Some new game called Forged by Chaos, that REALLY rips off the Games Workshop line:
http://www.forgedbychaos.com/backstory.html
More than just the fluff… writing too…
http://forums.penny-arcade.com/showthre … ost6055438
Seriously. Gonna be interesting to see how the lawyers rip this one apart. 
OMGWTFBBQPWND
Seriously. There isn’t much more epic than this EPIC FAIL. Why would you do something so readily discernable?
Even if they are sued, they can go trough that without a problem;
Remember things like the snes game “fighter history” or even “the lion king” movie… http://members.jcom.home.ne.jp/y-asada/leo2.html
Sometimes the law is blind, deaf and stupid.
Heh, this thing looks like it’s becoming popular in the gaming industry.
In June, the adventure game Limbo of the Lost was pulled off of shelves by its publisher once it was discovered that the scenes in the game were direct rips from other games, including Oblivion, the Thief series, UT2004, Morrowind and a whole slew of others. The developer basically took screenshots from those games and dropped them into their game as backgrounds.
http://forum.gamesradar.com/viewtopic.php?t=120121
Kinda sad when you have to rip material off other games. I’m hoping this kind of blatant theft isn’t going to become commonplace in the computer gaming market, in order to save money and time actually developing assets, either story or graphics.
Well, it’s hardly going to be a standard practice when anyone caught at it faces such a shitstorm.
The problem with LotL was that it was made by three guys in a pub, with no budget and no experience in game development.
When a typical mainstream game has millions of dollars to spend on art and you have zero, do you
A. Draw all the art yourself, knowing it will look like crap
B. Design a game in a minimalist style and explain that it’s an Artistic Choice that your characters are just flat-color geometric shapes
C. Search for as much free / cheap clip art as you can find and shake it all up
D. Attempt to find an artist who will work for ‘a percentage of sales’ (Good luck.)
E. Trace over art from another game and rework it into your own style and hope no one notices
F. Steal someone else’s art completely and hope no one notices
They did not make the wisest choice. But you’ll find all sorts of variations on these attempts in the hobbyist category, because decent game art costs money. Unless you’re lucky enough to be or know an artist, or you have some funds, your first game from scratch is going to have to deal with these issues.
But this doesn’t have much relation to the mainstream gaming industry, because those guys were never part of it.
It doesn’t justify what LotL did though…
I think some of the problem, is that would-be game designers see the market as a “get rich” career. Thinking like that will pretty much guarantee failure. One of the things I used to tell new employees during indoctrination was that if they expected to become famous or earn more than $40K a year, they could leave the building. Depending on the particular project I’m on, game designing is either a job I enjoy or a free time hobby.
I know it sucks to hear this, but successful designers can do two or more of the following tasks: artwork, game theory, level design, music, and programming. Note I DO NOT mention conceptual design or script writing. That’s because everyone in the building ¬ñ even the janitor ¬ñ could provide this. That is to say: everyone has a game idea. EVERYONE. Some people, like Daisuke Ishiwatari and Shigeru Miyamoto, can do all of these tasks. Such men and women are truly gifted.
I cannot stress that today’s game industry is elitist and dog-eat-dog. That’s because it’s a multibillion dollar enterprise that rivals Hollywood. There’s a nasty hidden world of backdoor deals and politics, that game magazine and electronic expos don’t show. You are either one of the best or you are incredibly creative with minimal resources - there’s no room for “average” contributions. Is it unfair? Most certainly. Ugly and backstabbing too. But this is not the industry’s fault alone: consumers are to blame as well. They want the next release to be bigger and better ¬ñ so to deliver that, the industry must become a monster. Game design is corporate now: just like Television and Hollywood.
Oh, I’m not trying to justify them. They were idiots and thieves. They ripped off a lot of people (supposedly, even large chunks of the game code were written by volunteers, who won’t even get to feel good for working on a game now). I’m just saying they’re not representative of a mainstream industry movement.
Heh, news to me… that people think they’re going to get rich quick, that is.
Still - $40K? As far as I know that’s extremely low pay for a programmer in the mainstream industry. (Not counting indies, of course, we range from making $10/year to tons if you’re very lucky.) I do say ‘programmer’ rather than ‘designer’ because I don’t know that many people in a design capacity in the mainstream industry, so I’m not sure what the payscale is like there.
