Stagnant sequels
I don’t know if anybody noticed, but this year, especially E3, was incredibly sequel heavy. Sequels can be great, it’s essentially a way for developers to build on and expand whatever material they had to begin with. With games from revered developers like Ubisoft and their newly announced Assassins Creed 2, there are certainly high expectations. Especially given the original game.
What I think is clearly the wrong reason to make a sequel, is milking the proverbial “cash cow”. If your first game was successful, rejoice in your accomplishment developers, you earned it. But when next fiscal year rolls around and you need a big game to fill a void, please don’t roll back onto making a sequel when you don’t have any inspired ideas to make the second any better than the first.
Too often are characters dragged from their old game in to a new one, with very little change to anything besides the story and surrounding environment. The saying; “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” can apply to video games, but I think this mind set is taken the wrong way. Instead of “not fixing it” by making a carbon copy sequel, you should “not fix it” by leaving the original alone. What does a game with the same mechanics and play style have to offer to the world besides more money in the studios’ pocket? I would honestly say, the Mario franchise is guilty of this.
The Mario franchise produced great games. I love them as much as the next guy. But what really irks me about them is that they’re all pretty much the same game. Sure it’s fun, but how long did they go with out making any change at all to the game play. Just recently with Super Mario Galaxy did I see some real change and innovation. However, with the announcement of Super Mario Galaxy 2, I am worried that we’re simply hopping tracks from your standard platformer, to a zero-gravity platformer. I can hope that Mario Galaxy 2 offers more to us than Yoshi.
Not to entirely rag on Nintendo, the Mario games are great. I enjoy them all; it’s just the lack of an attempt at something new between each game that bothers me. It’s certainly worth saying that Mario isn’t the only guilty party.
With so many sequels to so many excellent games, we really have a chance at playing some magnificent stuff in 2010. I have enough faith in the current big name developers to believe that we’ll get some great material out of our long list of sequels. But you can bet your bottom dollar that we’ll see sequels to the sequels, and I’ll have the same gripe about them too.
