Justin Williams Park City Utah goes over some of the worst continuations of all time.
A good sequel is hard to pull off; even if the second or third outing of a franchise is technically good on its own merits, it will invariably be compared to the original. Justin Williams Park City Utah wants to take a look at some sequels where its hard to know what the developers were thinking. Some suffered from problems in development, while others were doomed from the initial brainstorming sessions. All share one thing in common: none of them lived up to the standards set by their predecessors.
Justin Williams Park City Utah begins with a sequel that most don’t even know exists: Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures. This sequel, released in 1994 for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo Entertainment System, eschewed the classic arcade game’s gameplay loop of guiding Pac-Man through a maze of pellets while avoiding ghosts. Instead, the sequel adopts a much more detailed, less esoteric art style, putting the titular character against a 2D side-view backdrop. The player guides Pac-Man through the levels by slingshotting pellets at the screen to interact with items, draw Pac-Man’s attention to things, and feed him “power pellets”.
Not surprisingly, Justin Williams Park City Utah points out, the game was not as received as well as the easy-to-learn, hard-to-master classic the original was.
Another more recent disappointing sequel according to Justin Williams Park City Utah was Dead Space 3. The original Dead Space was lauded for its sci-fi horror sensibilities, and the sequel, Dead Space 2, was given even more praise. Parallels were drawn by many to the Alien series of movies: while the first was a straight-up horror, the second expanded upon the original by injecting more action into the mix without losing the original’s terrifying atmosphere.
Unfortunately, the parallels didn’t end there: much like Alien 3, Dead Space 3 can be described in one word: bad. By introducing even more over-the-top action, the game lost its horror roots and became yet another generic space alien shooter game.
Speaking of sequels that missed the mark when it comes to realizing the series’ core tenants, Justin Williams Park City Utah wants us to know there are few failures as egregious as Metal Gear Survive. The Metal Gear series, created by Hideo Kojima (who has been referred to as “the David Lynch of video games”) has always been an incredibly complicated, wacky, script-heavy series focused on the horrors of war and the nature of mankind. Metal Gear Survive, the first (and hopefully, only) game in the series produced by Konami after their separation from Kojima, reduces the game into an already well-trodden zombie survival game.
Rounding out the list, Justin Williams Park City Utah brings up another strange follow-up to a classic series: Bomberman: Act Zero. Bomberman classically has been a cutesy, cartoony multiplayer game, where players have a top-down view of the game map. Players set bombs to try to take out competitors, and the final one standing is the winner.
Bomberman: Act Zero doesn’t stray far from the established game mechanics, but it makes a few bad choices: for one, the art style, which had gone through minimal changes since the series debuted in the late 80s, underwent a dramatic shift to a more “gritty, dark” art style. The character designs became extremely generic, and the darkness of the style made it hard to discern the playing field. Insanely, the game also got rid of its multiplayer mode, which was the series’ main draw. Justin Williams Park City Utah thinks you would be hardpressed to find a more tone-deaf sequel than this.
There will always be sequels that let down fans of classic series—but, at least we can still gain entertainment by making fun of how bad they are.
