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Video Games--- Where are Take-Two Interactive's lawyers when you need them? There hasn't been a more blatant case of one company recycling another company's game than Namco's recently-released Dead To Rights, which is so similar in so many ways to Take-Two's Max Payne that one can't help but wonder if Take-Two is getting a royalty check in the mail from Namco. The game concept, story, graphical style, gameplay, and Bullet Time feature (even if Namco doesn't call it Bullet Time) are all eerily similar to Max Payne.

Most laughable of all is the commercial for Dead To Rights, which may in fact just be full-motion-video of Max Payne's intro. Some of the dialogue in the commercial seems to be taken word-for-word, or just slightly reworded, from Max Payne's introductory sequence. Even the talk about the city being "alive" and being unforgiving is ripped straight out of Max Payne. The only thing that separates the two games is that Dead To Rights also offers hand-to-hand combat sequences... or should I say, simple, repetitive hand-to-hand combat sequences that suck the life out of the game.

Ah, to reminisce about the good old days, when Namco used to shamelessly re-hash its own games over and over again, before they moved on to shamelessly re-hashing other people's games. How I miss those magical days of being charged 50 bucks for such disappointing cut-and-paste-jobs as Tekken 3 and Tekken Tag Tournament, as opposed to being charged 50 bucks for a disappointing cut-and-paste-job like Dead To Rights. Unless Tekken 4 and/or Soul Calibur 2 knock the gaming public's socks off of its collective ass, I think that all of the non-Namco-fanboys among us can agree that Namco's status as an elite, A-list developer is a thing of the past.

Labels: Video Games

posted by Ivan Trembow at 5:52 PM

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