There’s a “crappy sequels” thread running in CS right now, so I thought we should recognize the good sequels in the gaming world.
Extra points if you think of a series where the sequel was really good and the original was bad.
Warcraft, for example- I thought the original was utterly unplayable, but 2 rocked. Taking that a step further, StarCraft (which was really another sequel, sorta) was even better.
I didn’t enjoy the original Half Life at all, but god do I love HL2…
I found GTA: Vice City really bad, even though they did a really good job of capturing the Miami Vice ambience and setting… but San Andreas might have been the best game ever.
Reasonable people can disagree on which of the Ultima series was the best, but absolutely nobody thinks it was the first one. Master of Orion II was much better than I. It’s too bad they never made a third - I bet that would have been awesome. I’ve got a soft spot in my heart for Civ I though.
If we go by console releases, how about picking Ultima: Quest of the Avatar (technically part 4) as the sequel to Ultima: Exodus (part 3) for Nintendo?
No, it wasn’t. There are many good things to like about Baldur’s Gate 2, but it was vastly smaller than BG1. Yes, the map was larger, but even counting all indoor areas it was smaller than BG1, where every inch of the map was covered in playable outdoor areas, which usually had at least a small dungeon or two.
I nominate Thief 2. Arguably the best direct sequel of all time, and took the awesome original and made into smething almost sinfully incredible.
Call of Duty 2 was infinitely better than Call of Duty 1, especially in terms of multiplayer. Currently it seems Call of Duty 4 is one of the best FPS’s on the market.
From the old SSI Gold Box games, Curse of the Azure Bonds was a much better game than * Pool of Radiance*. Partially because the plot & pacing of CAB was better and partially because they added features to CAB (such as the Fix command) which made playing it much easier.
I’m going to give you an example from two games I didn’t like. Halo 1 outside of a few points was a terrible design: bland levels that the player backtracks through repeatedly, repetitive enemies, and just a bland mush. I still don’t like Halo 2 but my complaints there are just the interface; if it was on a PC it was be an okay FPS (well unless Microsoft were to completely botch the port but what are the odds of that happening?). I can’t even comprehend why someone would like the original Halo; the sequel is such a much better product I can’t believe it sprang from the same ground.
Deus Ex: Invisible War (Deux Ex 2) was a good sequel. It was also a good game of itself.
However, it greatly paled in comparison to Deus Ex, which is considered one of the best games ever made, and rightly so.
But if you ignore the fact that it was a compartively weak followup, the second game is a solid effort.
I preferred Max Payne 2 to Max Payne 1. Mainly because it didn’t have the annoying “follow the red trail of blood” sequences which were very frustrating in Max Payne 1. Although, I did prefer the storyline of the first one.
(Note that I played MP1 on a PS2. The controls were horrible for anything requiring precision like the sniper rifle or the trail of blood parts. That may have soured my experience somewhat. MP2 I played via Steam on my PC and didn’t have any control problems.)
And then there’s Fallout, which was the spiritual successor to Wasteland. It would have been Wasteland 2 but EA wouldn’t release the name to Interplay without an excessive sum of money.
Star Control II. StarCon I was a nice side-by-side 2 player battle game, with diverse spaceships whose powers interacted interestingly with each other, and a fun game environment (gravity whip!). Starcon II added about 10 new ships, each of them pretty fresh and interesting in their own right, without throwing off the balance of the original game.
And then Starcon II also added a completely awesome single-player campaign which is still my favorite gaming/story experience of all time.
Too bad (to steal a phrase) there wasn’t a sequel.
Heck, GTA3 was a massive leap over GTA2; while the top-down GTAs were fun, going to 3D changed everything.
A few others off the top of my head:
I’m sure some folks would trumpet Super Mario 64 over Super Mario World (IMO a lesser leap from 2D to 3D than GTA2 to GTA3 above), Super Mario World over SMB 3, or SMB 3 over SMB 2, but the leap from Mario Bros. to the original Super Mario Bros. was amazing to me when I was a kid. But, overall, the series has had a pretty decent progression in sequel quality over the years. Yes, I enjoyed SMB2.
It took a while for my local arcade players to warm to Street Fighter II, since we’d all been burned by the pretty boring and (since we had the cabinet with the giant rubber buttons) nearly unplayable Street Fighter. Mortal Kombat fans of my acquaintance also thought MK2 was a really good sequel to MK.
Yeah, I deliberately left out GTA3 because it’s so different from 1 & 2 that it can’t rightly be called a sequel. It’s as though they made the sequel to a Chaplin film next year with sound and color and CGI and so forth.
Freespace 2 was a monstrous good upgrade on the original Freespace, with higher resolution graphics, more fighters, and properly deadly capital ships.
Kohan: Ahriman’s Gift was a fine upgrade to Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns, though it was, really, the same game with some new stuff and tuning. The subsequent Kohan: Kings of War didn’t really work as well.
Multiplayer. Halo 1 wasn’t on Live (Live didn’t exist then), but there were system link games and you could play through your computer through Xbox Connect, but it was pretty laggy. Halo 2 was very strongly entrenched in the multiplayer aspect, but Halo 2’s problems were modded maps (for the downloadable ones), some cheating, and a few glitches. Virtually all of that was fixed and virtually eliminated for Halo 3, though. The fact that Bungie released the Halo 3 Beta to get their network right before the game helped a lot, as well (look and learn, Epic games).
In the Halo community, some still wax poetic about Halo 1 because of the unbalanced pistol and Halo 2 because of the button glitches and the lenient hitboxes and battle rifle. Halo 2 might have had the best collection of multiplayer maps, but we’ll see when the last three are released for Halo 3 to definitively make that statement.
I think most gaming sequels are superior to their predecessors because of technological advances. I thought vice city was much better than san andreas though, specially the pc versions.
