I never played the first one so I can’t compare it but I played 2 and liked it a lot.
I would add when the sequel sacrifices the single player experience to add multiplayer. Although I suppose that is a little bit of numbers 4 and 5.
As a corollary to 4, I’d say Jak II and Jak III. Jak and Daxter was amazing in it’s complete lack of loading time, the ability to run from one end of the world to the other seamlessly, and it was an old-school collect everything platformer. Jak II and Jak III, while still good games, moved the setting entirely (for plot reasons), added weapons, vehicles, and missions, and overall really changed the feel of the game. But it’s rare that a developer can do that and still put out a solid game.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within was a serious, serious letdown after Sands of Time. Darker and edgier is not always good, especially when it means you have turned the Prince into an emo whiny little shit.
I like X-Com : Apocalypse a lot better than Terror From the Deep. But then there’s Enforcer and Interceptor…
MoO3 is a good example, but someone else mentioned Zelda 2 : The Adventure of Link, and that’s your winner, right there. The Final Fantasy game series runs hot and cold… 1 is great, but the one released in Japan as #2 was awful. And Final Fantasy 8 is one of the worst games I’ve ever encountered.
:eek:
I’ll give you the silly micromanaged tactics part. But that was more than made up for by the unit bank (more than 1 unit a turn yay!), the IGOUGO turn sequence (preventing armies from flip-floping into each other’s territories as much,) and, most importantly. the larger variety of battles you can fight in any given territory which also feel as if they have a good relationship to where they are on the map. The last two of these factors made it feel like a better “historical simulation” to me.
That being said, increasing the possibilities of tactical movement definitively made the AI much harder to program than when movement was territory-based. For instance, when there is an enemy stack just barely one turn away from one of my settlements by road travel, I can send out a sacrificial unit or two to camp one “square” away from the road, but in its ZOC. The enemy army will attack my sacrificial unit with its whole stack (and thus into the NEXT unit’s ZOC if any) and thus move itself out of movement distance of my city, buying it another turn.
Dungeon Keeper was a ground breaking game, great idea, incredible graphics, surprisingly effective controls, and very fun. Dungeon Keeper 2 got better graphics, a crapload of stability issues and zero improvements or elaboration on the original’s ideas, WTF Bullfrog?
Agreed.
In the Civilization series, I have generally found that, with each iteration, the new stuff that is cool and really works outweighs the new stuff that did not improve the game.
I was annoyed that the ultimate anti-alien weapon (alien gas) required that you capture the alien queen alive in order to research it. If you could get that far into the game (pretty much completing it) then it really wasn’t worth it.
The Entropy Launcher was also just a big FU to building up any sort of equipment on your squads until you managed to get the personal teleporter, then it just became a game of micromanaging your units so they could teleport away from Entropy-weilding pink aliens.
Speaking of older games (and the third game curse), Curse of the Azure Bonds was a superior game to the previous Pool of Radiance but the third game in the series, Secret of the Silver Blades was terrible. Long, long canyon mazes where you had a “random” encounter every third step, couldn’t rest to re-memorize spells that’d help you blow through them and it was just a time consuming slog between plot points. God, I hated that game.
I liked Warrior Within the best out of the set, myself. The first game suffered from having way too much of its poorly done combat, while the second one both made combat a lot more interesting and didn’t foist as much on you at one time. It also broke up the linearity of the game, so that instead of there always being The One Obvious Route everwhere, you had a bit of branching paths and a little exploration to be done through the new & crumbled castle. I imagine we can agree that Two Thrones was awful, though, in keeping with the rule of 3 
Zelda 2 I liked the best out of that series, also. It was a perfectly good game in its own right for the time, and had it simply been named something else there’d be rather less grumbling about it.
That pissed me off to no end; it was basically a graphics and animation upgrade to the original- NO new gameplay whatsoever.
B17-Flying Fortress was the same deal; the one released in 2004 or so was the same exact damn game as the 1992 or thereabouts, with better graphics, and on a CD instead of 2 dozen 5.25 floppies.
Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 was widely criticised for being exactly the same as the original- not even a graphics overhaul. It was basically a full-priced expansion pack. RTC3, however, was very good.
To be fair, the 2004 version did give you option to play as the Luftwaffe and try and shoot down the bombers (Or, if you wanted to make your life easier, make all the German pilots bail out so you never encountered any opposition on your way to the target :p), so it wasn’t exactly the same game.
I just read the review for Supreme Commander 2. I have never played it, but I would nominate it for this thread.
I think Supreme Commander 2 should count as the third game in the series, so it can be expected to suck.
Following that logic, Bioshock is the biggest exception - though it’s really hard to call it a ‘sequel’. More like taking the basic idea and casting it in a new form. Now if it turned out that Atlas was SHODAN, that would have sucked mightily.
Would you kindly … go get stepped on… insect.
Then again, Doom II was basically an expansion pack to Doom, but that didn’t stop it from being a great game.
Bioshock really doesn’t have anything to do with System Shock, in much the same way none of the Final Fantasy games have anything to do with each other (despite the fact there are something like [del]14[/del] XIV “Final Fantasy” games).
Sid Meier’s Railroads! was the fourth and easily the worst in the Railroad Tycoon series.
I’ll have to completely disagree with you there Max, and agree with Martini.
I loved the Call to Power games, prefered them over Civ II. In fact I still have Call to Power II on my PC now, and I still regularly play it.