To be fair, when Doom II came out there hadn’t been any real technological developments for it to exploit over its predecessor- we’re talking about the early-mid 1990s here, after all. Rollercoaster Tycoon came out in 1999 and RCT2 was 2002- so, a three-year gap and some advances in tech (including “Ride The Rides 3D” being practical and used in at least one other contemporary game).
Dark Forces was Doom in the Star Wars universe. Run around bucking Stormtroopers down, explore the inside of a Star Destroyer, get kidnapped by Jabba the Hut, etc. The sequel Jedi Knight gives you a light saber (which is not especially easy to use if you’re controlling it with a keyboard), an actual 3D environment (DF was 2.5D) and much much more difficult puzzles. I remember playing the JK demo. You’re in a fuel depot and the only way to move on to the next part of the game is to adjust fuel levels in a tank, jump in there at the right time and swim through. But wait, you say… there was a level just like that in DF, except you had to swim through sewage. But in Dark Forces that level was much more intuitive. As you went through it each time you could plainly see the new areas that had just opened up because of your previous actions. In JK, there was nothing at all to indicate how to adjust the fuel tank so you could proceed. I’m not a big fan of games that can’t be beat unless you have a printed walkthrough telling you exactly what you have to do.
Soldier of Fortune was a fun shoot-em-up with lots of gore. SoF II was a creep and crawl game in which your enemies were invisible and never missed you. SoF: Payback is pretty sucky but has fun moments.
As for the C&C universe:
Tiberian Sun went too far into the future and lost a lot of the fun of the original game. Having to lay down cement all over your base so Nod tunneling units couldn’t get you sucked. The Nod artillery that could shoot you from across the entire map and killed your units in two or three shots really sucked. Micromanaging your airborne machine-gunners so that they wouldn’t land and immediately be killed sucked as well. It was a game full of good ideas but it never became more than the sum of its parts.
Red Alert 3 sucks ass compared to RA2/Yuri’s Revenge. RA3 was trying to be ultra-campy and fun but it just comes across as stupid. The only really neat things are little details like the neighborhood getting wrecked by battle debris and how the engineer has to hold onto his helmet when jet-skiing across the water.
C&C3 was an interesting take on the concepts of Generals combined with the existing C&C universe. C&C4 changed the formula altogether, abandoning base building altogether and putting in the dreaded unit cap. I can see why they did this. Every C&C game is basically the same- turtle up, tech up and once you have an army of elite ass-pounders go destroy your enemy. C&C4 was supposed to make battles quick and furious while getting rid of the micromanaging resources. Too bad no one wants to play C&C that way.
Top Gun 2 for NES was worse than Top Gun 1. I don’t think the first was that great though.
Yup.
For the grand majority of games, game #2 is “let’s take game #1, correct everything that players thought was wrong and add limited amounts of new shit on top”. As a general rule, that works more than fine (Fallout 2 bugs and ambulatory car trunk aside).
The real, absolute craptastic shit is almost always #3 - when the devs figure “allright, we’ve pushed that as far as it can go, let’s try to reimagine it, only better” or “let’s widen our player base by appealing to more gamer stereotypes”. Except it was generally imagined just right the first time around…
I’m looking at you, Thief : Deadly Blue Shadows.
Same here. It was different, that’s for sure. I’m not convinced it should have called itself Civilization. But it was, indeed, an awesome 4x game. The Public Works budget alone, to buy tile improvements instead of using settlers/workers, was brilliant. So were the visible (and raidable) resource trade lanes. If they’d combined the idea with critical resources (that is to say, if you don’t have iron you can’t build knights/panzers/whatever) it would have been close to perfect.
I hated Battlefield 2 a lot more than I did playing the Desert Combat mods for Battlefield 1942, and just as a game overall in general. And it was buggy. I’ve heard mostly positive things about Battlefield 3: Bad Company, so maybe this is one of a series of games that bucks the “the third game always sucks” trend.
BF1942 Desert Combat is so massively better than BF2. I still pull out DC from time to time, unfortunately there are only like 50-100 people playing it at any given time.
As flawed as S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (last time I use the periods!) was*, it was brilliantly atmospheric, terrifying in parts, and highly immersive, with an interersting bunch of story twists. The follow-up, STALKER: Clear Sky, seems to have fallen short in just about every way. I never played it myself, because the faction stuff is my least favorite part of the original and that’s apparently what Clear Sky focuses on. Apparently the third game, Call of Pripyat, is much better than CS but still lacks something.
Speaking of Half-Life, I do prefer HL2 marginally over HL1, but I’ve always been a fan of characters over plot. Plus, I found it more immersive. But it’s a very close call, and as others have said, what one lacks in one area, it more than makes up for in another.
However, if you consider the episodes, I’d say that HL2:E1 is nowhere near as good as HL2, though perhaps that’s an unfair comparison since it’s so short. Fortunately, the quality and certainly characterization/storyline took a steep upturn with HL2:E2.
I have to admit I’m a little worried about Portal 2. I just fear Valve might have complicated things too much and lost the charming simplicity (not to mention the ability to be surprised by GLaDOS and a certain piece of music) of the original. OTOH, I’ve yet to be disappointed with Valve’s judgment, so it’s quite possible that whatever P2 lacks in simplicity, it makes up for in a myriad of other ways.
