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Capcom Mobile copies 'Splosion Man... poorly

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polycounter lvl 11
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Zack Fowler polycounter lvl 11
A level from Twisted Pixel's 'Splosion Man: (2009)
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=06Sz_HQIpt0[/ame]

A level from Capcom Mobile's MaXplosion: (2011)
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOWlwo9dXh8[/ame]

This is atrocious.

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  • Slum
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    Slum polycounter lvl 18
    That is just sad.
  • Michael Knubben
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    And shameless.
  • eld
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    eld polycounter lvl 18
    Also, I read that the splosion man devs actually pitched their game to capcom, but were rejected, before they went to xbox live arcade.
  • NordicNinja
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    If your going to "borrow" ideas at least make sure the game is fun. The gameplay / design looks rather poor compared with 'Splosion Man.
  • NordicNinja
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    eld wrote: »
    Also, I read that the splosion man devs actually pitched their game to capcom, but were rejected, before they went to xbox live arcade.

    If true then...awkward :poly122:
  • HonkyPunch
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    HonkyPunch polycounter lvl 18
    Oh Capcom.
    I still love you.
    But i'm not so sure about your mobile division.
  • Habboi
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    Habboi sublime tool
    Ouch. That is all.
  • Geezus
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    Geezus mod
  • r_fletch_r
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    r_fletch_r polycounter lvl 9
    I wonder if they have some contact that is signed on submitting ideas for publishing. perhaps they have a sneaky little 'we can copy your idea' clause.
  • eld
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    eld polycounter lvl 18
    r_fletch_r wrote: »
    I wonder if they have some contact that is signed on submitting ideas for publishing. perhaps they have a sneaky little 'we can copy your idea' clause.

    Probably capcom mobile just signing some cheap dev that enjoys copying games, and people at capcom mobile were clueless enough to let it pass.
  • Geezus
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    eld wrote: »
    Probably capcom mobile just signing some cheap dev that enjoys copying games, and people at capcom mobile were clueless enough to let it pass.

    Eh, as much as I'd like to think that, I think you're giving them far too much credit. I have a hard time believing anyone in that position would be *that* clueless.
  • ironbearxl
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    ironbearxl polycounter lvl 18
    As an apology, Capcom should let Twisted Pixel develop a Megaman game. :D
  • greevar
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    greevar polycounter lvl 6
    This goes to show that ideas aren't worth shit. The money is in the execution of the idea and Capcom dropped a big steaming load. Twisted Pixel and Capcom started with the same premise, but produced two very different games in terms of quality. If I were the guys at TP, I'd laugh my ass off at Capcom's pathetic attempt to use copied ideas and then, I'd make a mobile version of Splosion Man that puts Capcom's tour de farce to shame. I'd be laughing all the way to the bank. Though, I think theft is not accurate. This is blatant plagiarism.
  • Slum
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    Slum polycounter lvl 18
    Hopefully this nonsense drums up a little more publicity for Twisted Pixel, resulting in a little sales boost :)
  • r_fletch_r
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    r_fletch_r polycounter lvl 9
    same difference. The point is they are scumbags.
  • crazyfool
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    crazyfool polycounter lvl 13
    BASTARDS!!! haha, its just so weird that they would let it slide all the way to the final product. Splosion mans been out for a few years now and its so blatant that they ripped them off, only difference is they gave the scientists guns and made the game look like crap. whats even worse though is......capcom!!! wtf?
  • kodde
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    kodde polycounter lvl 19
    That's just sad. You'd think that the bigger players would not have to resort to such methods.
  • Josh_Singh
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    Josh_Singh polycounter lvl 18
    wow. that is really obvious. The crazy thing is they didn't even have the creativity to at least TRY to do something new. He's got the same crazy sound effects and everything. And it looks way shittier too.
    Probably capcom mobile just signing some cheap dev that enjoys copying games, and people at capcom mobile were clueless enough to let it pass.

