The Last Hope – so much for game preservation (Picture: VG Games)

The worst video game of the year is no longer available on Nintendo Switch, as The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival is struck down by Sony lawyers.

Although Sony is now happy to put its first party exclusives on PC, none of them are ever made available on other consoles (except for baseball game MLB The Show, for some reason).

In theory that means the door is open for someone else to come along and make a similar game for other formats, except… you can’t just knock out a copy of something like The Last Of Us in a weekend. Even though that’s exactly what Nintendo Switch title The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival looked like.

We use the past tense because, after becoming a brief internet sensation, it’s now been removed from the eShop, thanks to a copyright claim from Sony.

Publishers making copyright claims is usually an act of corporate cynicism, with the makers of Candy Crush Saga trying to get everyone to stop using the word saga in their games and Bethesda trying to prevent anyone from using the word scrolls.

In this case, though, you’ve got to say Sony was entirely justified, as The Last Hope was a blatant rip-off of The Last Of Us, except, you know, completely awful.

You only need a brief look at a screenshot, or the video below, to realise that but Sony presumably didn’t want anyone thinking it was an official product, so they’ve had it taken off the eShop and the Nintendo website.

The trailers are gone too, and it’s not mentioned at all on the website of developer/publisher VG Games, whose other games don’t look very good either.

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If, for some reason, you already bought the game you’ll still be able to play it, but no one else will be allowed to buy it ever again. So maybe now you can try selling your Nintendo account on eBay for thousands, and the chance to play what is now one of the rarest video games ever made.

All three consoles have a ton of bargain basement rubbish on their online stores, although Nintendo does seem to allow a lot more of it than Microsoft or Sony.

Although even The Last Hope pales in comparison to 2020 Android game Zeld@ Ocarina Quest Of Time, which Nintendo’s lawyers did a number on as soon as they saw it.

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The worst video game of the year is no longer available on Nintendo Switch, as The Last Hope: Dead Zone Survival is struck down by Sony lawyers.