jake

THE YEAR… OF SEQUELS, Part 2!

Ah, creativity. Useless, overrated creativity.

Once, back in the past, a man had an original idea and he took it and he made a form of mass media out of it and people loved it. They loved it so much that they decided he shouldn’t work on finding something new to give them, he should instead work on more of what they loved.

And thus we were given The Odyssey. And The Odyssey was just as successful and lucrative as the first. This opened the eyes of the creative people, who would often struggle for long periods of time trying to make something new. Creative people did not have to be creative all the time. They just had to be creative once and willing to cash in on that one flash of brilliance as much as humanly possible!

Flash forward to the twenty-first century, a time of robots and warfare and nuclear doom and genetic modifications and food shortages and energy wars. Sequels are all humanity has left. Everything that anyone has thought in our lifetimes has been thought of before. All things that exist, from the smallest of atoms to the largest of black holes, are now nothing more than bleak sequels. Indeed, all of us are nothing more than foundering sequels of our own parents, who are nothing more than mere husks of their predecessors.

THE FUTURE OF GAMING IS STRAIGHT-TO-SEQUEL PROGRAMMING. Screw new control schemes, motion capturing, true 3d, better graphics, deeper plots, better AI. The true next big thing is games that are sequels to games that don’t even exist. This helps to eliminate the one truly hard thing in the creative process: Having a creative thought. By skipping this sometimes dealbreaking hurdle, we now can just turn on the profit hose and drink mightily from its sweet, sweet nectar.

We in the press have already caught on. The most prestigious of gaming awards are actually given out to games before they are released. By merely mentioning a game in the right way, it becomes an award-winning hype machine just ready to explode into an entire universe of poorly developed tie-in products for us to enjoy! And the magic of writing sequel reviews is that they are easy: Just compare that sumbitch to the first one and call it a day! And once we get rid of actual prequels and move on to straight-to-sequel programming, then those of us who review games will only have to imagine what it might be like compared to the first one. And since all we do in the first place is tick off bullet points that are given to us by the game manufacturers in the months and months of advertisement that comes before any game release, we won’t even have to be imaginative. If the developers say that the controls are better and that there is over 80 more hours of gameplay in the sequel to the game that doesn’t exist, then they must be right! FIVE STARS! I LOVE YOU BUNGIE SEND ME FREE STUFF!

Such life-like AI!

I’m already stoked for Grand Theft Auto Neo-Tokyo 2. I cannot fucking wait for Duke Nukem Forever 3: Platinum Game of the Year Edition. And who here doesn’t want The Elder Scrolls VII right now? I mean, have you seen the screenshots? Me neither, because they don’t even exist yet! But can you imagine?

We don’t need new genres. Screw new gameplay features. What we need is more sequels now for games we don’t even know we need more sequels of. How surprised will we all be when they announce World of Starcraft 2?!? How good would that make all of us feel. Damned good, that’s for sure.

And if sequels are the future of gaming, then the future is now. So we’ve written our own future destinies in the past that are affecting the present! Time paradoxes up in this shit! Woooo!

Welcome to the magical post-E3 world. Welcome to the year of Max Payne 3, Final Fantasy 13, Left 4 Dead 2, Lego Rock Band, DJ Hero, Super Mario Galaxy 2, Mass Effect 2, Assassin’s Creed 2, Katamari Damacy 3, Tekken 6, Modern Warfare 2, Mafia 2, Dead Rising 2, Forza Motorsport 3, Battlefield: Bad Company 2, The Beatles: Rock Band, Lost Planet 2, Zelda Spirit Tracks, Crackdown 2, Splinter Cell Conviction, Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2, Uncharted 2, Guitar Hero 5, Red Steel 2, God of War 3, King of Fighters XIII, Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, Overlord 2, Hearts of Iron 3, Wolfenstein Beyond Comprehension, Guitar Hero 5, Castlevania Lord of Shadow, Endless Ocean 2, Motorstorm: Arctic Edge, Just Cause 2, Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, Dead to Rights: Retribution, Wii Fit Plus, Silent Hill Shattered Memories, Sin and Punishment 2, Soul Caliber: Broken Destiny, Wii Sports Resort, Gran Turismo 5, Crysis 2, and No More Heroes 2.

