Why I Hate AAA’s Revenge More Than Roothless Himself

While those may seem like harsh words for what I believe to be Jumpstart’s first game on Neopets, I truly hate this monstrosity of a game and the downfall of a site I held so close to my heart it represents. I’ll try not to be melodramatic throughout this post, but this is a real stab in the gut for me.

Why? Because the entire game is completely full of 100% stolen content. The art assets, code, and potentially music are all stolen and/or being used in violation of their individual TOS by Jumpstart. I have receipts after the “Read More” link.

Sprites

These two sprites, as you can see, are direct traces from this RPG Maker male character base.



Most strange of all is that even Roothless himself uses traced features of the same sprite despite being shaped absolutely nothing like it. Which makes me wonder one thing; why? And if you look closely, you can see that whoever traced the RPG Maker sprite failed to color in both Roothless and AAA’s hands, leaving them inexplicably flesh toned.



The Character sprites aren’t the end of the tracing, either. Though this throne does not match identically, I believe it to be a direct copy of either this or an earlier version of an RPG Maker throne tileset. The pillars, however, are completely identical in every way to their RPG Maker Counterparts.

One might assume that Jumpstart purchased the commercial use rights for these sprite assets, making it okay to use them in this game, but one would be wrong as it is a direct violation of the RPG Maker useage agreement to do so.









Programming

Even the code for the entire game was taken from outside sources.

As detailed in this post by @poogle-races, we have discovered that the code for the game has been directly plagiarized from at least two sources. The following is just one of the examples:

Origin: http://www.neopets.com/games/aaasrevenge/js/main.js

Origin:

http://www.html5gamedevs.com/topic/1380-how-to-scale-entire-game-up/?page=2#comment-110466

Notice how they both misspell “zone” as “zome”.

You can see more details laid out at @poogle-races‘ post here.





Music

After some digging, I did find that the music in the game is not unique either. It originates from a company called “FCAnimated” on the album Dragons Fairies and Witches.

I was able to find that FCAnimated does sell the license to this particular song here. But because of the previous evidence, I am not confident that this license was purchased legitimately for use in this game.





Conclusion

I am done with Neopets. I just can’t do this anymore. With every plagiarized item that gets uploaded, every bad update, every broken promise, I just can’t stay. I must give up the site I’ve called home for well over a decade. And while I don’t expect to sway your views on Neopets, or Jumpstart, I feel that this deception on their end must be brought to the attention of its players.

Thank you.