Alas, poor Sequels...

God is it ever a bad time to be a gamer. Sure, today we have graphics that barely fall short of eyeball-vision, and our controllers have gone from square boxes with buttons to slim gadgets that contour to your hand have have buttons placed right at your finger tips. But whose presidential campaign do I have to give a million dollars to to get an original game?

Today it seems that every new release is the bastard child of either something good and failure, or failure and even worse failure. And to ice the fail cake (and coincidentally much like a birthday cake), they continually add numbers to the end of each game. At least the non-creative ones do. As for the creative ones, to show that their new game is "oh so much better" than the original, they give it a title so long that any 1800s Duke would envy it. Game developers have finally sunken to the level of hollywood, where all you need to make some money off a movie/game is include an attractive female side-character and make it a sequel to something people once loved.

I feel many game developers could benefit from the old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it". It seems they've abandoned fixing the broken games completely in an effort to "fix" all the good games. When a game reviewer says, "this game sucked, this is what you could do better...", developers take that, go to the bathroom, wipe themselves with it, and think nothing more of it. But the moment someone says, "This game was great!", the immediately take that game, stuff it full of nuts and bolts made of failure and pus, put a numerical value next to the title and re-release it. Given the odds, anyone who found the original game entertaining will buy this one as well, ensuring money is made. Sure it destroys any love the gamer had for the game, but getting by these days is getting harder and harder, and broken hopes and dreams put food on your table.

According to biology, if you truly had to, you could eat your own excrement. By doing so, you would only absorb 40% of the original nutrition that was once in that food. You can continue eating your own excrement, but each time you would only absorb 40% of what was left over. In the same way, I feel each remake has only 40% of the value its previous one held. Therefore, I deduce it should only be fair that any game that is a sequel should be 40% cheaper than the original. Of course, I realise that not all sequels suck (Thief II, the Legend of Zelda series, Resident Evil, etc.), but I make my bread and butter from generalizations, so you'll have to eat my 40% nutritional pieces of work, and enjoy it.

I don't ask for much, besides having my own castle in my own country on my own planet that is owned by myself, but one thing I would like to see is game creators taking a few risks once in a while. What could you lose by creating a game that appeals to less than 50% of the game consumers? The answer to that is; a few dollars. And that is why you'll never see it.