7 Game Franchises They Drove Into the Ground

Via the ever-excellent Game|Life, a post on Games Radar that details seven destroyed game franchises, taken from us in their prime by callous game publishers. Running the gamut from the venerable Sonic (of whose decline we've already spoken) to the good-to-crappy-in-two-years Viewtiful Joe, these are all games that just deserved better. I personally lament the decline of the Tomb Raider series (number 7 on the list) the most. Her most recent outing was much better than previous iterations, and I definitely hope that Eidos can keep up the momentum. Are there any series that you feel have fallen from heights that should have made the list?

Comments

X-COM

[borfast]

The X-COM series (actually, just the first two, IMHO) was probably the best strategy game I have ever played. Sometimes I even think it was the best game I ever played. It's a shame they ruined it starting with the third installment in the series.

UFO: Aftermath, Aftershock (and soon, Afterlight) are pretty cool games but they're nowhere near the coolness of X-COM: UFO Defense (or, for those of us in Europe and other parts of the world, UFO: Enemy Unknown) and X-COM: Terror From The Deep.

Those were the days... :)

Turok

[Sciros]

I haven't read the article ("games" blocked :-P) but if they didn't mention the Turok series then they've overlooked one of the biggest losses to gamers in history. (If they mentioned Turok then sweet.)

Turok: Dinosaur Hunter and Turok 2: Seeds of Evil for N64 set new standards for console FPS games in terms of both graphics and weapon design. In my opinion, Turok 2 is yet to be outdone by any FPS as far as hardcore weapon lineups are concerned. Sure there is the occasional gem like HL2's gravity gun, but nothing has had as many great hurting machines as the Turok games.

Those first two games rocked. Great levels, awesome bosses. Turok 2 even had a half-decent multiplayer.

I don't know what went wrong after that, but the games just underdelivered in every way possible. There was Turok: Rage Wars which was the dumbest thing ever because when you have Perfect Dark (or Goldeneye) on your console, like heck you're gonna care about a multiplayer-combat-oriented Turok game. Whoopee. And it just went downhill from there.

They're trying to resurrect this franchise nowadays, so we'll see what happens. But my expectations at this point are quite low.