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A Ridiculous Fishing story: Reel talk from Vlambeer and Gamenauts
While Super Crate Box developer Vlambeer was preparing to announce an iPhone version of its first game, the browser-based Radical Fishing, it discovered that the game was almost on the App Store. Sort of. A game called Ninja Fishing, published by Gamenauts, bears an unmistakeable resemblance to Radical Fishing. In both games, you start by controlling a hook falling through the water, dodging fish on the way down. You then pull the hook up at high speed, grabbing as many fish as you can. Then you yank the fish out of the water and destroy as many as you can before they splash back down. The art is different, and there are some tweaks, but the two games are, at the very least, closely related.
IGF chair continues campaign against game cloning
Independent Games Festival chairman Brandon Boyer is quite unhappy with Gamenaut's iOS title Ninja Fishing, a game that's more than "inspired" by indie studio Vlambeer's Flash game Radical Fishing. Vlambeer was secretly in the process of porting the game to iOS when the studio was blindsided by the clone. "I have a chart I'm almost done with. This is not inspiration," Boyer told us at GDC Europe today when he brought up the dilemma. "The things [Radical Fishing] doesn't have is ... Fruit Ninja. Radical Fishing didn't have Fruit Ninja. [Ninja Fishing] has everything else, except they added Fruit Ninja to one of the parts." Boyer continued, "The progress, the structure, the power-ups. The mechanics, the three-part design. It's just Radical Fishing. I think most people in the indie circle haven't played Ninja Fishing, which is good, but I think because of that they don't quite understand how blatant it was. Once you lay it out side by side [a project that Boyer will publish soon on an excel sheet he showed us], it's like 'Oh yeah, they just 100 percent ripped that off.'" When asked what the difference is between "inspiration" and theft, Boyer said, "It's like the thing about pornography, you know it when you see it." If this type of blatant cloning sounds familiar, it's because it is. In February, the story of The Blocks Cometh theft made the rounds. Indies being ripped off by indies isn't the only type of iOS cloning going on, either. It can also happen with major publishers, as was the case with Capcom's MaXplosion, a blatant clone of Twisted Pixel's high-profile 'Splosion Man. [Image credit: Official GDC]
Ninja Fishing for iPhone looks eerily similar to popular Flash title
Ninja Fishing is a new title coming on the App Store that combines Fruit Ninja's hacking and slashing mechanic with a fishing game, where you throw fish up in the air and then chop them down for fun and profit. Unfortunately, quite a few people have noticed a resemblance to a Flash game called Radical Fishing, which itself was already being made into an App Store title called Ridiculous Fishing. Sure enough, the original Flash title has you fishing and then shooting fish out of the air, and the planned iOS title plays generally the same way, it would seem. So what's the deal? Certainly there is a resemblance between the two games, even if the swipe-to-slash mechanic is a new addition. And this obviously isn't the first time we've seen game mechanics from another medium apparently ripped off for an iOS title. But the developers of Ridiculous Fishing seem to be taking it in stride anyway -- they're still working hard on their iOS title, and they say it'll have lots of cool new ideas and "an amazing visual style" as well. Gamenauts, the company that released Ninja Fishing, says that the title was inspired by the original Flash game, and that credit will be given, though they weren't specific on how that will be done. Mistakes were made, it seems, but given how many titles are available on the iOS store, it's probably not too surprising that we've got a few overlaps.
