First post, by MrFlibble
- Rank
- Oldbie
A while ago, when I took interest in what may be broadly termed open source game remakes, it did not become immediately apparent to me that some of the projects try to stay very close not only to the mechanics of the game that is being remade, but also build upon the original art style of the source material.
Consider two Lemmings clones, Pingus and Lix. The former takes the rather usual route in Linux gaming of reimagining the game with Tux and Co. as the main characters, while the latter tries to replicate the look of the original Lemmings, with characters and props that are distinctly different yet very similar to Lemmings.
Below is a quick (and generally unsorted) list of the projects that I know of which also follow this path of remaking a game as closely as possible. This does not include anything that uses original art from the games that are being remade.
- Advanced Strategic Command - Battle Isle series
- Widelands - The Settlers II
- Dave Gnukem - Duke Nukem
- Open Surge - Sonic the Hedgehog (can't tell how close, I'm very unfamiliar with Sonic titles)
- LordsAWar! - Warlords II Deluxe
- OpenTTD - Transport Tycoon Deluxe (engine recreation with a libre data set)
- Wyrmsun - Warcraft II (many gameplay changes but graphics try to mimic Blizzard style)
- Haxima - Ultima series
- FreeCiv - Sid Meier's Civilization (visuals resembling the first and second game were used during different stages of development)
- C-evo - Sid Meier's Civilization II (many gameplay changes)
- Fame - Castle of the Winds
- Lincity - SimCity
- BtBuilder - Bard's Tale Construction Set
- Open General - Panzer General II
- Panzer Marshal - Panzer General II (I think both PG2 clones use libre graphics but not sure)
- Freedoom - Doom (libre data set for the open source engine; many textures in the WADs have this "similar but different" look when compared to Doom's counterparts)
- LibreQuake - Quake
This is not limited to FOSS titles of course. Recently I found an old game by Johan Peitz (of the Happyland Adventures fame) called Alien Assault II which is pretty much a small Alien Breed clone for DOS (get it here). And there's Super Angelo which I guess needs no explanation (based on an earlier Mario clone by the same author).
Ultima RPGs were cloned pretty heavily, not in the least because of the rather simple visual style. Kingdom of Syree, Excelsior and the Ultizurk titles are worth mentioning among others.
A few more non-FOSS projects:
- Palm Kingdoms 2 - Heroes of Might and Magic II clone, initially for handheld devices (I think it uses some modified NWC graphics)
- Priority: Survive is a small RTS project with very StarCraft-ish visuals and gameplay
- a commercial game onEscapee imitated the style of Flashback and Another World
- a very neat Civilization clone was developed for Amiga and Windows called Great Nations but sadly never completed.
- Planet Cloudius IX is based on an engine recreation of Commander Keen IV-VI and is essentially a Keen fangame, but with custom art and unrelated characters/storyline
If you know more games of the kind described above, please let me know! The main idea is that the art style/visual presentation is very similar to source material, not only gameplay.
