Best Original Games of 2003?

PapaZit writes "It seems like most of the games that I purchase these days are sequels: GTA3 and Vice City , Zelda: Wind Waker, even Knights of the Old Republic and Galaxies built on the Star Wars franchise. What are the best original (not a sequel or franchise) games that you've played this year?"

Comments

"Original" ?

[mirko]

I am not sure there *is* an original game : there are strategy games, like Civ, Warcraft, there are Doom like (once again obviously unoriginal), there are multiplayer games...
Well, the last time I saw a NEW game and said "WOW" was when I saw people playing Dance Dance revolution...

Re:'New' titles are a gamble to publishers

[Snowmit]

Can I just say that I'm sick and tired of people equating sequels with a lack of creativity in games? No? I'll go ahead and do it anyway.

I'm sick and tired of people equating a sequels with a lack of creativity in games.

We need to get over the mistaken notion that sequel == uncreative or even easy. It may be true (but not 100% true) that sequels are indicative of recycled creative ideas in the world of film and books (though note that we have no problem with good dramatic television shows that run for many episodes). But games are different from these things. One of the important ways that games are different from movies is that games are software. I don't think that any of us would complain that Adobe keeps releasing sequel after sequel to Photoshop. Photoshop 7.0 is a dramatically better product than Photoshop 1.0. Linux kernel current.number is a more robust OS kernel than Linux kernel 1.0. Likewise, it is reasonable to expect that (game title) 2.0 could be a better title than (game title) 1.0.

To pick a recent example - by all accounts, Project Gotham Racing 2 is a dramatically better product than Project Gotham Racing 1. They tweaked the interface, they made it prettier, they added new gameplay functionality and they generally made it a BETTER GAME. It is uncreative? I would argue that the cool new things that they added were very creative indeed.