9 Video Games That Got Away With Being Total Rip-Offs

8. Vigilante 8

What It Ripped Off: Twisted Metal. Twisted Metal brought the car-combat genre kicking and screaming into the third dimension when it released on the PlayStation back in 1995. Its cheesy tone, tight controls, killer rock soundtrack and awesome vehicles and characters that brimmed with twisted personality spawned a franchise that helped Sony's first console find an audience in teens and adults. Inevitably its fine example and subsequent success made it irresistible to copycats. The most shameless of all is Vigilante 8, which released on the PlayStation in 1998 and the Nintendo 64 a year later. It featured similar weapons (machines guns mounted on cars, homing missiles, mines) to Twisted Metal, but didn't feel anywhere near as good to play. The weapons lacked punch, the AI cars tended to just stand there and let you shoot them and crashing into people didn't have the same satisfying, damaging effect in Vigilante 8. Oh, and getting your car to do a u-turn exactly when you need to was next to impossible. You may as well try to teach your cat ballet. It did have destructible environments and visible car damage that was quite impressive for its time, but it just lacked personality. It had different characters with their own intertwining stories but none of them were particularly interesting. Playing a car combat game for its story is as pointless as reading erotic fan fiction for the social commentary, but our point is that the whole game just felt soulless. Congratulations, Luxoflux. You somehow managed to make speeding around environments and blowing everything up a mind-numbing chore.