    I can actually see this happening. Some High ups at game companies aren't as vigilant as you might think.
  • Steve Schulze
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    Steve Schulze polycounter lvl 18
    This seems to happen an awful lot on the IPhone. Not always as gratuitously as this, but there are plenty of studios set up just to do mobile knockoffs of popular titles.
  • eld
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    eld polycounter lvl 18
    Jackablade wrote: »
    This seems to happen an awful lot on the IPhone. Not always as gratuitously as this, but there are plenty of studios set up just to do mobile knockoffs of popular titles.

    Yep, it's a bit of a shameless business, lots of money-grabs and ripoffs, And the true gems have to suffer, because they're sharing space with a crapton of bad software.
  • rooster
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    ironbearxl wrote: »
    As an apology, Capcom should let Twisted Pixel develop a Megaman game. :D

    i guess it would look something a bit like...

    [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InQxWsmMN6g[/ame]
  • adam
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    adam polycounter lvl 19
    Did Gameloft make this? ;)
  • Geezus
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    Geezus mod
    rooster wrote: »
    i guess it would look something a bit like...

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=InQxWsmMN6g

    hrmmm...maybe want....maybe....want.
  • eld
  • Zack Fowler
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    Zack Fowler polycounter lvl 11
    I just looked through that Gameloft article and found this comment from a guy identifying himself as an ex-designer for them:
    There's a lot of misinformation in the post, and in the comments. Having worked in Gameloft as Game Designer, I can attest that it IS the company's intention to offer a clone for a store where there are none.

    IF Blizz made SC2 for iPhone fine, call them copycats or whatever, but there's no halo, there's no uncharted, no nothing.

    Gameloft provides a service, it offers smaller players the chance to get the feeling of bigger games.

    I no longer work in gameloft, as Game designer it was somewhat frustrating (not much creativity allowed), but the job we did was great.
    I had to post this response:

    Just because the company that made the original hasn't ported their game over doesn't make the act of making a completely derivative clone any more morally defensible. If a game company was making a blatant ripoff of Uncharted for HD systems, would it suddenly become a more respectable thing if they were 360 exclusive? No, clearly not.

    What you're tapping into is this entitlement mentality where the modern consumer feels like they have the right to determine when and where they can get a product, rather the company producing it. See: fanboys raging over franchises that switch systems allegiance. This is NOT a healthy mentality to foster. As a hypothetical, no matter how much you enjoy Gears of War it doesn't mean you deserve the option to play it on your PS3, or iPhone, or Android, or Wii, or toaster oven.

    Drug dealers fill a void too. Filling a void isn't a noble thing in and of itself.
  • TortillaChips
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    TortillaChips polycounter lvl 10
    It seems like Capcom and especially Gameloft have gone out of there way to make them more like the originals.

    I laughed when I saw 'Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance', that's a terrible name, 'Gameloft' is pretty bad too.
  • greevar
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    greevar polycounter lvl 6
    I just looked through that Gameloft article and found this comment from a guy identifying himself as an ex-designer for them:

    I had to post this response:

    Just because the company that made the original hasn't ported their game over doesn't make the act of making a completely derivative clone any more morally defensible. If a game company was making a blatant ripoff of Uncharted for HD systems, would it suddenly become a more respectable thing if they were 360 exclusive? No, clearly not.

    What you're tapping into is this entitlement mentality where the modern consumer feels like they have the right to determine when and where they can get a product, rather the company producing it. See: fanboys raging over franchises that switch systems allegiance. This is NOT a healthy mentality to foster. As a hypothetical, no matter how much you enjoy Gears of War it doesn't mean you deserve the option to play it on your PS3, or iPhone, or Android, or Wii, or toaster oven.

    Drug dealers fill a void too. Filling a void isn't a noble thing in and of itself.

    I disagree completely and saying that they're wrong isn't going to change anything. It's you against millions of people. Who do you think has more collective time and resources? To call a video game, which is just an arrangement of 1's and 0's a product, means you're committing a misnomer. A video game is no more a product than calculus. They are both a collection of executed ideas, but neither is a product. The disc, on the other hand, is a product. It's made of finite, scarce resources that are required to produce it.

