‘If you like Mario surly (sic) you will like Ricky’
Best get it soon, though
Mario is pretty well unarguably the most successful side-scrolling platform game series in history.
The problem is, it belongs to Nintendo, and there’s about as much chance of it legally appearing on another company’s hardware as there is of Sheikh Osama bin Laden appearing as a judge on Strictly Come Dancing.
Back in the 1990s, a blatant knock off called Great Giana Sisters hit the shelves, but Nintendo cried foul and the game went underground (though it reappeared quietly years later on mobile and, surprisingly, on DS.)
Nabil Chatbi’s Ricky has apparently been around since July, so it’s doing pretty well, but we can’t help but fear for its future should Nintendo take an interest.
The game doesn’t play particularly like Mario. There’s no inertia, for a start, and you can’t duck. And going on initial impressions it’s much, much worse. But many of the visual elements are identical - most notably the torpedo-shaped hills in the background and the utterly blatant mushroom motif.
Ricky himself doesn’t look much like Mario, you may be interested to know - he looks like Kirby – but the game’s resemblance to Nintendo’s series is fairly striking otherwise.
According to the App Store description, Ricky is ‘ON SALE FOR A LIMITED TIME’. The author may be more right than he knows.
