iOS Game Takes Mario Knockoffs to The Next Level

The Wooster

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Jul 15, 2008
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iOS Game Takes Mario Knockoffs to The Next Level

3D Cartoon Land: Safari does the Mario.

Apple's app store isn't the only digital distribution platform facing a scourge of knockoffs and imitation games, but the iDevice's market dominance makes the app store a popular target for unscrupulous bootleggers.

Chinese developer, Jiang Zhi, is keeping the proud tradition of shameless rip-offs alive with 3D Cartoon Land: Safari, a game which looks like a creepy pod-person-version of Super Mario 3D Land.

Jiang Zhi is presumably hoping the small changes it's made to Mario's visual formula will protect it from Nintendo's legal wrath, but instead it just makes the entire game seem profoundly wrong in a David Lynch kind of way. Koopa Troopers are now "angry tortoises," the ? boxes that litter the Mushroom Kingdom have been replaced with ! boxes (subtle) and the central character looks like Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs wearing Mario's skin as a coat. Eurogamer described the game's Goombah stand-ins as "small shuffling pine cones," but to my jaded eye they look like butt plugs that have just gained sentience and figured out what their role in life is.

[gallery=898]

Believe it or not, this is actually a step down the copyright infringement ladder for Jiang Zhi. The developer's library includes such classics as Fury Birds, Line Ski, Cube Craft, Angry Pigs and, my personal favorite, God of Warriors [http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/god-of-warriors/id513666095?mt=8], which includes the most hilariously chill picture of Kratos you'll ever see.

3D Cartoon Land: Safari is available on iOS for 96p, but I wouldn't count on it being available for long.

Source: Eurogamer [http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2012-09-17-this-blatant-super-mario-ios-clone-doesnt-look-that-super]

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That One Six

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Dec 14, 2008
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Yeah... If Nintendo forced the Legend of Zelda Total War mod to go offline, this isn't going to last a week.

Edit - I'm wrong about this. I had bad information stored in my traitorous 3am brain.
 

yuval152

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Jul 6, 2011
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It's so unique it's as innovative as final combat.

I love having a yahtzee avatar.
 

Ed130 The Vanguard

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Sep 10, 2008
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Boudica said:
The problem with intellectual property and copyright: competition can't compete to offer the same experience. I'd actually like it a lot of copyright went away and people could out-and-out clone products. The big guys might hate it and throw a tantrum, but people could offer the Mario experience (for example) cheaper, better and more often.

Game A not on the system you own? Someone can port it for you.

Game B too much? Someone will make it and sell it cheaper.

Game C have too many bugs? Someone will make a smoother version.
We aren't talking of making a game similar to Mario style platformer but a complete ripoff. I'll bet if you were to compare the coding between this knock off and the original Mario game there would be allot of similarities due to Jiang Zhi pulling code wholesale from the Mario title.

That said, Apples patent war with Samsung is a dire warning about patent misuse.

Captcha: good riddance
 

weirdee

Swamp Weather Balloon Gas
Apr 11, 2011
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I'm kind of disappointed in the Nintendo copy protection, usually it takes way longer to get a working version of the game that doesn't fold in on itself, especially since the 3ds is much more inaccessible than the ds was as far as messing around with the code goes.
 

Some_weirdGuy

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Nov 25, 2010
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I accidentally a whole post

edit: accidentally two posts it seems

made all the more amusing due the username of the person who posted before me XD
 

Eric the Orange

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Apr 29, 2008
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Boudica said:
The problem with intellectual property and copyright: competition can't compete to offer the same experience. I'd actually like it a lot of copyright went away and people could out-and-out clone products. The big guys might hate it and throw a tantrum, but people could offer the Mario experience (for example) cheaper, better and more often.

Game A not on the system you own? Someone can port it for you.

Game B too much? Someone will make it and sell it cheaper.

Game C have too many bugs? Someone will make a smoother version.
There's a deference between,

"Mario is a good game. Let's make a game like it."
"Mario is a good game. Let's copy it and change a few names and graphics"
 

cookyt

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Oct 13, 2008
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Boudica said:
If I understand you correctly, you're arguing for a sort of Laissez-fair market. I can see the merits of that: inferior products would be culled from the market by consumer arbitration and we would get eventually get better versions of the product. The invisible hand of the market would naturally shape our games so that we get the best there is.

You would still have to deal with some other problems. A shady developer, for instance, could just rip the textures from an existing game and use it in his own. You also have the situation where developers copy ideas blatantly, and the shear volume of shoddy product hides any novel ideas or good implementations. One could argue that the existence of Shooter Season 2012 shows that this sort of thing happens anyway, but it you look at Chinese markets, where copyright laws are much more lenient, you see that it's almost impossible to find anything decent because you have to wade through all the useless trash.

I'd also say a well worded copyright law is essential to promote innovation. Legitimate developers are more likely to produce novel content if they know that some shady character won't just take all his work, copy it over the weekend, and sell it at a much lower price on the same market. Note that it's much easier to copy a winning formula than it is to write it from scratch.

I don't think the system we have now is perfect, not by a long shot. Things like Nintendo stopping the Legend of Zelda Total war mod and the stopping of the Lord of the Rings mod for Skyrim shows that copyright can impede innovation, but I think it's better than the current alternatives.

As for this guy:
I can't see him getting very far with this game. It looks like a watered down Mario, and it'll probably disappear shortly. Still, he'll probably make a reasonable profit on it because it likely didn't cost too much to make. That's rather unfortunate because this sort of cash and grab shouldn't be encouraged.
 

cookyt

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Oct 13, 2008
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Boudica said:
cookyt said:
A shady developer, for instance, could just rip the textures from an existing game and use it in his own.
You say that like it's a bad thing :p

I support communist, so perhaps my ideals for society don't align with many others', making it hard for us to see eye to eye.
Well I think it's a bad thing because.

1) The developer who ripped the textures didn't incur any costs for making them. On its own, maybe it's not too bad, but when you have 50 games going around with similar mechanics, all using the same textures, but only one is actually any fun, it's easier for a consumer to write off the lot of them instead of looking through to find the good one. This assumes that the copies would be inferior, which might not be the case, but usually is because anyone who would rip textures from a game to lower development costs probably isn't looking to craft the best experience.

2) If I'm an artist who writes textures for games, seeing lots of games using my textures without paying me for them disincentives me from drawing textures for new games. If this sort of behavior causes my studio to close, then society, as a whole, looses out.

Just because you're communist doesn't mean we can't argue over ideals. We might even come upon an agreement if our logic is sound. I try to come into these things with an open mind. The results are up for debate :)
 

Sean951

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Mar 30, 2011
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That One Six said:
Yeah... If Nintendo forced the Legend of Zelda Total War mod to go offline, this isn't going to last a week.
The mod is still up and running... it was updated just 11 hours ago.