The Maroon Witch. Thor with an ‘N’ at the end. Miss Marvellous. Rabid Raccoon and… Grout. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry at AMZGame’s Tiny Mighty Heroes Unite, so I do a little of both.
The creator of the sort of games you see advertised in those tiny Facebook ad boxes (League of Angels, anyone?), AMZGame is, as far as I can tell, a Chinese developer of online browser-based fare that obviously likes to play it fast and loose with intellectual property rights.
Tiny Might Heroes Unite is a game I kept seeing in those little Facebook ads, but I didn’t take the plunge until earlier today, when a reader named Danilo pointed me towards several YouTube vids about the free-to-play browser title with the subject line “Copyright infringements everywhere.”
China doesn’t seem to care much about copyrights, or at least not enough to modify the obvious Marvel (and one DC) characters more than the tiniest bit. All the men are chubby. All the women are winsome. The names have been mostly changed to protect the lazy.
Winter Soldier becomes Winter Warrior.
Blade, vampire hunter is now the entire Sword, hilt and all.
Sentry is Sentri, which is entirely different who says it’s not.
And Sabertooth becomes…
Well I guess he’s just Sabertooth.
By far my favourite renaming however, goes to that tricksy Norse god of mischief…
La Cross. It’s perfect. I can just hear Thorn shouting his name angrily at the heavens as the trickster runs away, his brother’s sporting balls held fast in the horns of his helmet. By far my favourite character from the Avengers movies.
Tiny Mighty Heroes Unite is one of those team-building role-playing sort of games where you assemble a group of heroes and send them off to fight mostly automatically through repetitive stages, collecting the loot needed to upgrade them along the way. It’s pretty standard pay-to-win nonsense.
I played it for about 15 minutes. Skip to the 11 minute mark to listen to me choke as I read through the hero list for the first time.
How can a game like Tiny Mighty Heroes Unite exist in a world where Marvel Comics, a company famously protective about its brand, is owned by Disney, a company that will kill you?
It’s the miracle of shady Chinese game development. For ages there was a browser-based game featuring characters that were obviously tiny versions of Naruto and friends. Pockie Wars? That was it. It’s technically still going in Russia, and it apparently has a sequel even. So it’s not just China. Large countries in Asia just do not give a damn.
Comments
5 responses to “The Mightiest Marvel Comics Rip-Off Of Them All”
Hahaha That is amazing!
I may even give it a try…. then again maybe not =P
It’s hilarious the male characters are all overweight slobs and the females are all hypersexualised high-class hookers. And I think I heard the theme from Ironman 1. heheheh!
Makes me wonder if they’re trying to get away with it on parody grounds
I’m actually pretty impressed by the chibi art. It looks like they’ve hired a really decent artist who knows the characters pretty well and given them a brief of, “Create Marvel character ripoffs with portly dudes and cheesecake chicks.”
If those ripoffs were sitting on a Deviantart page insead of a ripoff mobile game, we’d probably be seeing a different article with a handful of the best and a link to the page, maybe some headline like, “What happens when there’s too much cheesecake in the Marvel Universe.”
As long the developer not making any profits, its all good. Wait they’re?