10 Video Games So Great They Ruined The Series
Will Capcom ever really top Resident Evil 4?
The gaming community loves to condemn underwhelming franchise sequels to the gallows, pelting them with gamer snacks like soggy Kettle Chips, Haribo sweets and empty Relentless cans for not being innovative or pushing the series forward enough.
But just imagine being a sequel to a hugely successful and beloved game for a moment. It's can't be easy. Some games just seem to nail the spirit of their series so perfectly that they're almost impossible to follow up, with their successors doomed to forever live in that shadow.
It almost makes you think it'd be a savvy move for publishers not to try and create the perfect game too early in a franchise, simply to make the games that come afterwards not look quite so bad by comparison.
But then, if they did that, we'd miss out on these 10 incredible games, which were so great, that they kind of embarrassed their own sequels...
10. Silent Hill 2
With Konami's steady desecration of one of the greatest horror video games series in existence, eventually resulting in the highly-anticipated Silent Hills being replaced with a bloody Pachinko Machine, it's not too hard to find the series' high-point, especially as it is quite possibly the greatest horror game of all time.
Silent Hill 2 replaces the more direct horrors of the original game with something altogether more psychological, casting you as James Sunderland as he searches for his wife in the eerie titular town. There are very few jump scares in Silent Hill 2, making it a rare example of a game that doesn't rely on cheap shocks, but a pervasive, spine-tingling feeling of dread to unsettle us.
From the grainy filter over the screen, to the haunting story, by way of radio static signalling some twitchy mannequin monster - or worse - right around the corner, Silent Hill 2 is a horror masterpiece that puts the rest of its series to shame (even though 1 and 3 are very much worth checking out).