Let's Play: Indie Game Minecraft Clones
Attack of the clones
CastleMiner Z and CastleMiner were Xbox Live's two bestselling Indie Games of last year. Both bear a striking resemblance to sandbox blockbuster Minecraft. We put them and more of the marketplace's Minecraft clones up against the Outside Xbox buzzer test in the video above. The full list of games featured is below.
If you weren't aware of all the Minecraft cloning going on, here's the situation in movie metaphors. If Minecraft were ace bounty hunter Jango Fett, Xbox Live's Indie Games would be the alien cloning facility churning out duplicates from his genetic template. The Indie Games catalogue is full of games with "Mine" and "Miner" in their titles that are dead ringers for Mojang's blockbusting sandbox game.
But as with Multiplicity's many Michael Keatons, cloning often creates wonky copies of the original. While some of the Minecraft clones are competent ripoffs with more guns, zombies or Xbox Live avatars, others are twitching abominations of XNA code. You'll find the full spectrum of clone quality in the video, which features:
Fortress Wars
CastleMiner Z
Miner of Duty
CastleMiner
Miner4Ever
Red Tie Miner (much less a clone, much more a 2D platformer with mining in it)
For videos on the real deal, why not watch us discover a Minecraft Nether Fortress or breed Minecraft animal babies?
About the author
Jane Douglas
Jane is co-editor at Outside Xbox, where she writes words and makes videos. She enjoys dialogue trees.