I’ll grant you conceptual design, but ‘script writing’ IS sometimes a specialised task that needs to be hired out for. If you’re writing an arcade game or a match-3, it isn’t, the story is so unimportant that even utterly mangled engrish will be mostly overlooked, except for a few snide comments in the review. In certain game categories (such as RPG or adventure) writing is quite important. And just like really good music, really good writing can make a difference in a game where it wasn’t completely mandatory. For Bookworm Adventures, popcap got the “Bob the Angry Flower” guy to write all the various witty quips, and the humor was a big factor in me deciding to pay for the game.
In an ideal situation, a designer should have a working knowledge of all of these aspects, even if the designer is not an expert in them herself. Understanding enough about each facet to be able to synthesize them into a pleasing whole AND to express to the people actually doing the art/music/whatever what you NEED out of them in order to fit your vision…
Therefore, ignore the mainstream industry, come be a starving indie! 
40K for game designers without noteworthy skill in other specialties/experience. Programmers are among the highest paid individuals in the gaming industry. Specifically those who are involved with engine, artificial intelligence, and/or physics. That’s actually where the REAL money is - especially those who outsource the code (Havok for example).
Finding errors in spelling, grammar, and what have you - are considered as one of the primary responsibilities of QA. For scenario design, scriptwriting is deeply important, but are a different league of individuals. Note that most for most story intensive titles (RPG’s for example), the scriptwriters are also producers and/or directors. Essentially they are paying for the project or are industry veterans. If a company does hire an outside scriptwriter, that person is already an experienced novelist, film writer, or television scripter. I never noticed any “novice scriptwriter” hired unless it was an internship for someone who was also a programmer (i.e. had a minor in English or Literature). Even then, he was related to NPC townspeople dialog and such ¬ñ but more desired for his/her programming talents.
There’s a special class of writers hired to make a script sound better (script doctors): all those cool one liners and memorable quotes you hear in a video game, often come from these kinds of guys and gals. But they rarely (and I mean RARELY) are given the time of day outside of that task. They aren’t tapped for game design… just dialog (again EVERYONE has a game idea).
Ideally a designer should be able to create a working demo of the game they wish to propose by themselves. It doesn’t have to look like a multi million dollar work, but be respectable enough to convince a development team that its worth pursuing.
What people fail to understand, even if you’re hired by a big company, you’re not alone as a low level game designer: there are nine to eleven other individuals who want their ideas brought to life too, with the ability (or resources) to create working presentation demos of them. It’s VERY competitive… if your ideas are passed over a number of times, you’re immediately let go, because you obviously don’t have what it takes to compete with the rest. That kind of “black mark” can last your entire career. Does not mean you’re kicked out the game industry, but it does stick you in whatever “secondary talent” position you had (programmer, composer, game theory, etc).
This is only tangentially related to your main point … I feel sorry for Ted Woolsey. Square’s translator back in the SNES days … Was riding pretty high for awhile there; his reputation as a translator was pretty good, lot of people liked his work.
And then he graduated, formed a game company Big Rain … and went and made Shadow Madness. A game even I avoided like the plague. It was, so far as I know, his only shot at being one of the big boys … and it sucked. Man, did it suck – if even half what I read about it is true, it’s a terrible game. So his development house got folded into Crave Entertainment. (Oh, and Wikipedia says there was work on a 64DD RPG of some kind.)
Don’t know what he’s doing now, but I bet it’s not what he wanted to be doing.
Shadow Madness is a textbook perfect example of what can go terribly wrong, when someone not suited for game design makes a game. The last reputable thing I heard about Ted Woolsey, was being employed by the Japanese division of Real’s online game venture. He wasn’t making games: mostly being an executive type person. This was back in 2005 though…
Though not a game designer per se, a “famous” Western gaming individual whom I’ve kept track of is Victor Ireland from Working Designs. The man made a lot of “enemies” during his time, bad mouthing the operation styles of SEGA (Saturn era) and Sony (PS1 and PS2 era). Even insulted Nintendo once or twice (or so I’m told). After he folded WD down, he claimed to be starting a new company called Gaijinworks for XBOX 360 games. As one might understand, his reputation is a bit… tarnished. He currently sells signed copies of games on Ebay. How the mighty have fallen?
I’m not familiar with Shadow Madness, wanna tell tales?
