Not Every Game is a Sequel

Earth Wind and Metal writes "In response to a recent article from the Guardian about the lack of original games, Siliconera selected ten brand new titles set for release in 2006 to keep your eyes on. Five of the games are new to the USA and the other five are making their world debut. The list includes the robot house sim Chibi Robo, sandbox mecha RPG Steambot Chronicles, Taito's DS cooking game Cooking Mama and of course Okami." I am *really* looking forward to Okami.

Comments

Where are the PC games?

[Chowderbags]

Seriously, what about Spore? Ok, maybe there's a tenuous connection to Sim Life, but seriously, Spore is gonna be a whole new thing.

The article doesn't mention a single PC game. Why talk about sequels vs original games without at least mentioning computer games?

Blah Blah Blah

[th1ckasabr1ck]

Video game developers manage to do something which Hollywood has never been able to do - The sequels that we make are consistantly BETTER than the previous entry in the series. How many movies can say that?

People love to talk about how so many new games coming out are sequels, and they are - But so what? If the games are high quality and you have fun playing them, then just enjoy! I could understand this a bit more if people were saying "this game sucks", but all they seem to be saying is "this game is a sequel".

I'm not saying that some more original IP wouldn't be nice, but it gets tiring seeing all these blogs/comments/websites/etc stating the obvious.

Re:Blah Blah Blah

[Shadarr]

Not true. Generally, even the "derivative" sequels are better than the original. They look better, they have more options and content. Basically, once you get the sequel you have no reason to play the original again. People who complain that Doom III isn't as good as Doom aren't really comparing the two games on their merits, they're comparing the original against what they wanted Doom III to be. Doom III is still better, it's just not innovative. It gets points off for doing a lot of the same sorts of things as Doom.

Also, some "sequels" are really quite innovative. Grand Theft Auto 3 was a sequel, as was Dune 2. Resident Evil IV and Civ IV should both be game of the year on their various platforms, yet they are sequels.

Compare that with movies. It's very rare that a sequel is better than the original. The only ones that spring to mind are Aliens, Terminator 2 and Return of the King. ROTK is very similar to a videogame sequel in that it used the same engine, but they'd had time to refine it.

Conversely, something like Matrix Reloaded not only was worse than the original, it also crapped all over it.

FF is more like the exception than the rule

[Moraelin]

The FF series, ok, it does manage to have different stories, swing between medieval and SF, and even change the game mechanics (whether it's needed or not). Duly noted, and true.

But how many others do that?

E.g., to pick on another long series of games, take Sierra's empire building games. Exactly what was the fundamental change between Caesar and Emperor: Rise Of The Middle Kingdom? I've actually had Caesar III, Pharaoh, Zeus and Emperor installed at the same time at one point to make a comparison, and make no mistake, they were the same game with different sprites.

The only noteworthy tweak I can remember was that after Pharaoh they finally introduced road-blocks, so you can make essential NPCs (e.g., those supplying a city section with food and water) move in a loop instead of wandering stupidly into the desert while everyone in town leaves in droves. Otherwise, other than changing the sprites to fit a different civilization, they just largely kept releasing the same game over and over again.

It took PopTop's Tropico to shake the status quo, and give that team the idea to finally give NPCs a brain. E.g., to have each person on the map go to the market when they're hungry, instead of having pinball supplier NPCs walking in a loop. So they dutifully produced another mindless clone, I'm talking about Immortal Cities: Children Of The Nile, except this time they cloned Tropico instead of their earlier games. (And to add insult to injury, accompanied by a mess of interviews and trailers in which they act as if they're the ones who invented that, and noone before COTN ever thought of that.)

Which brings us to another phenomenon: mindless clones of whatever sold well last year.

Worse yet: often _clueless_ clones, by people who don't even like or understand the genre, but just have to make a RPG or The Sims clone or whatever, without even understanding what people liked about those games.

And city building is used above just as an example. It's not even the worst offender. Other genres are worse offenders.

E.g., take EA's neverending series of "Some Sport 2006", where the only major difference from last year's installment are the player names. 'Nuff said.

E.g., take economic games. For every occasional gem like "Die Gilde" ("Europa 1400: The Guild"), you have about a hundred clueless "me too" exercises, often missing the whole point. Everyone and their grandma just has to imagine that giving people a rectangular area to place shops on, and slapping on a title ending in "Tycoon", is all there is to it. Actually worrying about gameplay, balance or diversity is obviously not needed.

