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10 UNDERWHELMING SEQUELS WHICH KILLED THEIR FRANCHISE

12/3/2018

23 Comments

 
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Bad video games are not uncommon, but slightly too often... there have been bad video games which happen to be sequels to good video games. Or, at least, sequels which aren't as well received - for whatever reason - from the game that spawned them. 

Sometimes an overabundance of hype is to blame. Other times its a switch in development teams. Sometimes, the prevailing winds are just blowing-off in a different direction.

Here are ten such games which ended their franchises with not so much a bang... as an apologetic shrug of the shoulders...
STREET OF RAGE 3
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Streets of Rage 2 was always going to be a tough act to follow, and on the surface Streets of Rage 3 appeared to be doing everything right to ensure the franchise didn't get stale. It tweaked the gameplay in a number of subtle ways, provided a deeper, subtly more complex, experience, and made the levels much larger than before. 

Also, a kangaroo was available as a playable character, which - frankly - should be a prerequisite for any great game. Seriously now; how much better would the Halo games be if there was a kangaroo in them?

For whatever reason, however, Streets 3 didn't hold together as well as its predecessors, and to date - despite attempts to reboot the franchise for both the Saturn and Dreamcast - remains the final game in the series. One fact which might've impacted on the game's poor reception was Yuzo Koshiro score, which players considered "disappointing" and "not up to his usual standard". 

You know: as if John Williams had performed all the music for Return of the Jedi on a slide whistle.
BIOSHOCK INFINITE
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Il Papa! This one hurts to diss. It hurts because Infinite is clearly a well-designed game, set in an intriguing location, and brimming with characterisation and some big, meaty, ideas. On most levels it's hard to argue against it being a solid, decently put together, experience.

Unfortunately, following one of the best games of all time (and we'll ignore Bioshock 2) - which boasted perhaps the greatest twist in video game history - was too high a hurdle to overcome. The more open locations weren't as enjoyable as the original's claustrophobic setting, and some of it just felt a bit sloppy and thrown-together. It proves that if you're selling a first-person shooter it doesn't matter how involved and smart the story is; you need to get the game right too.

Following the release of the Burial at Sea DLC, the game's producer Ken Levine announced there would be no more Bioshock games, as he found the stress of putting them together too great.

He honked, sadly: "It changed my life in terms of what it did to my health, and what it did to my view of making games, and my relationships with people."

"Ken" you believe it??!?!?!
PERFECT DARK ZERO
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Goldeneye was a classic. Perfect Dark was a reasonable follow-up. Then Microsoft bought Rare, and the third game in this sort-of-trilogy was pumped out as a launch title for the Xbox 360, like an Oscar acceptance speech that consisted of somebody emitting a long, slow, guff into the microphone. 

Frankly, Perfect Dark Zero would've benefitted from having a little longer in development, feeling like the product of a development team getting to grips with new hardware; the graphics all looked as if they'd been laminated, and over-polished. That's not "polished" as in "made to look great", but "polished" as in "everything was really shiny, like it was coated in a slick film of baby oil".

In order to be a launch game - a significant feat for any development team, and a breakdown-inducing effort for the 25-person skeleton crew Rare was woking with - they had to axe a number of features, which might be why the game feels so empty and unfinished. The result wasn't a fundamentally broken game so much as one that was achingly average. And shiny. So shiny.

Though idiot reviewers were fairly kind to it at the time - no doubt excited by the new hardware, and dazzled by the shininess - most true aficionados tend not to mention Zero when discussing the one-two kidney punch of Goldeneye and Perfect Dark.
SPOT GOES TO HOLLYWOOD
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Cool Spot was one of the best-looking side-on platform games to ever grace the Mega Drive. A proper sequel could've only built upon that. Instead, when a new development team took over for Spot's second instalment, they dragged it in a completely unwanted direction... like a new step-father taking their wife's son to the dentist.

Specifically, this new direction was an isometric one.

The big issue was that Cool Spot as a character wasn't really designed for an isometric view point (indeed, he had been designed as a corporate mascot for 7-Up), and this made him very difficult to control. It also ensured that Spot Goes To Hollywood was unnecessarily tough, and pretty much expelled all the residual goodwill built up over the first game.

And that, you see, is how you burst a (cool) spot.
​DUKE NUKEM FOREVER
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Famously the most delayed sequel of all time, when Duke Nukem Forever was finally released it was eviscerated utterly by the gaming press. It would've had a hard time living up to expectations even if it had been a decent game, but to release one so fundamentally flawed was leaving it open to a drubbing.

