Company
It was really only a matter of time that the winning formula of Infinite Interactive's Puzzle Quest was duplicated by another games developer. Kotaku reports that Legacy Interactive and Paramount have done the deed utilising a license of Lindsay Lohan movie "Mean Girls" and making a more or less shameless clone of Infinite Interactive's outstanding puzzle RPG hybrid game.
Kotaku describes the elements that were substituted - "jewel matching for shoes, lipstick and, err, jewel matching" and "swapping out of spells and incantations for 'rumours, pranks and putdowns'". Who needs new ideas anyway!
Oh god. Sounds aweful.
Oh god. Sounds aweful.
I don't know about aweful
If they're ripping off the gameplay of Puzzle Quest, then it's most likely going to be pretty damn fun. Check out the Kotaku comments, there are more than a few Puzzle Quest fans interested in it.
I wonder if this game has perked the interest of Steve F. and the team since it's their formula aimed at another whole market. It would certainly be an interesting direction to go, and who knows, it might be one worth pursuing. We'll have to see how much success this game achieves.
It's more of a ripoff then
It's more of a ripoff then Infinite's own puzzle quest derived games. I think there might be a cause for a little bit of trademark/copyright breach there.
trademark/copyright breach
Dunno how successful litigation would be, and it's somewhat frowned upon in the games industry since games have reached a state where they borrow elements from many previous games. In the early days of gaming, it was quite more common though. Nintendo was and still is very protective of their IP, and my hazy memory recalls some court cases involving some of the real early games like Space Invaders and Pacman.
These days, you don't hear much of companies suing others because of 'likeness' like Nintendo did with Super Mario Bros etc. However, there was that one fairly recent case of the Geometry Wars developers shutting down a free-to-download PC clone because it resembled too closely to the look and feel of Geometry Wars. I guess asteroids + retro glowing vector art is copyrighted :/
Good idea - bad implementation
The puzzle Quest model is very cool and could be applied to many other games.
Mean Girls though....
I guess whatever floats your boat.
Also Souri, check out your main page on TSumea in Firefox, there are some formatting errors.
Puzzles are Cool
Hey guys,
Had a good laugh when this did the rounds of our office yesterday morning :-)
Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery as they say, and every time someone calls this a "Puzzle Quest Clone", well it's a bit of free advertising for an Australian product, and that's alright by me!
But just as every RTS is in some way a clone of the first RTS, remember that every RTS is not created equal in the fun department. In EVERY genre it's all about the execution & polish of the game. If these guys get it right - good luck to them, the world will have another fun game - we might even learn a few things for Puzzle Quest 2 (that's not an official announcement by the way!)
Cheers
-Steve Fawkner
Sorry Steve :) We definately
Sorry Steve :) We definately will be looking out on the shelves for Puzzle Quest 2 in the near future :)
Aka its a bit of a no brainer you guys will be bringing one out based on the success of the first. :)