E.g., heck, take FPS, the genre which pretty much made mainstream the practice of releasing two dozen identical games per year. Get a graphics engine, bolt on two dozen unrelated maps, and the bog-standard assortment of guns (knife, pistol, SMG, sniper rifle, shotgun, flamethrower) and call it a new game. Oh yeah, and bolt on a half-baked multiplayer mode where no thought was given to weapon balance or map layout for multiplayer, and just reused whatever the single-player game had.

In some cases the sequel not only didn't really add anything new, but was actually a step back and folded back into the comfy mediocrity of being another "me too" clone. E.g., Unreal 2. It did away with all the Unreal universe and unique weaponry (e.g., the flak gun being a unique something in between a shotgun and a grenade launcher, but not quite either), and replaced that all with a generic SF universe and generic FPS weapons (yay for having a standard shotgun again.) In fact, it was another dime-a-dozen generic FPS that only reused the franchise name.

I could go on, but methinks you get the idea already. When some of us complain about sequels, spin-offs and raping a franchise name for a quick buck, what we have in mind is the above. It doesn't mean literally that exceptions like the FF series don't exist. It just means they're just that: exceptions.

Re:*sigh*

[CastrTroy]

I think the problem with a non-linear RPG is that people have trouble finding out when they've advanced in the game, or even beaten it. The probably get frustrated wondering if they are on the right path too. You spend all this time trying to do one thing, and you find out that the result of what you just did isn't really what you wanted to accomplish. I think people like to have a defined starting and end point in a game, and a well defined path between the start and end. If the game is non-linear, how does anyone know what to do next? if you have 5 missions to choose from? which do you choose, and if you choose the wrong one, do you end up with a bad result?

I'm not holding my breath...

[Poromenos1]

Spore looks great in screenshots and theory and all, but I'm a bit disillusioned by all the games that promised depth. The most recent one being Fable, I thought I was going to be able to do anything I wanted, and it turns out the things they presented as only a few options were ALL you could do.

So, I'm waiting to see if Spore is the Holy Grail or just a Pacman/Simwhatever/Warcraft/Starcraft clone :/

Re:*sigh*

[HunterZ]

MMORPGs don't count! Nice try though.

Errrr WTF?

[HaydnH]

From the blurb:

"In response to a recent article from the Guardian about the lack of original games, Siliconera selected ten brand new titles set for release in 2006 to keep your eyes on."

OK, let's look at some of these "ten brand new titles":

Beatmania (Playstation 2)
After the success of Dance Dance Revolution in the USA, Konami has finally decided to bring the first Bemani game over.

So this is just another dance dance revolution but you press buttons with your hands instead of your feet... and that's not a sequel??


N3: Ninety Nine Nights (Xbox 360)
This brilliant game is developed by Q? Entertainment and action veteran Phantagram. On the surface it looks like a Dynasty Warriors clone

"Dynasty Warriors clone".... says it all really.


Every Extend Extra (PSP)
The second title from Q? Entertainment has more in kind with their other titles (Lumines and Meteos). Every Extend Extra is actually an extended version of the PC game Every Extend.

"An extended version" - heeellllooooo????


Drill Dozer (Game Boy Advance) & Exit (PSP)

Both are side scrollers - I 'm sure it would take a lot to make a new & innovative side scroller... and I'm sure I've seen a robot with a drill on his head before.


Seriously, the article is meant to be arguing that not all games are sequels, and they use these as examples?

Haydn.

Re:Sequels

[Delphiki]

Reasoning? There is no reasoning. Bashing sequels and spin-offs and movie licenses is the way to appear more indie or underground than the other gamers. As far as I can tell, it's all bullshit penis waving by gamers trying to seem more sophisticated than other games. It goes kind of like this..

"I'm too cool to play Madden. Football is for dumb jocks and frat guys."
"Oh yeah? Well, I'm too hardcore of a gamer to play any sports or racing games."
"But I refuse to play any sequels or movie licensed games because they're so unoriginal."
"Oh yeah, well I don't play anything but independent games developed in third world countries where every person on the development team had a Ph.D. in art or philosophy."