Has anyone found any clones or similar games that are worth talking about?
The first one I remember finding is Ganbare Natsuki San (
video), which I think I played on
PSP homebrew initially and later on
Xbox Live Indie Games, where it should still be available on all regions. It's also available free for
PC and there are links to versions for the Pandora and GamePark2X open-platform handhelds on the
developer's homepage. It's a fun little game - nothing like as deep as Umihara Kawase but worth a look. It seems to have seen
somewhat intense speedrunning on SDA (you know people are getting serious when they start talking about "saving a few frames").
I also dug these up recently:
http://www.papota.jp/uni.htmldownloadhttp://www.geocities.jp/xaxxi0529/meril/README.htmldownloadvideoBut I can't get either to work on Win7/64.
I also remember that the team behind
N+ were working on a game called Robotology, and name-dropped Umihara Kawase a bunch of times in interviews, but after a while they went quiet on the topic and that was ~5 years ago now so I'm guessing it's not going to see the light of day.
I've given most of the Bionic Commando games a shot at one point or another, but the swinging is nothing like as nuanced as Umihara Kawase, and always felt secondary to the shooting anyway.
Any others?