10 Beloved Video Games Series That Have Been Ruined By The Industry
Sonic, Crash, and Kevin Spacey: What's become of you?
There are precious few video game series that have had an entirely smooth road, all of them stumbling once or twice on the road to greatness. The Legend of Zelda series had its Zelda 2 and Wand of Gamelon, Mario had that weird Mario Bros. Special game for the PC, and Street Fighter had Street Fighter: The Movie. We've all made mistakes, right?
The best franchises get over these blips, but for many the blip has hollowed into a rut, the series deteriorating with each successive release until they're a husk of their former selves.
Just as the developers and publishers of the games industry giveth us so many good times and great memories, they also taketh away, running beloved series into the dirt until they're dead, or continuing to exist in some kind of horrible zombie-state.
Here are ten that have been ruined by the industry.
10. Resident Evil
Resident Evil defined survival horror. While various other games along the way played their part, it was Resident Evil, with its pre-rendered backgrounds, claustrophobic fixed camera angles, and cumbersome controls that were both terrifying and frustrating, that set the benchmark.
It was all going so well until Resident Evil 4, which introduced the over-the-shoulder camera and more gunplay while still offering a back-against-the-wall horror. Capcom misread its success as signifying that people were looking for more action-focused gameplay, and followed it up with sequels that have steadily been getting worse and worse.
Resident Evil 5 still managed to retain some sense of horror in an interesting new African setting. However, due to the fact that you were essentially shooting up zombified Africans in shanty towns, it drew the wrong kind of attention, and Capcom retreated to more generic locations, with increasingly generic gameplay.
Operation Raccoon City, Resident Evil 6, and Umbrella Corps are all glaring signs of how the series has lost its way, though perhaps the PT-esque Resident Evil 7 will be the turnaround we've been waiting for...