The truth is, I don't hate Duke Nukem Forever. I mean, it's a terrible game in almost every respect, but it's so terrible, so broken, so misguided, and so lacking in sophistication of any sort, that it's hard not to have a certain begrudging affection for it. It stands apart from everything else, and though its blunt misogyny was about fifteen years too late even in 2011, you've got to admire its shameless, gonzo, conviction.

Begrudging affection aside, it doesn't change the fact that it has, in all likelihood, killed the Duke Nukem series forever.
DINO CRISIS 3
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Dinosaurs. Think about them. They were real. Like, actually real. Wherever you are reading this right now, millions of years ago - on that very spot - dinosaurs were fannying around doing stuff. No other monster in popular culture can hold that accolade - they've never dug up any vampire or Dalek fossils - and this might be why dinos hold such a unique appeal.

Therefore, it was a stroke of genius on Capcom's part to mix its survival horror template with dinosaurs. The first two games in Dino Crisis series were well received, and delivered on the promise of this concept.

The third one ruined everything... ditching the dinosaurs for weird mutations which looked more like dragons and that, and spoiling matters even further with a camera system that simply didn't work.

The locations were larger than in its either its predecessors or the Resident Evil games, but the speed of the player's movement was significantly faster. This, coupled to the flip-camera viewpoint, led to a bewildering experience, which left the player continually trying to make sense of switching perspectives, and firing at off-screen enemies.

The response from players was thus: "Please... no more Dino Crises".
BANJO-KAZOOIE: NUTS & BOLTS
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Microsoft was very keen to exploit Rare's enviable properties after it snatched the developer from beneath Nintendo's snout. Hence, it was inevitable that there'd be a Banjo-Kazooie game on the Xbox 360 sooner or later. Unfortunately, the one we got was Nuts & Bolts.

Ditching the fairly classic free-roaming 3D platformer gameplay of the originals, it required players to gather up vehicle parts before putting them together and doing races. It disappointed fans, it confused newcomers who didn't understand what the fuss was about, and ultimately... that was the end of Banjo-Kazooie.

We've since had Yooka-Laylee, a sort of spiritual follow-up to the original games from many of the original team members who, like the rest of us, would prefer to pretend that Nuts & Bolts had never existed.
COMMAND AND CONQUER 4
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It's difficult to understate how massive the Command & Conquer series was in the 90s. It bloated left and right into various different franchises and timelines... but it was Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight which finally finished it off. Alright, there has since been an MMO version, and various smartphone re-releases, but Tiberian Twilight was the tawdry end-point for the main series. 

Like many franchise-killers, C&C4 ditched a lot of what players had loved about the originals. Gone was the resource-gathering, and in its place was a game that was pretty much unrecognisable from what came before. 

One sure fire way to kill a series is to offer players something completely different to the thing they had previously enjoyed, as if to say "No - you are wrong... this is what it should be like."
SYPHON FILTER: THE OMEGA STRAIN
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The stupidly-named Syphon Filter was a proper smash - and it's somewhat unfair that it isn't more fondly-remembered today as a less weird, less fiddly, take on the Metal Gear Solid formula. It was a shame, therefore, that each subsequent instalment watered down the concept further... until The Omega Strain smashed it entirely. 

A scarcity of ammo, enemies which respawned constantly, clunky controls, and other little niggles all added up to ensure that The Omega Strain wasn't so much a return to form as a full stop.

"Strain" is right. You know: like straining to do a poo. 
STAR CONTROL 3
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This is a rare example of a postively-reviewed game killing a franchise. Star Control 3 is generally considered the best game in the series... for those who were inexplicably invested in the series.

​Alas, perhaps because its basic graphics and strategy were out of step with what most players wanted in an era where nice graphics had become a prerequisite of any game, its sales were sufficiently weak to ensure there has never been a fourth. 

In my opinion, they were all simply catching up with what I believed when I played the original Star Control on the Mega Drive: why has this terrible, dated-looking, game been released at all?! 
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23 Comments
Stephen Botting
12/3/2018 10:20:23 am

Of all the list here the two I'm most sad about are Streets of Rage and C&C.
I also have a lot of sadness for Destruction Derby Arenas which killed my favourite driving franchise (I'm much better at crashing than cornering).

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BOYD1981
12/3/2018 10:40:07 am

Legacy of Kain: Defiance managed to kill off both Blood Omen and the vastly superior Soul Reaver by giving people what they want and allowing them to play as both titular (tee hee) Kain and Raziel in one game. Sadly this decision lead to a game with not even a quarter of 25% of the gameplay or camera control the previous titles had, and when you consider that large portions of content were cut from both the Soul Reaver games which still managed to be excellent, Defiance just seems like the gaming equivalent of realising half way through a poo that you're out of toilet paper.

