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Post by Snake on Aug 30, 2023 12:10:52 GMT -5
The sequel, for whatever reason gets a bit of notoriety for featuring Fabio on the cover and it had strong marketing (being published by Acclaim probably helped). A friend of mine had it and that was in an era when people owned very few games (we mostly rented ours). The third game though...nobody talks about that one. And I always forget there's a Game Boy game. Seriously! That Fabio cover has become something of a cult legend. Even though your in-game character in Iron Sword is always in full armor, instead of the topless barbarian romance novel hunk. I wish I had played Wizards and Warriors 3 when I was young, but never saw it for sale nor rent in my local area. I attempted to play it a few times on emulation, but its definitely more of an exploratory commitment game. It seems to have shift to a more of a Metroidvania type set-up, with allowing to change into different job classes through guilds. Maybe I'll give the Gameboy a release a go, if it's more straightforward like the first 2 games.
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Post by dr_st on Aug 31, 2023 6:35:15 GMT -5
A friend of mine holds the opinion that the Gabriel Knight series is one such example, with only the first game being good, citing playability issues with the sequels (although the story is good).
Just sharing the opinion here. Cannot confirm it, because I've only played the first game myself, and the remastered 20th Anniversary edition at that.
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Post by dsparil on Aug 31, 2023 10:37:42 GMT -5
I don't think anyone would deny the original Gabriel Knight is a classic, but the sequels have some things going against them. The Beast Within is a pretty big step down in terms of the cast since live action is obviously more expensive than voice acting especially in the days before a fully digital workflow. I don't want to go off on a whole tangent about the failures of FMV and "Silliwood" (🤮) in general, but that boondoggle sent the industry on a vastly different path than it might have otherwise. Blood of the Sacred, Blood of the Damned has some really bad puzzles and dated 3D graphics. My opinion of it is colored by CGW absolutely tearing it apart, and Old Man Murray also had their famous takedown of it which is actually fair despite OMM basically being an FPS site. Overall, I'd say that the second and third still have more lovers than haters, but it's definitely not surprising to hold up the first as the only good one.
To get a little narrow, Zork Nemesis out of the graphical Zork games. JoeQ likes it, but Return to Zork is the only game I know that was deliberately designed in a hateful rage (literally without exaggeration). It makes really poor use of being on a CD, and it's so scattershot in its use of still photos, FMV and CD music. The third, Zork: Grand Inquisitor, makes a lot of mistakes in general even though it's probably the one "most" people would say is the best; I question this because it sold the worst by a wide margin. It has reckless disregard for the series lore, most the puzzles are busywork, one of the big selling points was a tiny section, and it has a lot of dumb FMV.
Nemesis on the other hand, is basically the template every FMV using game should have followed. For one thing, on the FMV side, it was basically a real production. The co-writers were professional screenwriters, the director had extensive TV and film experience, and the core actors were mostly experienced character actors. It took a story everyone knows, Romeo and Juliet, mixed it with a fantastical but quasi-historical element, alchemy, and tied it to a game that let the FMV complement the adventuring instead of fighting with it, Myst. I guess I'm going off on that tangent now, but it wasn't the "tech industry" deciding it could be Hollywood better than Hollywood. Not only that, but I think it's the only game in the entire Zork series that really treats the setting as a real place and adds in a lot of details. It's not perfect, but it does a whole lot right.
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Post by Woody Alien 2 on Oct 17, 2023 9:39:01 GMT -5
Could Ducktales (NES) and MediEvil count for the purpose of this topic? In both cases the first game was held in high regard, included in bundles and famously remade, while nobody really cared about their direct sequels and several people didn't even know there was one. Sure, Ducktales 2 was included in the Disney Afternoon bundle, but like 25 years later.
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Post by retr0gamer on Oct 17, 2023 18:28:56 GMT -5
I'm of the opinion that MediEvil was never good to begin with and the recent remaster proves it. It was a minor hit of ps1 but was bang average.
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Post by excelsior on Oct 18, 2023 6:53:57 GMT -5
Both the first two games were given platinum releases and were critically received similarly well. I think the series was never popular enough for the remake to really create excitement - the previous games receiving this treatment being Crash and Spyro which were some of the very best selling PlayStation games. MediEvil doesn't come close to that. I'm not sure whether MediEvil would be considered a one hit wonder, but I think its fair to say that interest has fallen off substantially since its release.
I'm not familiar with DuckTales to discuss that, although there was a remake about a decade passed which I remember received some negativity.
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Post by dsparil on Oct 18, 2023 7:53:19 GMT -5
I didn't even realize there was a DuckTales sequel for a very long time! It feels more under the radar than some other 1993 and even 1994 NES releases. I liked the remake of the first game though. I think what turned some people off was the difficulty and the expanded levels. I didn't mind either, but I can imagine those two things compounding each other.
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Post by retr0gamer on Oct 18, 2023 9:52:39 GMT -5
The big issue with the remake was the amount of cutscenes. The Devs managed to get the original voice cast back together and decided to make the most of it. While I appreciated all the new duck tales content the cutscenes really slowed the game down. Other than the cutscenes it was a damn fine remake and the parts of the stages they expanded were great. I much prefer the original though as it flows much better.
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Post by shelverton on Oct 27, 2023 6:11:11 GMT -5
I feel like I show up in threads lately just to say ”Chrono Trigger?”, but I feel like it’s one of the strangest one hit wonders in gaming. Yes, it has a sequel, but the franchise is absolutely carried by the legacy of the first game. And yet SquareEnix just inexplicably abandoned it.
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