All I can find from a quick search is people complaining that it was a bit easy and didn’t have enough XP levels.
I never played it, and the review that convinced me it was terrible was the one by that guy who was on the Working Designs website. He basically said the writing was literally the only redeeming quality the game possessed, at all, and it wasn’t nearly enough. I do recall him saying even on the hardest difficulty setting, the entire game was literally a cakewalk.
One of the biggest failures of Shadow Madness, stems from overhype and expectations. When the game was announced, Ted Woolsey’s name was plastered everywhere, alongside the credentials that he was the translator of Final Fantasy and Chrono Trigger. I wish I could find an old scan of the magazine advertisements… it shows this clear as day. His plan was pretty obvious: gamers would flock to Shadow Madness, seeking the kind of quality experience they got from Squaresoft titles. He didn’t notice that sword was double-edged though. You see Final Fantasy 7 made it debut before Shadow Madness (hell… Xenogears was out before it), and Woolsey left Squaresoft before that monolithic RPG was scheduled. It takes no genius to see that Shadow Madness is no FF7. Thus right out the doors, the association that Shadow Madness was comparable to a Squaresoft title resulted in advertising suicide. Customers were expecting something along the lines of Final Fantasy ¬ñ because Woolsey kept pushing that his involvement with those games (at least in game magazine articles), equated to Shadow Madness being their equal… and maybe it was… until FF7. I should also mention that Ted Woolsey only wrote PART of the script to Shadow Madness. An equal or larger bulk of the work, was penned by Paul Reed (which was not advertised like Ted). Name doesn’t ring a bell? How about Secret of Evermore? Well Paul wrote the scenario to that monumental failure.
As for the game itself, [b]there are multiple reviews that give varying opinions[/b]. However keep in mind, when reading the “pro-Madness” reviews, that the title was a complete and total commercial failure. It’s recently become “trendy” to bad mouth FF7, when at the time FF7 was considered one of the best games ever made (honestly it still is; the legacy that game left is tremendous). I will try to outline the failures of Shadow Madness (SM from here on out) from a developer’s point of view, without letting my gamer side interfere. 
SM was a story that was turned into a game: this is a failing many do not grasp. Not all games make good stories. Not all stories make good games. With the notable exception of niche markets such as visual novels (as we all well know): the success to an outstanding game, to that of a mediocre one, is story and gameplay are developed simultaneously as one. SM made the mistake of dividing them. There is an incredible amount of detail and intensity to the script and dialog of SM, which is disproportionate to the actual game itself. The battle engine is minimal and simplistic. The exploration factor and quantity of side quests is nonexistent, due to everything being on rails. There’s no challenge. Graphics are terrible. There are points in the game where people do nothing but talk, talk, talk (a complaint leveled at Xenogears that later killed Xenosaga for going overboard with it). So forth and so on. In similar relation: the presentation format of SM was too Westernized. Until the last few years, there was a “feeling” associated to console RPG’s that made them distinctly Japanese. That is to say: they had far more in common with anime, than they did with Lord of the Rings or Dungeons and Dragons. This lack of getting the mood, is what helped Secret of Evermore to fail - thus Paul Reed might be to blame. SM did not capture the “mood” gamers were expecting ¬ñ its darker and goes along a plotline widely divergent from the standardized Square or Enix fare. It was more of a PC rpg, rather than a console rpg… at least for its time.
Finally beat Super Mario Galaxy… rawr. :o
So why post about it?
[b]Bowser’s epic theme song[/b]. Clearly a communist. He now joins the ranks of Sephiroth and other chorus choir baddies. 8)
Aside from the fact he gets his ass kicked by a fat plumber, Boswer is a pretty cool game villian: ruler of an empire, commander of a huge army, massive physical power, expert sorcerer, knowledgable with technology (considering it’s all wooden steampunk), practically immortal, has strong children whom he can absolutely trust, etc.
Now if only he could get rid of that damn fat plumber.
Oh my god … you rip off Bleach and Hellsing? Seriously? And you’re that obvious about it? How many millions of copies of Bleach and Hellsing have been sold, and it never even occurred to him that he might get caught?
Look at all the BLATANT Diablo ripoffs which are not only produced, but survive and thrive. This game might actually make it to release. And from what little I’ve seen I have to say I at least like their animations.