    The reigning issue here is that those that create believe they are being cheated out of income because people can download and copy the works they create without compensating them for it. The commonly used argument is that they just want it for free and they have some sort of unrealistic entitlement complex. The first part may be true, but the second is not. The reason being is that those whom download have come to realize what many among the file-sharing community have come to realize: Copies are not worth the media they're stored on. Now, I'm not saying that artists don't work hard to make the games nor am I saying they don't deserve to be paid. It's that they're selling the wrong good entirely and don't realize what business they are really in.

    Games are a service industry, they find people that want games made and then get paid to make them. It's much like a contractor who finds clients that want something built. They're not selling a building, but they are selling their time, effort, and skill to build them. What needs to change is who is paying for those games to be made. The publishers hire developers to make these games and then sell the copies for profit. That just doesn't work anymore and the pervasive file-sharing culture outlines that in spades. So what does one do? Well, finding other ways to make money from games that doesn't involve selling copies would be a good start. Companies like ZeroPoint Software are selling exclusivity and other perks to raise funding to make their games. There's tiered support that gives increasingly better perks as the amount given increases. Selling exclusive products and services is another.

    The point of these methods is to get people very hyped up about the game in development and get them to buy the supporting products/services that keep the business going. It works too. XKCD makes comics that are posted for free on the website and they let anyone and everyone copy and redistribute them. Even with that, they've successfully made money selling the printed version of the collection and other related goods. ZeroPoint's Interstellar Marines is developed under their AAA indie initiative where people buy "support" badges that upgrade their status as a member of the community and have behind the scenes access to the development of the game and the community gets to decide what games they want made, instead of the publisher. This gives the developers the power to make games for their target audience rather than telling their target audience what games will be made for them.

    The reason people are downloading a game for the purpose of playing them on other platforms is because they feel cheated that they have to buy a game twice. Whether they're right or wrong about that doesn't matter. What does matter is that there are under-served customers out there that are trying to get what isn't being offered to them. It would appear that customers want games that can be played on more than one platform or they simply don't like the monopoly fostering nature of game console design.

    Edit:

    The great thing about this, is that this way the developers get paid, the fans get their games, and nobody feels cheated.
  • Slum
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    Slum polycounter lvl 18
    Holy crap, that post couldn't be any more off topic, or off the mark. I don't even have the energy to respond to that wall of text.
  • greevar
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    greevar polycounter lvl 6
    Slum wrote: »
    Holy crap, that post couldn't be any more off topic, or off the mark. I don't even have the energy to respond to that wall of text.

    Is it off topic? No more than Zack's comment. Is off the mark? Not by a long shot.
  • EzMeow
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    EzMeow polycounter lvl 10
    greevar wrote: »
    ... They are both a collection of executed ideas, but neither is a product. The disc, on the other hand, is a product. It's made of finite, scarce resources that are required to produce it....

    so steam , PSN, XBL are just some ideas' store? O.o...
  • Slum
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    Slum polycounter lvl 18
    Zack's quote was about consumers entitlement to having their favorite games on whatever platform they want. Yours was about piracy - the two are completely unrelated. We're talking about legitimate customers.
    That just doesn't work anymore
    Just because you can say something, doesn't make it fact. The games industry is making billions of dollars by selling games, either retail or digital download. I'm pretty sure it actually *does* work.
  • greevar
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    greevar polycounter lvl 6
    Slum wrote: »
    Zack's quote was about consumers entitlement to having their favorite games on whatever platform they want. Yours was about piracy - the two are completely unrelated. We're talking about legitimate customers.


    Just because you can say something, doesn't make it fact. The games industry is making billions of dollars by selling games, either retail or digital download. I'm pretty sure it actually *does* work.

    So, he's talking about people demanding that when they buy a copy of a game, they should be able to use it on any platform they choose? Well, I still disagree. Music can be transferred to many different platforms (PC, Mobile phone, iPod, etc.). It's not unreasonable in this era to see that they would think that considering other media, they can do as such. I don't need an MP3 player device to listen to MP3's and I don't have to be limited to one format either.

    Just because I say so? You're telling me that nobody can download a game, instead of buying it from the publishers? Publishers have an actual, unbreakable monopoly on access to the works they sell? Well then, I was mistaken.

