Tag: Zelda Clones

Even though currently “retro-style” games are a big deal, developers have been taking notes from their colleagues’ play books for about as long as games have been around. After all, Doki Doki Panic on the Famicom was close enough to Mario to be called Super Mario Bros 2 in the west. This week on ZD Top, we had our staff look through their game catalogue for their favorite Zelda-inspired games.

Zelda rip-offs, imitations, and “inspired-by” games are nothing new to the series’ fanbase, we see new ones emerge every day on a wide range of consoles and gaming outlets. This trend of pulling ideas from Zelda games has been going on since the dawn of the series, so YouTube personality Boku No Eruption compiled a list of his favorite 2-D Legend of Zelda clones in an engaging video review. He debated the merits of these Zelda “inspired” games; he gives…

Since we’re already out of chronology, I may as well leap past some of the older 8-bit Zelda clones for now and focus on a much more recent retro-styled 16-bit game created as freeware to be played on your PC. And if the picture to the left didn’t make it obvious enough, this game is clearly based not just on the Zelda series in general, but A Link to the Past specifically. This week we’ll be talking about the Zelda…

While I had said last week that my intention for this week was to return back to chronology of Zelda clones in roughly the order in which they were released, I was preparing for the next episode of a similar series (albeit a video one) on Zelda clones on my YouTube channel… and that episode was on the topic of The Legend of Spyro trilogy… so I decided to kill two Keese with one arrow and just use that research…

My intentions were to sort of follow the basic chronology of the Zelda clones, doing all the early 8 and 16-bit ones first and working my way up to the newer ones. But then Evoland happened. And while in many ways it is in an entirely different genre of video games (meta? Is that a genre?) it is absolutely a Zelda clone to point that it basically tells the technical history of Zelda (and by extension all action-adventure games) up…

Zelda clones. They get a bad rap. Sometimes deservedly so. As we discussed in our post last week, sometimes clones are made out of sheer love for our favorite series. Other times they are simply made to cash in on Nintendo’s ideas. One such clone, Neutopia, is the latter, and is one of the very first (but not the first) Zelda clones made. It shares so much in common with the original Legend of Zelda that it is shocking the…

Welcome, Dungeoneers, to this inaugural post for a new features series on Zelda clones! As many of you likely do not know, I am not new to this topic; I have a video series wherein I cover the same sort of topic on my YouTube channel. This text-based series will be a bit different in that rather than just rambling in a stream-of-conscious manner for seven minutes, it will be a bit more detailed and to-the-point with visual aids to…

Every gamer should experience Ōkami. That’s a given. In the six years since its release, this game has seen unprecedented critical acclaim. It’s often labeled a “sleeper,” but I won’t go that route; while it hasn’t pushed the kind of sales it unquestionably should have, a good number of gamers have seen this game in action and know why it’s so revered. With the impending release of the HD version of Okami on the PlayStation Network, it will soon be…

Zelda games are consistently some of the most innovative, engaging, and playable games in the industry. Earlier installments especially played a role in shaping the industry and exerted their influence at such a fundamental level that it’s hard to discern just how pervasive this influence is in games we play every day. There are some games, however, that freely wear their Zelda influence on their sleeves. Much as Doom clones were once a genre of their own before individual games…