The surplus amount of indie and/or shovelware titles appearing on official storefronts has been in the uprising for the last decade. As more and more resources are easily available for people interested in the video game industry, it's no surprise that this has been the case.

While many have realized their dream game into a reality with the current tools at their disposal, others take inspiration from already existing titles to bring forth a new story with original characters. However, you can only take so much "inspiration" from a game before it borders into plagiarism, and this has been the one case for a title found in the Nintendo eShop, "The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival".

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The title found its way into the Nintendo eShop just like month, on June 30th, and many people took interested in the title due to some interesting resemblances to another published title by Sony. The promotional image for "The Last Hope" sees the main protagonist in company of a woman who highly resembles Ellie from "The Last of Us", down to the very same hair style, clothing and face, albeit with a lower quality than that seen in The Last of Us.

Outside of the resemblance with Ellie, the game has very little substance to even make it into the mediocrity level. The story boils down to a time travel concept of sending a soldier's conscience to the future to help with a zombie outbreak, but aside from the flat story, there's no voice acting; instead carrying over all plot/story points and dialogues through hefty text boxes and still images (which may or may not be AI generated), dull environments and awful models that make the game look like an early PS2 title in terms of visual quality due to the lack of proper lighting, almost no music at all, simplistic UIs and the gameplay itself leaves a lot to be desired.

After the game made its ways in social media, it quickly caught up and gathered attention, enough to make the rounds of Sony, to which the resemblance of Ellie with the character of "Eva/Eve" in "The Last Hope" was enough for them to take action and issue a copyright claim to it. The game's trailer has been taken down with the message "Video unavailable. This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC" (which has been reuploaded by other users given the original has been claimed).

Not only was the game's trailer pulled by Sony, but it seems like Nintendo has also removed the game from their own eShop, as well as all other instances or mentions of the game from their websites, with the original link for "The Last Hope" now redirecting to a 404 page. Most interestingly, prompting the link into the Wayback Machine gives out the message "Sorry. This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine."

Source

 

[gaga941021]

https://gbatemp.net/threads/the-meme-box.532361/page-1054#post-10197929

This comment is just sad.

 

[Nincompoopdo]

Lots of trash that was trash then. I am that old. The seal just means it’s physically of good quality. Nothing about the game

According to the founder of Atari in many interviews and documentaries - he said that if he had control over his platform, the video games industry wouldn't be ruined by all those trashy games. All those 3rd parties are only interested in profits, not quality of their games, that E.T. game for example, was made in 3 weeks.

Nintendo learned from Atari's mistakes and ensured that they were the only one who can make the cartridges for their system. This allows them to curate the games for their system. This control is a necessary evil that ensures quality control. Today, Apple's products are similar to consoles, their walled garden is just a replica of console's quality management.

 

[raxadian]

Wii??

Nintendo was not consistent on how and why it approved games. Censorship always happened but most games based on movies were usually given a pass no matter how bad. However it still wasn't as bad as with Atari and they at least tried to keep some quality control. By the Wii era there was no control at all save the ban in adult content.

 

[TomSwitch]

Nintendo was not consistent on how and why it approved games. Censorship always happened

Censorship never improves anything, a good game needs to be good by other means, censorship normally damage the art and the best it can do is to not do too much harm.

Whipping something or someone into shape is a very very wrong idea.

What the consumer should be getting is a return policy.

 

[raxadian]

During the Nes era Nintendo had a huge control on what games got published on the Nes to avoid what happened with Atari. However crap games still got published and most of those crap games ended being movie tie ins. Why? Probably because money.

Also Nintendo had a very strict "You publish a game with us you cannot publish it on a rival videogame console" policy.

That policy disappeared on the Nintendo 64 since Nintendo took way too long to launch that videogame console and publishers had found ways to subvert it during the Super Nintendo era anyway.