Enjoy your stay.

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christian
christian
14 years ago

What is DJ Hero the sequel too?

And you aren’t far off about awards being given out ahead of time. One of the early years of Spike’s VGA awards had King Kong nominated before it was on shelves.

Michelle
14 years ago

Guitar Hero one would guess…

This reminds me of a quote I saw in one of my retro mags the other day, to paraphrase a lot it basically was from a 1970s gaming magazine complaining about the proliferation of sequels then, so it’s comforting to know that it’s not just a problem that just appeared recently.

Straight to sequel though? I like it, almost like straight to DVD, but much better. ;)

Spyder Mayhem
Spyder Mayhem
14 years ago

DJ Hero is a sequel to guitar hero. If anyone is nervous about this new game: Relax, it has happy colored buttons on it. Just think of it as a Guitar Hero controller only flattened out.

Going through Youtube highlights of E3 for my big list of the year’s sequels, I found a whopping four videos that were not for sequels. Four. I kept a note because there would be entire pages of Youtube clips that were nothing but videos of sequels. There were, I’m sure, more than four unique properties announced at E3, but damned if they weren’t trampled upon by sequels.

Yes, I’m sure this problem was bad in the 70s, and it may not even be worse now than it was then. But it is worse now and we all know it. Gaming is big business. Sequels to successful games are easy money. Sequels are factored into big game development. (Gee, Don, if we make your game… Do you have any ideas or thoughts on how we might may sequels to it? Do you see this world of yours being used again and again like the dirty whore it is?)

And I got confused while going through Youtube for my list: Did they seriously push both Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy XIV, or did some people just get ahead of themselves? I won’t lie, leaking trailers and screenshots to the sequel of the game you have so far only released trailers and screenshots for is pretty damned awesome.

SQUENIX SEES THE FUTURE.

christian
christian
14 years ago

The DJ Hero thing is like calling Guitar Freaks a sequel to Beatmania. It doesn’t have that much applicability, and sounds petty.

But hey, I like to rip on Activision when they (often) earn it, not because it allows me to flex the snarky muscles in my fingertips.

Spyder Mayhem
Spyder Mayhem
14 years ago

While spinning your plastic disk around and pressing the green, red and yellow buttons on it, you may pretend like that is totally different from strumming your plastic guitar whil pressing the green, red and yellow buttons, but it is not. And when you mess up the button press and the spinning and the game makes a jarring scratch noise instead of a jarring string noise, it’ll be like you’ve never played a rhythm game before. But as the notes fall from the top of the screen down towards the bottom urging you to press and sometimes even hold the buttons, then and only then may you wonder if you’ve ever done this before.

Maybe DJ Hero, whose name is not similar to any existing product line whatsoever, will be totally original and will blow all of us out of the water. More likely, though, is that like Guitar Hero it will feature fourteen prebuilt stereotypes of different types of DJs (Including the black guy with an afro and the white guy who loves Japan and wears glasses!), like Guitar Hero it will feature different DJing venues ranging from your parents’ basement all the way to the Sydney Opera House, it’ll feature boss battles where he who scratches better and faster gets to throw lightning at the opposing big name DJ (including DJ Han of Linkin Park, Terminator X from Public Enemy and some no-name DJ whose underground cred is out of this world!), it’ll feature unlockable street wear to deck your DJ out in and it’ll feature a song laid over the end credits that is ridiculously tough.

But I’m sure I’m wrong and it’ll be nothing at all like a sequel. Activision, like everyone else in gaming at the moment, just oozes creativity and innovation. I mean, the people who invented Guitar Hero can invent all sorts of awesome new things! Right?

What? They didn’t invent Guitar Hero, they just bought it so that they can spam out sequel after neverending sequel? Oh.

Regardless, I’m sure there is a compelling argument out there somewhere that supports the idea that DJ Hero will not be a Guitar Hero sequel. Jay, please remove DJ Hero from my list of sequels.

Rosaura Siddons
14 years ago

Yeah season continues with episode 12 I’m happy because ABC is making more episodes for flashforward because it was a fight between them for episodes

Jacalyn Hillis
13 years ago

anything that kids want the momma or pap to buy at the store in the food sextion