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10 ALMOST FORGOTTEN GAME SEQUELS

28/6/2018

26 Comments

 
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Sequels. They should, in theory, build upon what has come before. They should be better, a consolidation of everything that made their predecessor great, with fresh takes, new ideas... but enough of what fans loved first time around.

That doesn't always happened. The history of gaming is littered with the husks of sequels which, for one reason or another, remain overshadowed by their forebears; they were just too similar, too different, or too bad. 

Here are ten of them. 
HEART OF THE ALIEN
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A Mega-CD-only sequel to the classic Another World, Heart of the Alien wasn't a bad idea in principle - retell the original story from the point of view of your alien chum, "Papoose" - but in execution it lacked polish and finesse. Having involved him in initial stages of Heart of the Alien's development, "creative differences" led publisher Interplay forged ahead without Another World's creator Eric Chahi. He later disavowed it as not being an official part of the Another World story.

Meeeeow! Chahi got clawz.
FADE TO BLACK
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Flashback was thematically and stylistically very similar to Another World, despite coming from the mind of someone completely different. The game's creator, Paul Cuisset, was at least kept around for development of a sequel.

Unfortunately, Fade to Black was a stark departure from its predecessor, swapping the slick, stylised, cut-scenes for ugly CGI, and replacing the side-on platforming with third-person, 3D shooting. It was reasonably forward-thinking for the time, but it irritated many fans of the original by tossing aside what made it so good. Thus: where dat game gone now?

Answer: Toiletland.
NiGHTS: JOURNEY OF DREAMS
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A more-or-less forgotten Wii-only follow-up to the cult Saturn title NiGHTS into Dreams, Journey of Dreams appeared to be superficially similar to its forebear... albeit shackled to a dreadful camera, and graphics which - by the time it was released - appeared dated. Similarly, the arcade-like structure was woefully out of step with the era, while the way the Wiimote was utilised made controlling the character a headache. Consequence: swept under the rug like a shrivelled-up old rat.
CRASH: MIND OVER MUTANT
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Yeah, even I'd forgotten this had even existed too. It took the running-out-of-the-screen classic Crash gameplay, and... more or less completely forgot about it. Instead, it was an attempt to turn the franchise into a Mario-like free-roaming platformer, albeit having more in common - perhaps inevitable given its lineage - to the Spyro games. Not least in how easy it was.

It wasn't a total travesty, but has been proved by the success of the recent Crash anthology release... people want to see the Bandicoot in his default environment; Swansea.
BOMBERMAN ACT ZERO
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Brightly coloured, fun, cartoonish... all elements associated with the Bomberman franchise. Bomberman Act Zero was a stark departure from the established baseline, a gritty reboot akin to making a new version of Teletubbies set in a dystopian, post-apocalyptic wilderness, where La La, Dipsy, Tinky-Winky and Po must fight to survive against bloodthirsty mutated rabbits, at the behest of a cruel alien sun god.

The blood shall run like Tubbycustard (tm).
HALO REACH
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It's not that Halo Reach is bad - indeed, I'd argue that it has one of the best endings of any game ever - just that it did, and still does, feel inessential next to the main Halo series. Tedious as that may be, with its po-faced mythology and general sense of self-importance.
MEDAL OF HONOR: WARFIGHTER
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Whatever happened to the Medal of Honor series? This is what happened: Warfighter, a game which took the series' traditional WW2-set combat and attempted to compete with Call of Duty Modern Warfare by setting it in the present day, with glitchy visuals, numerous bugs, a bewilderingly unfocused storyline, and dated, linear, gameplay. There hasn't been a Medal of Honor game since.
SUPER MARIO SUNSHINE
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Super Mario Sunshine is not bad... but in the wake of its groundbreaking predecessor, Super Mario 64, it sort of got a bit lost. It's a gorgeous game, and boasts the sort of ingenuity the series is famed for, but it also messed around with some of the tenets of the franchise.

​With much of the gameplay built around Mario cleaning up sentient diarrhoea, and flying around on a water-powered jetpack, it was something of a departure. Hindsight suggests that it lacked some of the polish Mario games are known for. The sprawling, non-linear levels were a feature of Super Mario Odyssey, but at the time felt at odds with Mario's traditional focus.

It sold well at the time, but Nintendo admitted later that it had failed to live up to expectations. Consequently, it finds itself filed alongside Super Mario Bros. 2 as one of the less-remembered entries in the main Mario series.
DRIV3R
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Here's a good idea; take your successful franchise, in which players have enjoyed driving around in cars, and release a sequel in which huge chunks of it are set on foot. And not just set on foot... but set on foot using really clunky controls. It's akin to making a sequel to The Fast & The Furious set around the world of speed running.