    "Just because I say so" is not what makes it true. The fact that people can and do distribute copies of all types of media proves that the way of things as they were, are not going to last. It's just getting started. People are only just starting to realize that they don't have to pay for copies. Given time, this will idea will spread.

    EzMeow:

    You're putting words in my mouth. I didn't say they were simply ideas. I said they are a collection of executed ideas, but no more tangible than when they were just ideas. You have to realize, those stores are selling an infinite product. No matter how many they sell, there will always be more. That was the point I was trying to to make. Can you put a price on a infinite product? Anybody who understands supply and demand would say no. You need a limited supply and people who demand it for it to have a price. An infinite supply means that there's no demand because everyone can have it and the supply isn't exhausted.
  • Zack Fowler
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    Zack Fowler polycounter lvl 11
    I take it you don't actually work in the games industry. Otherwise you would know that porting from one set of gaming hardware to another requires a very significant amount of work and is not at all analogous to playing an MP3 on different devices.

    And no, you're still missing my original point and going off on a tangent. I was referring to the way that people think that they have the right to dictate what platforms a game gets released on, like "PS3 players deserve to get to play Valve games too" or "360 players deserve to get Metal Gear Solid too" and on and on, which is directly analogous to the idea that people gaming on mobile platforms have some sort of God-given right to mobile phone versions of popular franchises. Which is what the Gameloft guy was using to legitimize their modus operandi.

    Neither piracy nor having to pay for multiple ports of the same game are directly related topics.
  • greevar
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    greevar polycounter lvl 6
    I take it you don't actually work in the games industry. Otherwise you would know that porting from one set of gaming hardware to another requires a very significant amount of work and is not at all analogous to playing an MP3 on different devices.

    And no, you're still missing my original point and going off on a tangent. I was referring to the way that people think that they have the right to dictate what platforms a game gets released on, like "PS3 players deserve to get to play Valve games too" or "360 players deserve to get Metal Gear Solid too" and on and on, which is directly analogous to the idea that people gaming on mobile platforms have some sort of God-given right to mobile phone versions of popular franchises. Which is what the Gameloft guy was using to legitimize their modus operandi.

    Neither piracy nor having to pay for multiple ports of the same game are directly related topics.

    I'm not in the industry yet, but I spent 4 years learning what goes into making a game, including consoles. It takes 1,000's of man hours to create a game design document, storyboards, programming, art, design environments, and do testing on a AAA game. It's also difficult to port a game from one platform to another because the console makers made a lot of effort so that specifically are incompatible. That way, they can sell those ridiculously over-priced development kits. These systems are wholly incompatible with each other and require separate development teams to produce a game for each platform. Do I have it about right?

    And why shouldn't the customers that buy the games have a say in what platforms they get it on? It's their money and they can take it elsewhere if you won't provide it.
  • Slum
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    Slum polycounter lvl 18
    It's also difficult to port a game from one platform to another because the console makers made a lot of effort so that specifically are incompatible. That way, they can sell those ridiculously over-priced development kits. These systems are wholly incompatible with each other and require separate development teams to produce a game for each platform. Do I have it about right?

    Dude, not even close.
  • greevar
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    greevar polycounter lvl 6
    Slum wrote: »
    Dude, not even close.

    Really? You can dev a 360 game on a PS3 kit? That was my point.
  • Zack Fowler
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    Zack Fowler polycounter lvl 11
    Saying that Microsoft and Sony intentionally made their devkits mutually exclusive is like saying Ford intentionally designed the 2011 Mustang so you couldn't use a transmission from a 95 Carrera. Just... huh?
  • greevar
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    greevar polycounter lvl 6
    Saying that Microsoft and Sony intentionally made their devkits mutually exclusive is like saying Ford intentionally designed the 2011 Mustang so you couldn't use a transmission from a 95 Carrera. Just... huh?

