Why Won’t You Just DIE Already?
There are zombies everywhere. The gaming industry is bursting with extended franchises, long-running series, and ongoing characters - many of which started before some of their audience was born. It isn’t madness, of course - ontinuing an established brand has shown itself to be a crowd and pocket pleasing idea - but it does have it’s ups and downs, and the downs are only going to get worse.
Sonic and the Black Knight (Sonic Team Japan - Wii) is out soon, hot on the heels of Sonic Unleashed (Sonic Team Japan - PS2, PS3, Xbox360, Wii). The latter is the latest in a long line of woeful attempts to grab the drug-fuelled speed of the original Sonic games and stuff it into a 3D space. And he becomes a werewolf, or something. Sorry, wereHOG. By all accounts the fast running parts of the game work (sort of), although the only way they’ve cheated it in is by putting the blue thing on rails, making the third dimension a sparkly background distraction. Black Knight, on the other hand, is Sonic in medieval times, with a sword, joyfully puking his whole concept into a bucket.
Also refusing to just-bloody-die is that iconic figure, Lara Croft’s breasts. And the rest of her. Where modern Sonic games are trying to capture something magic from the past, the Tomb Raider games keep doing things the same way after everyone else moved on. Except with boobs. The problem is that while in the beginnings of 3D gaming she represented a nerd’s only digital pornography access, Lara is now very old and sagging in important places. There are better virtual tits out there for young boys to play with (having faces that don’t remind you of sex toys), not to mention better games. The latest Tomb Raider, Underworld (Eidos - PS3, Xbox360), is not important.
There are financial concerns, no doubt, and the industry is very aware that people are eager to throw their cash at a familiar face and cautious to try new things. Glancing at the sales figures for Psychonauts (Doublefine - PS2) comparedwith Need for Speed 14: Catch and Kiss Edition is depressing. Far Cry 2 (Ubisoft Montreal - PC, PS3, Xbox360), a game about a mercenary in Africa working for rival factions fighting to free the world from the colour 
brown, is the sequel to the 2004 sort-of-hit, Far Cry (Crytek Studios - PC), a game about a guy in a Hawaiian shirt shooting people in the face on an island. Looking at the two games, you get the feeling they may have rebranded the ’sequel’ if not for the crippling fear of not getting enough cash to roll around in.
Buying a new game can be expensive (especially for those of us living at the butt-end of the world) and people will look for any pre-purchasing clues as to which ones they will like. This usually means grabbing the pretty box with the smiling furry or pouting woman you remember from better days, at the expense of new independent properties - without realising this is no indication of quality. If you love playing the same thing over and over until your brain bleeds out your ear, this is totally the way to go.
None of this is necessarily saying that all sequels and franchises are bad, there are quite a few super ongoing brands - Mario, Metal Gear, Prince Of Persia, and so on and on. There has also been a surge in original concepts in the last few years. Things will continue to decompose, however, until two things happen:
1. Developers need to have more faith that their original ideas can stand on their own - or if they don’t have original ideas, they need to get the fuck out.
2. Gamers have to jump out of their comfort zone a little more, buy something new and interesting, and stop picking up mindless raw turdburgers just because they have a recognisable tart on the cover.