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Dungeon Master
12/3/2018 11:09:20 am

I'd submit Eye of the Beholder 3 for this category. Granted, that genre of game was dying/dead, but it was a huge disappointment anyway.

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Col. Asdasd
12/3/2018 11:10:23 am

This topic always makes me a bit sad. It reminds me that all series, loved or hated, are slowly sliding towards extinction. One badly received sequel can be the end of any series, and with development and marketing costs sky-rocketing alongside shareholder expectations, the threshold at which something is considered safe gets ever-harder to satisfy.

In this sense a game like C&C4 isn't a cause for derision, it's a sobering reminder of the sword suspended over the heads of even the most popular and established gaming icons.

It wouldn't be so bad if we had a healthy turnover of ideas in the scene, with new characters, stories and gameplay concepts replacing those who have had their time in the sun, but bold new IPs and genres come along as frequently as good gaming telly.

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@purplephlebas
12/3/2018 11:19:42 am

Star Wars: the Old Republic. Not a direct sequel but as the next MMORPG in the canon from SWG it had to be good. It wasn't. It was ok. But often became a grind and more like World of Warcraft with robots. Plus it never felt a community in the way SWG for all its faults did. Really don't see another online experience with Jawas anytime soon

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Stoo
12/3/2018 11:46:37 am

Misogyny aside I didn't think Duke Nukem Forever was all that bad? I mean, it didn't have a lot of original ideas but I don't recall it doing anything particularly wrong either. It just looked at what other shooters had been doing over the past decade, put those elements together and added Duke swaggering around.

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Spiney O'Sullivan
12/3/2018 03:04:26 pm

Unfortunately in striving desperately to do exactly what everyone else was doing, they specifically went the other way on everything that made DN3D fun on a design/gameplay level.

Levels were largely dull and linear, mostly lacking the detail and interactivity that made DN3D's world so believable, or the depth that made you go back to find everything. Guns felt horribly underpowered and the few interesting weapons usually had such limited ammo capacity and availability that picking them up was now just a waste of one weapon slot instead of something neat that you could have in reserve to play with when you felt like it. Vehicle segments that added nothing to the game were thrown in as though jamming more poorly-implemented gameplay styles on top of a core of mediocrity would somehow help matters.

The few memorable moments in the game were either in the first 10 minutes (the best part of the game is given away in the demo), or stood out for being cringeworthy as hell (the strip club fetch quest) or agonisingly dull (the desert).

So in the end we got a game that had almost nothing of what made its predecessor stand up against more technically impressive competitors like Quake, and which tried to overcompensate by ramping up what it thought passed for comedy. Unfortunately they didn't quite grasp that while hatefully dark comedy in games was in thanks to Rockstar, the GTA titles were (a) very good games where (b) the spiteful comedy nicely complemented the absurdity of the game world while taking jabs at our own. DNF, meanwhile, wasn't fun to play and had pretty much nothing to say beyond a few cheap shots at far better games (and I guess the Olsen Twins for some reason?) that it couldn't back up.

Maybe I'm remembering it more harshly than it deserves, but I don't think I've ever been so disappointed with a game.

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Twycross Dresser
12/3/2018 01:20:21 pm

I worked on PDZ. More time would have fixed the shininess (caused by a discrepancy between the final hardware and the Power Mac development kit) but not much else.

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RichardM
12/3/2018 04:50:19 pm

I would love to know more about this time at Rare, as I was one of Rare’s biggest fans and was genuinely gutted when Microsoft bought them out. Appreciate you can’t probably say much of anything.

Credentials: I ran a Rare fansite (RareCentral) and wrote for PDark.com, back when I was a spotty teen with nothing better to do.

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Horatio Hornblower link
12/3/2018 01:49:47 pm

Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts was being reviewed within my first weeks at [redacted games magazine] and the general company line by the well-PR'd, nostalgia-warped editorial illuminati was that is was absolutely amazing and incredible and, to quote directly, "genius". I played it for about two hours and called it overinvolved, bloated, weird and confusing and was memorably told I didn't understand what a good game was and probably shouldn't have been hired.

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Spiney O'Sullivan
12/3/2018 02:25:03 pm

I'll actually defend Nuts and Bolts (a bit). It's not a Banjo Kazooie game exactly, but the scope for creation in it is excellent, and once you starting thinking laterally about things like the magnetic beam connectors you can make some really crazy things. I guess I got from it what kids get from Minecraft now.