    True. But the mere fact that neither are compatible does add to the issue that it's hard to port games to other platforms. MS doesn't want the PS3 SDK to create 360 games and vice versa. It's a colossal pain in the ass to make a game for three consoles and Windows, but it doesn't have to be. Actually, if the PS3 and the 360 could run each other's games, that would be big for the consumer. Consumers want cross-platform compatibility. Why deny them what they're willing to pay for? Oh wait, because MS, Nintendo, and Sony want their cut of your earnings.
  • Wahlgren
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    Wahlgren polycounter lvl 17
    greevar, you sound like a guy that think you know a metric shit ton of stuff while you in all reality don't. You should chill and listen to the more experienced dudes around here instead of saying things you don't really know a whole lot about.

    Anyway, gameloft has always been a shady bunch of dudes to me. I'm surprised they haven't been beaten by the lawsuit stick yet... certainly there should be a case right?

    EDIT: About Capcom tho, I dunno what to say about it really.
  • greevar
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    greevar polycounter lvl 6
    Wahlgren wrote: »
    greevar, you sound like a guy that think you know a metric shit ton of stuff while you in all reality don't. You should chill and listen to the more experienced dudes around here instead of saying things you don't really know a whole lot about.

    Anyway, gameloft has always been a shady bunch of dudes to me. I'm surprised they haven't been beaten by the lawsuit stick yet... certainly there should be a case right?

    Whatever.
  • Karmageddon
  • Michael Knubben
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    Can we start a thing at polycount where an especially idiotic post nets you an avatar that says 'idiot'?
    I hate reading a wall of text only to find out I've been reading the literary equivalent of dribble.
  • eld
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    eld polycounter lvl 18
    Well, if you put a thousand grevars on a thousand keyboards and give them an infinite amount of time, chances are they'll produce the same formation of 1's and 0's as some game and eventually prove that digital rights are null and void.
  • Yozora
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    Yozora polycounter lvl 11
    MightyPea wrote: »
    Can we start a thing at polycount where an especially idiotic post nets you an avatar that says 'idiot'?
    I hate reading a wall of text only to find out I've been reading the literary equivalent of dribble.

    Ignore list is there for a reason!
  • Jeremy-S
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    Jeremy-S polycounter lvl 11
    Yozora wrote: »
    Ignore list is there for a reason!

    Now that's logic that makes sense to me. Ignore function FTW!!
  • Bigjohn
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    Bigjohn polycounter lvl 11
    eld wrote: »

    That was funny to see all those side by side.

    The only one that felt weird though is the Starcraft/Starfront comparison. Not because it's off-mark, but because nobody ever seems to give Blizzard a hard time for a title that's basically a rehash of Warhammer.

    That their humans are basically War40k's Space Marines, their Zerg are essentially the same as the Tyranids, and Protoss are a combination of Tau/Eldars, all seems to go under the radar.

    Warcraft I think is better done. The Orcs aren't directly the Warhammer Orks, but more like a generic combination of fantasy Orc, with a bit of Klingon mixed in. Their Elves actually feel unique, with the druids and whatnot, etc. But Starcraft is a pretty clear parallel to War40k.
  • Mark Dygert
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    meh... one more game like this and its a new genre...
  • rooster
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    rooster mod
    I'm going to throw this into the ring: sometimes I want a ripoff.

    I'm primarily a PC gamer, and there's a bunch of cool psn games I fancy but can't play. Frankly, I'd love someone to do a good pixeljunk shooter ripoff.. or, something inspired but with a slightly different flavour. Either..

    As long as it isn't a *shitty* ripoff, which this capcom thing looks like. Imo, if the market is there and someone's ignoring it, it's their own fault when someone else comes along and plonks their own version down. Having said that it's likely more Microsoft's fault than it is Twisted Pixel due to some exclusivity contract, but whatever, they still signed it.
  • jakelear
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    jakelear polycounter lvl 14
    greevar is like belias with words
  • Skamberin
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    Skamberin polycounter lvl 13
    greevar wrote:
    To call a video game, which is just an arrangement of 1's and 0's a product, means you're committing a misnomer. A video game is no more a product than calculus. They are both a collection of executed ideas, but neither is a product. The disc, on the other hand, is a product. It's made of finite, scarce resources that are required to produce it.
    1zg6ss1.gif
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