, I think the "plot" and especially the inlay graphics were sometimes added as an afterthought, when it was realised "we got something we can sell". (I've also seen Western total re-writes of Japanese ideas, like "Mega Twins" [turned cuties into aggressive Bart Simpsons] ... ) Secondly...
All right, you win, there were intelligent '80s games. But -- a limited subset of them and if you happened to be spending that time in Asia, you may have seen better.

Regarding your comment that players will "imply" a plot when it isn't there: I mean: we could get all kinds of Foucauldian, couldn't we. What does it REALLY MEAN when we knock an ape off the scaffolding, that's probably very racist. And if you are a guy/girl selling cheap games in 1982, and someone gives you a Pac-Man clone, you are not going to write on the tape "this is Pac-Man", you are going to invent some shizz like — well, Hungry Horace, haha. if you had Japan game production experiences in the 80s that would of course be fascinating to hear. (We got the Hudson Soft stuff like Bomberman [stupidly localised to "Eric and the Floaters"] and Stop the ITA Express...)

tldr: I am speculating, maybe you were in the industry at the time, tell us what you know from that time. <3

[equinox]

For Knightlore, sure.
But Head Over Heels isn't like that at all. With the exception of the bit in the moonbase where you can choose to go liberate one or more planets, it's incredibly linear. It gives the clever impression of not being so, in a few points where you cross Head and Heels separate paths or where you pick up one of the items then backtrack a couple of screens to pass something you previously couldn't, but for the most part it's go into the next screen, solve it, move on. You're being guided along a fixed path, even if you're given the impression you could wander anywhere.

One more: Knight Lore had that brilliant concept of dumping you in a random room when you started. In other words, if you had trouble with the north or south room, it didn't matter, 'cause sometimes you would get a place where you didn't have to touch that room. And if you were trying to make a map, what a godsend. (How does this compare with the "roguelike"? Just a thought.)

Won't disagree with AndyC because I don't boast to that level of gaming experience :p His name is not new to me. I don't play modern games very much but yeah even equinox can spot linearity when it's there. I hope. AC I/we would appreciate more info on game design though. We know you were moonlighting for the Dreamcast.