Worse still, it has become synonymous with a review score-fixing scandal dubbed DRIV3Rgate. You probably remember that; it became part of the justification for the embarrassing drip-stain on gaming history that is GamerGate.
WII SPORTS RESORT 
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Few games have helped to sell a system as well as Wii Sports. Indeed, it's up there with both Tetris (Game Boy) and Super Mario World. As a standalone, non-pack-in, game, Wii Sports Resort needed to be compelling enough to shift copies on its own terms. There's no question it sold well - it's the third best-selling game on the Wii - but few would argue that it is anywhere near as iconic and console-definining as the original. And so, it has been airbrushed out of all but the most tenacious of memories.
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26 Comments
mikey
28/6/2018 10:45:59 am

Can I suggest Sonic-R on the Saturn. For SEGA fanboys like myself it was *the* Saturn big hitter to square off against the in vogue open-world classics like Mario 64 and Tomb Raider.

It ended up being the most striking "2d to 3d" failure and the beginning of the end for the Saturn. OK maybe the end had begun already but you get my drift...

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Spiney O'Sullivan
28/6/2018 11:28:17 am

I don't think that's fully fair on Sonic R. It's not Mario 64, but even at the time we knew it wasn't developed by Sonic Team, and it was never really meant to be the true 2D-to-3D Sonic game that Sonic Xtreme was built up to be, so it can't really be compared to Mario 64.

It's easy to forget now, but Sega hyped up Sonic Xtreme a LOT considering its incredibly rocky development (which nearly physically killed its lead developer). I'm sure it was mentioned on the box my Saturn came in, I think I recall competitions and tie-in promotions around it, and I believe there's even actual physical merchandise that did go to retail. For a spin-off that got inadvertently cast into the limelight, Sonic R was reasonably fun -if far too short- and had some enjoyably cheesy music. It also pulled off some things that were previously understood to be pretty much impossible on the Saturn (the GameHut channel on Youtube, run by an ex-Traveller's Tales developer, goes into that sort of thing).

The failure of Sonic Xtreme to materialise in any form (even though every single form I've seen admittedly looked awful) was far worse for the Saturn than a spin-off title not made by the real Sonic team being so-so (though if we're honest, the Playstation would have trampled it anyway - no matter how Xtreme he became, Sonic was irrelevant to the FHM generation that the Playstation capitalised on).

On a Sonic Team note, Nights: Journey of Dreams was so unfun to play to that it actually made me question how much I liked the original (a feat with Duke Nukem Forever also managed, though I maintain than DN3D is really well put-together). The free-flying stuff is great, but it reminded me that part a certain point, the bosses were often a completely miserable and sometimes random-seeming experience (looking at you, Jackle). Add even more painful bosses (that chameleon thing) to a story mode padded out with awful platforming with some dull children seemingly taken out of Mary Poppins, and you have a sequel that deserves to be forgotten. The only good thing I have to say for it is that if you switch back to analogue stick controls, it's much more bearable than the motion style.

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Darth Tinder
28/6/2018 12:51:54 pm

I dunno. I know Sega made a lot of strange decisions from 1995 onwards (on the home consoles at least) but cancelling Sonic Xtreme was a brave one and I think it would have been worse for the Saturn had it actually come out. Yeah, it was a nightmare to make, probably cost a lot of money and it feels like a waste... but it would have had to be perfect to go up against Mario 64, and based on what's there I don't think that was gonna happen. They were smart to hold a proper Sonic game back until the Dreamcast...

...Until Sonic Adventure came out. Oh no!

Spiney O'Sullivan
28/6/2018 02:57:17 pm

Oh, I agree that none of the versions I saw looked fun (or even playable in most cases), but I just meant that the promise of it as a whole being pulled after so much hype was pretty damaging to the system, and definitely moreso than Sonic R just being okay. Either way they were stuck: release a bad game that they'd grossly overhyped, or release nothing after grossly overhyping it. Both would have been very damaging options, after which point a spin-off racing title done by a third party wasn't going to sink or save the system either way.

Darth Tinder
28/6/2018 03:39:45 pm

True. I think "choose between making a bad decision or a *really* bad decision" sums up Sega's problems around that time.

Again, except in the arcades where they were always fantastic.

Lewis
28/6/2018 10:48:23 am

I’d add The Chaos Engine II to that list - basically sunk without trace on launch and only ever got released on PC.

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Lorfarius link
28/6/2018 10:57:15 am

It came out on the Amiga as well which it was designed for. PC was a port.

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Lorfarius link
28/6/2018 10:58:44 am

In fact looking back it never had a PC port. Amiga only!

Neptunium
28/6/2018 12:53:55 pm

Mario Sunshine? Really? Someone put some toys in my pram so I can throw them!!!11!!11!1

Wii Sports Resort I have mixed feelings about. It isn't as groundbreaking as the original, but 100 pin bowling is absolutely magical. Worth the RRP solely for that and table tennis.

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CJJC
28/6/2018 02:54:18 pm

Frisbee Golf, Jimmy.

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Larry Bundy Jr. link
28/6/2018 01:18:37 pm

Someone was looking at my tweets yesterday :D

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lilock3
28/6/2018 01:19:39 pm

Someone *needs* to make Biffo's Teletubbies reboot idea!