Ooh. What’s the consensus here about Left 4 Dead & Left 4 Dead 2? I know a lot of people who were disappointed with the sequel, but others who felt the opposite. Didn’t play either so I can’t judge.
- Personally I never had all the tech problems everyone else complained about, but that might be 'cause I bought it late enough in its life-cycle, post-patches.
I never played it, but a lot of Devil May Cry fans didn’t like DMC2.
This one I’ve only heard: odd numbered Resident Evil sequels suck. Which really, to me, means GAME IS USELESS WITHOUT LEON. And I’ve heard it mostly from females. So take that one with a grain of salt.
I’d like to hear from someone who has played FF Tactics and the sequels. I didn’t really play Tactics for the actual strategy part, more for the plot part, which is why I haven’t picked up any of the sequels. Yes, not even Al-Cid as a playable could make me do that.
L4D2 was better in every way, except subjective elements like character design. I think most people preferred the L4D survivors to the L4D2 ones.
L4D2 had better maps, better gameplay, better modes, better balance, better support. It isn’t even close.
Whether you think CivIII was a step forward or backward from CivII depends on whether you think the additional features (borders, armies, unit promotion…) outweigh the awful corruption mechanic, which basically made world-spanning empires pointless. Not a bad game, but it never grabbed me the way II or IV did.
If you want a really old example, Frontier was a huge let-down after Elite.
IV had basically the same corruption mechanic as III, for gold at least (though not for shields/hammers). They just displayed it in a different place, that apparently made it not as noticeable.
Exactly. In IV you were still never going to have a massive globe-spanning empire as it would have bankrupted you, so there was still a limit on that kind of activity.
I’ve yet to play a game of Civ IV in which I didn’t have a massive, globe-spanning Empire. And I’ve yet to encounter any problems with corruption or expense in maintaining said Empire.
The WWE games have been getting steadily worse (in terms of gameplay, though not graphics and sound) since No Mercy on the N64, which I think was the last one to use the Asmik Ace/AKI grappling system.
I actually liked KOTOR 2, including the story. It was the bugs and the obvious loose ends in the dialog and maps (where the developers had run out of time and had to delete quests) that pissed me off.
I also think HL2 is vastly superior to HL1, and in fact, as an immersive experience it’s superior to anything else I’ve ever played.
Super Mario World was widely regarded as the best game ever when it came out, so calling it inferior to SMB3 seems a bit odd.
I’ve always thought Super Mario Bros. 2 was far worse than 1 and 3.
In fairness, SMB2 was really just a totally unrelated game called Doki Doki Panic that used sprites lifted from the SMB world for the US and European markets.
My god, I’d forgotten about those awful artillery units. They would roll up about 50 miles outside your base, often on the other side of impassable terrain like a river and then just sit there and pound your unable-to-respond units. At the level in the tech tree/build process you were at you had nothing that could go out and stop them, at least not without spending a large amount of time and resources to be able to take out a relatively cheap Nod unit. Then when you killed it there would be another along soon. The range on it was just overpowered.
It does remind me of Star Trek: Armada 2, which was a RTS game set in the universe. It suffered from the problem of giving every race identical ship types (except Species 8472, who also used a different resource system instead of mining dilithium), so everyone had a long range torpedo ship with near identical stats, everyone had an assault ship, everyone had a flagship-style vessel, and a science vessel etc, they just had different models.
The Galaxy class ship could do its famous saucer separation move, but it was clunky, and they were really not very useful starfleet vessels - they were good as turrets though, which is hardly the role I imagined them in for the former flagship of the Federation - parked outside your base as a defence system. The way to win as the Federation was to build a ton of Akira-class torpedo ships since they were cheap and had an absurdly long range and were also fast, so you could hit and run en masse on everyone.
The only exception was against the Borg, who were just overpowered. Their ships were hard to tell apart, except for the diamond, sphere and cube, all the others looked almost identical, but it didn;t matter - you just churned out 8 cubes relatively easily and then combined them into a Tactical Mega Cube (I forget the actual name) that was essentially immortal. Your one ultra ship could cruise across the field with impunity and take on anything it came across, assimilating all the weapons and abilities of anything it came across, so you get an immortal ship that has all of your enemy’s special abilities.
The AI never used the tactical cube, however, so as a human player it was easy to kill the Borg.
The game was also sort-of 3D, so you also had a z-axis to fly around in on the maps, but the implementation of that was pretty terrible so you almost always just ignored it unless the computer pathed your ships up or down due to small objects.
Operation Flashpoint Dragon Rising was the official sequel to Operation Flashpoint. Only it wasn’t made by the original developers. It has a great graphics engine and there’s a good game there somewhere, but there were just numerous problems that should have been easy to fix but weren’t fixed in the 1 or 2 widely spaced patches. And no dedicated server support and no SDK is what finished it off.
ARMA and ARMA2 are the true sequels to Operation Flashpoint, they’re huge and impressive, but have plenty of bugs too. Still, I think they are an improvement.