Cloning Clyde - Xbox Live Arcade

So, you wake up in a research lab wearing only a hospital gown (complete with revealing back-slit)... of course the first thing you're going to want to do is push all the buttons you can see, right? While this activity might not seem like such a good idea in real life, Cloning Clyde approaches the ageless cloning question with a silly sense of humor that encourages such reckless behavior. Clyde is trapped in a cloning lab, and it's up to you to help him, and all the copies he can make of himself, get out in one piece (though that piece may be spliced with any number of other creatures).

This game takes its cues from classic console games like Lemmings, only it brings things into real-time - so rather than tell your Clyde copies where to go, you actually switch between them and move them yourself. In a scientific research facility packed with dangerous mechanisms and gene splicing devices, there are plenty of knobs to twist and pressure plates to jump on, and the results range from shocking to incendiary to door-opening. Occasionally, Clyde'll run into a gene splicing machine that can combine his DNA with that of some helpless little critter like a chicken, sheep, or (our favorite) monkey. These hapless beasties give up their genetic code in order to add new and freakish powers to the creepy Clyde.

While Cloning Clyde may not be the deepest game on the 360, it's pretty rich for an Xbox Live Arcade title and delivered a number of cheesy chuckles in the short time we spent with it. It's clear that the creators of Cloning Clyde have a good handle on what works with a casual game (they also made Outpost Kaloki X) and it's a snap to pick up and pass a level in just a few minutes... the trick is putting it back down again.