Video Game Sequels

     Previously I have talked about the sad need by current entertainment industries to repackage films or stories previously experienced into an unnecessary additional story.  I would like to depart from written literature and touch on video games.  They are far worse than movies with their inability to break away form repetitious ideas and rehashing of previously executed (and often better) plots, themes and in the case of games also overall gameplay mechanics.  What he have now are an overabundance of games ending in "2" or "3" or a colon with a meaningless subtitle such as Angry Birds: Seasons or Assassin's Creed: Revelations.  Game publishers are uneasy about pushing their money towards any projects that can't assure stockholders of overall rise in revenue, so most game developers are forced to remake the same game over years and years, some even expected to have yearly releases that make older versions entirely obsolete such as the Call of Duty franchise.  The problem, then, is that we aren't seeing many new or innovative ideas out of mainstream higher-grossing companies as they play it safe with investments, taking a safe reiteration of an already popular franchise and just expanding on it.
     What I wish we could see in games today is a stricter following to the idea of spiritual sequels.  A perfect example of this done right as well as done wrong would be the Bioshock series from 2K Games.  The game itself was a spiritual sequel to a PC game called System Shock (which itself also had a sequel, System Shock 2).  Though Bioshock shared many similarities with System Shock, it was it's own beast that gained popularity due to the high-quality execution of it's environment as well as providing the player with a story-driven incentive to explore and complete the game.  The game starts with your character surviving a plane crash only to was ashore a small lighthouse.  As you enter you realise this is no mere building, but the entrance to the underwater city of Rapture, a town without government where men of science and prosperity can exist without the burdon of morality imposing itself on the expansion of new technologies.  It was itself a well-focused narrative that slowly reveals the origins of the character you play (in first-person) while you also begin to understand the seedy Atlas Shrugged quality of the city's views on property rights, individualism and how the city fell apart to drug addiction and riots, unable to support it's own ideal society.
  Almost three years later Bioshock had itself a sequel.  This was the typical drivel produced by the average studio, releasing a product in a hurried and unsuccessful attempt at recreating the booming and unmitigated success of the original.  Like so many intellectual products whose appeal is not only the original product itself but the prospects of establishing a series, a pool of preexisting concepts and ideas, all already fully realized, it is easy to make a sequel because it is so much harder to create an original conceptualization of a game that doesn't already have all the groundwork in place.  The general appeal of an updated version of an already-known universe is easy to produce and far too easy for audiences to indulge and ask for more of the same, so long as they disguise it as new.