That said, I get that it's definitely not the sequel to Banjo Kazooie that people wanted, though I suspect the pure 3D platformer was basically seen an impossible sell after the last generation's total oversaturation of collection-heavy 3D platformers. Even by the end of the N64 era (including Banjo Tooie) there were complaints about the collectathon genre, and one generation later things weren't getting better for it as the open-world vehicle/shooting game became dominant.

Anyway, as for the game itself, it definitely went on a bit too long (never finished it), and some levels felt awkward with vehicles, but it's not utterly hateful as a game. It's kind of a shame that they didn't just try a new IP with it.

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Horatio Hornblower link
12/3/2018 05:28:08 pm

I swear I heard at one point that it actually had been designed as a new IP but somebody thought it would work better as a Banjo game. Trouble was all the decades-old lore and in-jokes rather got in the way of the game explaining itself.

Still I agree with back everything you say here. It had its charms, but went on way too long. Mostly as it seemed to want you to build an entirely new car for every single level, which took aaaages. Often longer than the level itself took to complete.

Also it was screaming out for a mechanic where you could get blueprints off other players online to save time and fuel creativity. Sort of like LittleBigPlanet-style - a shop front for cool ideas.

Big Jobs
12/3/2018 02:16:20 pm

"...dinosaurs were fannying around doing stuff" has to be one of the best lines you've ever written

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Twycross Dresser
12/3/2018 03:37:13 pm

It's also precisely why PDZ was so long in development and was so underwhelming.

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Meatballs-me-branch-me-do
12/3/2018 02:43:26 pm

Star Control (the original) was basically the “hero shooter” evolution of Space War! Very different ships, all with unique abilities, slugging it out in multiplayer mayhem. The strategy mode was interesting, but the series really hit its stride in the sequel, set in the aftermath of the war you fought in the original.

You are the last free human crew, piloting a customizable alien ship of immense power, trying to work out what’s happened, gather allies and resources, and save Earth from enslavement. The combat was improved, but it was the exploration, music, and writing that made it so damned addictive. Open source for free as “The Ur-Quan Masters”.

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sonicshrimp
12/3/2018 03:48:13 pm

It didn’t kill the franchise exactly but was disappointing: Zone of the Enders 2. Now wait, ssshh. hear me out. I enjoyed it and it developed the great parts of the first game but a criticism of ZOE (1) was its brevity, so it was an anticlimax to boot up the long awaited (and difficult to find at least where I lived) sequel and experience something that went like this:
‘Oh wow! yes! this is fantas - finished’

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RichardM
12/3/2018 04:52:27 pm

Star Focks Assault? It was shite.

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ChorltonWheelie
12/3/2018 07:07:40 pm

What a thing BIOSHOCK INFINITE nearly was.
Beautiful to look at, amazing concepts and world building.
Unfortunately you had to play a shit game to move through it. Ah well, so much promise.

And... Medal of Honor: Warfighter? Sheesh, dogshit.

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PixelGuff
12/3/2018 08:33:05 pm

I'd like to add Renegade 3 to your list. I loved Renegade and Target: Renegade, but the third was a total dog egg.

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Robobob
12/3/2018 09:35:56 pm

One of my proudest moments (for I am sad and my achievements are limited) was getting a letter published on Digi (or it may have morphed into Gamecentral by that point) about Duke Nukem Forever.

I can't remember what it said but it was something along the lines of there being a Nostradamus quatrain about Duke Nukem Forever's release.

Yeah, well, it seemed smart at the time. Funnily enough it was still literally bloody yonks after that before it was eventually released. "Duke Nukem Still Developing It Forever" as it wasn't called!!!?!!!?!

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Dr Kank
12/3/2018 10:01:40 pm

For me, Bioshock Infinite will always be the game where you can eat sandwiches you find in bins.

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Chris Wyatt
13/3/2018 12:16:03 pm

I had Spot Goes To Hollywood (for the Saturn). Agree it quite a tough (and frustrating) game.

I'm not really sure why I bought it. I guess my parents were buying me a game and that was among the crappy selection in the store that day.

I hadn't played any of the previous games, and think I must have just liked Spot from the 7-up adverts. Anyway, I have nostalgia for it, and liked it enough to actually complete it recently.

It's not a terrible game, and the music on the Saturn (and presumably PSX) version is fantastic. It also does get better once you master the tricky isometric viewpoint, but that does take a while and requires a lot of patience and not having better games to be playing (which I didn't at the time).

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Kendall9000
15/3/2018 12:47:37 am

Star Control 2 was a classic. Definitely one of the best games of the 90s.

I haven't run into many people who thought Star Control 3 was an improvement. If anything I think most fans of the series prefer to forget it ever existed.

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