Top Best Adult Entertainment. It’s not a name that springs to mind alongside the likes of Nintendo, Blizzard, Valve or BioWare, and there’s a reason for that. This is one of the worst developers in the world.
Not because they put out bad games, though that certainly helps. It’s because of the lies they dress their bad games up in.
A ripped-off reader pointed us towards Top Best’s catalogue earlier today, and it makes for grim reading. Well, hilarious reading initially, until you remember people are being tricked into paying money for this company’s games.
Selling its wares on Apple’s App Store, Top Best offers a number of titles, among them Craft – Build Terrain, Zanda – Linked Swords and MoonCRAFT Mine. Zanda is such a shameless Zelda rip-off it’s a wonder Nintendo’s crack para-lawyers haven’t already put a stop to it, but it’s the two Craft games that are the real problem.
Both sell themselves as Minecraft clones. Again, that’s OK! As we’ve shown you, some of those can actually be quite good if you give them the chance. Top Best’s games aren’t even Minecraft clones, though. They’re something worse.
On both games’ store pages, screenshots are shown of what look like Minecraft clones, using screens that are almost impossible to distinguish from the actual Minecraft game available on the iPhone. Upon buying the $US2 games, though, users find that instead they’ve been sold a crude and awful 2D platformer.
“Wow. This is NOT what I expected at all” writes one disgruntled purchaser. “Instead of being a MC styled game, this is simply a 2D black and white jumping game with a Minecraft picture gallery.”
So Top Best include a gallery of Minecraft images, which they can then say constitute the provided screenshots, only for the actual game to be nothing of the sort. Then when people demand their money back, they…well, whaddya know, Top Best don’t have a website.
Now, we could get angry at this arsehole developer, but you know what, the world is full of dogs, and you can’t blame a dog for barking. Those ripped off by these arseholes should instead be angry with Apple.
The company’s approvals process for the App Store has long been a source of frustration for developers, but this is taking the piss. If Apple wants to have full control over what appears on its store then it has to assume full responsibility for the content that makes it through. And this making it through makes you question whether they’re even looking at these things before approving them, let alone playing them.
With no developer website, no support (the “support” link on Top Best’s pages just go to google.com) and games that are either being sold as a lie or, in Zanda’s case, aren’t even finished products (it crashes after the first rudimentary level), Top Best Adult Entertainment are a developer to be avoided at all costs.
The fact they are a developer at all, though, lies at the door of Apple, who more than ever really need to sort the App Store out. Because it’s supposedly controlled by Apple, consumers place a basic level of trust in the company that they’re being dealt with honestly and fairly in the store. Stuff like this will quickly erode that trust.
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