SCREWATTACK MAGAZINE - MARCH
73
ent way with similar properties and take different parts of the world and morph them to our own vision. Movies and games work like this as well.
Greetings, fellow g1s. I’ve been pondering this through a large amount of time. Usually, when I see a negative review, I hear the term “rip-off”. A rip-off is either a product that is not worth all the money you spend for it, or a duplicate of a different product with a different name slapped onto it. My mind at first was against this sort of thing as it has become very monotonous to see the same thing being copied over and over again. Then my mind debated that I liked some things that did just that because the formula of said thing was enjoyable to through over and over again. But then that was counterattacked by the idea that some formulas get altered to become different, leaving my mind to wage a metaphorical war against itself with the various ideals that were flying from one side to the other. Now, before I can talk even more about how things have been ripped off in various ways, I first have to talk about the complaint itself. When a viewer witnesses that a particular part of a game or movie has similar, if not identical elements of a different game or movie that they have experienced, their mind recognizes it and the person begins to think that this lacks any sense of originality whatsoever, which may turn them off. But here’s the thing, people only refer to something being a ripoff, when various other factors of the product do not work fully to their advantage. Allow me to go deeper on this. If we want to strip everything down
to the lowest form we wanted to, everything would be considered a ripoff. Think about it. Love, hatred, conflict, war, unity, conservation, sins, purity, morality, allignment and various other philosophical terms have been sewn into various stories. Including those that the creative design to us or the realistic that tell tales about thier older days. We’ve all experience the same emotions, we’ve all been X years old at some point or the other, we all have fingerprints. Simply put, nothing truly in this world is, or ever can be purely original. The thing that seperates us from one another is not how we’re completely different than others, having our own little bubble that no one will be able to comprehend and decipher, but how we have been crafted in a differ-
The thing with those things though is that some of us can’t appreaciate it when it rips off something in a way that is inferior to the original portrayal after realizing it’s a copy. For example, when Avatar came out, everyone, including me, hated it. The reason? It was basically Ferngully and/or Pocahontas with a more alienistic and fantasy-like feel coat of paint on it. Now, before I continue, I must address that even though I dislike that movie, it could have been worse. At least the look of the movie was nice, and I appreciate the effort they had when making the visuals, despite not being much of a graphics-goggler. It didn’t deserve that much hate as it attempted to do a little more with it’s story. Not that much, but enough to at least make it something that a person may consider renting. Now that I got that out of the way, allow me to continue. The thing with repainting a story is that if you basically add nothing truly ground-breaking to your “rip-off”, people will dislike it more. Flip’s Twisted World gained a reputation for being a mediocre game mainly because it did not add anything to the rip-off of Super Mario Galaxy that was truly outstanding other than it was a different set of backgrounds and characters. It’s not usually wise to just take a story and slap many minor changes