Talk About A Blatant Ultima Rip-Off
This was brought to my attention by Adrien Adchee on the Ultima Dragons Facebook group. Have a watch, and if you find it too crazy-making, skip ahead to about 3:30…whereat you should listen carefully to the soundtrack.
Now, of all the songs from the various Ultima soundtracks one might rip off…why, oh why would you rip off the highly distinctive, unmistakable Gargoyle Theme?
That’s almost more offensive than the offer of a $100 in-app purchase that pops up almost immediately after the game begins!
I’m not sure how you could discern any theme through that. We need a sample w/out all the chatter.
Welcome to the world of music rippers, a very common occurrence sadly.
That game may be the biggest pile of AIDS I’ve ever witnessed, and I’ve seen a few of them. And yeah, that’s definitely the gargoyle theme, one of my favorite songs from Ultima VI. I hope the developers die in a fire. Or actually just almost die in a fire but survive to suffer through the skin grafts, which then go horribly wrong shortly after their backwater hospital runs out of morphine.
All the obvious plagiarism aside, it’s pretty awful that a game so blatantly exists to trick children into spending large amounts of their parents’ money without realising it. Aren’t there supposed to be some sort of App Store police to stop this kind of thing? I’m not an Apple user so I don’t know how this works, but I thought they were fairly strict about what gets put up for sale.
Good call on the kids… I don’t have an iPhone so I’m not sure what constitutes pressing Enter, but it looked like it was defaulting to Buy. Just seeing those fast, tiny pop-ups with the highlighted Buy button at $99.99 actually caused slight anxiety even though I knew I was watching a YouTube video. If you can sue over spilling hot coffee over yourself and win, surely there can be a class action lawsuit against these ass clowns, right? If not then there’s always the class action lynch mob, I suppose. I have torches.
And this would be why my phone is set to prompt for my password immediately prior to carrying out ANY App Store transaction. And it goes without saying that only I know my password.
Not that I would let my kids play this crap, but they do get to play some games…some of which offer in-app purchases.
Which, again, are password-protected by the settings I’ve enabled.
The catch is that I had to enable them myself; the default setting is for the phone to cache the App Store password for 15 minutes or so. And that’s where these horror stories of kids racking up massive bills come from.
Apple principally audits the app code rather than its content presentation, I think. Basically, they want to make sure you aren’t doing anything obviously malicious (data mining, malware, etc.) or accessing restricted APIs.
They will police apps for content more in reply to complaints and comments. But those apps do get their day in the sun first, as a result.