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Spiney O’Sullivan
28/6/2018 02:03:18 pm

Couldn’t help but think while reading the “Driv3rgate” bit that one of the -many- negative outcomes of Gamergate is that any actual discussion of shady reviewer/games company PR relations now has to be done in a very careful way that says “well, this is really a bad thing that they did and we should probably acknowledge that a bit, but the most important thing here is that I’m definitely not part of Gamergate.” (Even in writing that sentence I put more far work than I’d like to admit into wording my way around the using terms like “ethics” and “gaming journalism”...). That probably isn’t a good thing.

When you think about it, the end result of Gamergate’s stated aim was actually to leave the goal wide open for whichever PR person wants to be responsible for smashing the next Driv3rgate into it. I mean, who in their right mind is going to make a big thing of it when the next games payola scandal comes out?

That said, it seems that even without ever having to worry about being caught paying off/threatening reviewers/sites again, big companies like EA are still perfectly able to create massive sales-damaging PR nightmares for themselves out of sheer arrogance and shortsightedness that results in getting attention in the more mainstream press. So that’s something?

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Col. Asdasd
28/6/2018 06:17:32 pm

Yeah. Harassment is awful (is that enough of a 'I'm not a nazi but' disclaimer? If not then ach, vergaben mir) but I have absolutely no doubt that the media had a strong interest in making Gamergate into as much of a toxic fiasco as possible, because they realised that it would be a very hand shield to deflect all criticism for decades to come.

Remember that this is an industry that is primarily funded by the companies it reports on. That is a very obviously unhealthy relationship, a conflict of interest on an existential level, and we'd be naive in the extreme to think that the Driv3rgate that happened to come to public attention was the only one to have ever occurred.

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David W
28/6/2018 08:33:02 pm

Rise of the Robots, for example, which was so terrible that it didn't need a suffix.

floop
28/6/2018 03:08:16 pm

syphon filter 1, 2 and 3 were not exactly smash hits, but they were fairly enjoyable stealth/combat/cook with taser em ups on the original playstation. Then "omega strain" on the ps2 happened. it was distinctly poo flavoured.

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Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
28/6/2018 03:37:32 pm

Reach forgotten? It was the final Bungie Halo game and it was excellent! Being part of a truly massed UNSC force for a change was nice, some of the levels were inspired (flying from building to building to do a little mission in each stands out in my head) and it had the Forge mode for building silly maps.

Also, Heart Of The Alien was a continuation of the original story, not a retelling from another perspective: it opens with Buddy (the Alien) putting Lester down to rest after his beat down at the hands of evil the Alien, Red Eyes, at the end of the first game.

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Geebs
28/6/2018 06:08:40 pm

Reach was the last good Halo, and way better than Halo 3.

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Col. Asdasd
28/6/2018 06:20:55 pm

The Halo game that I'd argue belongs on this list is probably ODST. In fact I'm not even sure that's the correct acronym, and I definitely don't care enough about the game to look it up.

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Marro
28/6/2018 07:53:26 pm

Spoiler! I've been trying to finish Another World for over 25 years!!
And by "putting down to rest" you mean tucking him into bed with a Jaffa Cake and a glass of Horlicks, right? RIGHT?!!

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Clive link
28/6/2018 09:12:27 pm

Nopers. Gets the intergalactic equivalent of a double-fisting with a run-up. And no lube.

Robobob
28/6/2018 06:19:26 pm

I bought that Nights sequel recently in one of those high street chains still trying to flog off old Wii stock for a quid. Bought largely on the strength of still having the Saturn original, and it being a quid. Haven't played it, mind. Doesn't sound like I'm missing it. Remember Saturn Christmas Nights?

Also, Mario Sunshine was pretty cool. I particularly liked how the world got a tiny bit brighter with each shine sprite you collected, until eventually you need sunglasses to dull it down a bit.

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Marro
28/6/2018 07:56:49 pm

Is this list console only or can I say Laser Squad Nemesis?
I can't remember much about it other that it was more buggy than the secret entrance to the Temple of Doom.

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RichardM
28/6/2018 10:10:16 pm

Surprised this hasn’t seen more action from the SMSDF*... I never liked Mario Sunshine: hated the way the levels kept changing around to suit each Shine ‘challenge’, felt lazier and less properly open world than Mario 64. FLUDD was shite. The pinata people or whatever they were called were absolutely forgettable. The only good bit i (spoilers) Bowser fessing up to his son that Peach isn’t his mother: that was cute.

*Super Mario Sunshine Defence Force

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ChorltonWheelie
3/7/2018 05:55:12 pm

Syndicate Wars.
Doom 3.
The Darkness 2 (Great game)

I 'd love to say 'Revenge of the Mutant Camels' just so I could mention 'Attack of the Mutant Camels' was called 'Advance of the Mega Camels' in America but it's hardly forgotten so I won't.

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David Heslop
10/7/2018 03:54:30 pm

I'd be tempted to throw in that weird 3D version of Sensible Soccer - was it 2000? Ugly thing that lost all of the SWOS charm.

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