Dead video game series/franchises you refuse to let go

I couldn't really get into Ultima but I loved the SF in Wizardry in addition to the very detailed character stats and skills. How science fictiony did might and magic get? I have never played those
The end of 1 reveals that the name of the world, VARN, stands for Vehicular Astropod Research Nacelle, and 2 has the heroes go to CRON (Central Research Observational Nacelle). The main bad guy for the majority of the series is an alien named Sheltem. The sci-fi influence features heavily in the first part of the series, but as far as I'm aware it starts to lessen as the series goes on.

Admittedly, I never really played much of the games but I have researched them. I just find it fascinating that so many of these fantasy games have so much sci-fi influence.
 
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Games that I've given up on hoping for a new entry:
Katamari Damacy, Custom Robo, Advance Wars, F-Zero, Metal Arms, Battlefield: Bad Company, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Rising: Reveangeance, Anarchy Reigns, Saints Row.

Danball Senki aka Little Battlers eXperience is Custom Robo to a T. Hasn't been a new entry in a couple years though.

I don't see Wonderful 101 on that list, but I guess we can file it under Viewtiful Joe since it was pretty much the successor to that series.

For my money, I would love to see something in the vein of Robot Alchemic Drive, which I forget the original name of. But controlling a squishy human who's remotely piloting a giant stompy robot from a vantage point atop a flimsy skyscraper was unexpectedly a lot of fun.
 
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My favorite dead but not dead stumbling corpse of a game is...

City of Heroes.

Fucking love that game. One of the FEW MMO's I liked. (The other being the ORIGINAL Secret World, which was the best single player MMO ever)
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THIS was a high level fight. Me and one other guy against 14-18 "Paragon Protectors", which are superpowered bad guys. He ran in, taunted them for crowd control, then I popped a trio of red damage boost inspirations, and fired off my big gun. BOOM! All but 2 dead in that one little mob.

Edit: I suppose I should explain why I'm willing to play a game made in 2004 over more modern super-shiny games.
First of all, since it's fan-hosted (the server code walked out the door right before the game shut down, what a fucking shame...) the cash shop, which was pretty good in the first place, isn't there any more. There's no tons of microtransactions and no tons of ads thrown in the game.

I can't stress how fucking nice that is in Current Year+4. No big-ass banner ads. No fucking "DO THIS FOR FULL ACCESS TO OUR DILDO SHOP!" buttons in the upper right, and no "We Know You're a Paying Subsciber BUT VISIT OUR CASH SHOP FOR MORE FAGGOTRY AND AIDS!" bullshit banner. It's all there, all unlocked, all within reach.

The community servers that I play on have a "Pay 2 Win Vendor" that basically offers all the old cash-shop stuff, veteran rewards (You got rewards for having been a paying customer in addition to free bennies like costume pieces and other fun stuff), and temp powers that there's no way to get any more. You get a bunch for just making a character (GO GO NEMESIS STAFF AND SANDS OF WIFF!) and then can use the in-game currency for collecting the rest.

Second is: LOTS AND LOTS of fucking powers/abilites. Sometime around the development of Champions an article came out about people only being able to track about 6-9 things at once, and fucking Dev's ran with that shit, "Streamlining" by lowering the amount of active powers. Holy shit, did I hate that.

Powers you got in the beginning still matter at the Endgame. Take for example the character above. She's got the basic Pew-Pew electric power she had at 1st level. Only slotted out with the standard 6 enhancement slots all with a Endurance Mod Invention Set to make it so she can pull down the enemy's endurance. It's the first power, but you're able to customize it.

When you create your character, you select your origin (Natural, Science, Magic, etc) which doesn't really matter beyond which kind of Dual Origin and Single Origin you can slot along with some contacts and missions. Then Your Archetype: Blaster, Tanker, Defender (Healer), Controller, Scrapper, etc etc. Then you select your Primary and Second ary Power Sets, based on your archetype. That lets you select one of two of the first sets of powers on the Primary and you get the first power of the secondary. Yeah, only 2 powers at 1st level, but since you level up in the tutorial and game a 3rd power, it's not that big of a deal. Plus you have brawl, and your origin power (a shitty little one that you'll still be using at level 50 because MORE POWERS!) and anything you grabbed from the Pay2Win Vendor.

After that, your costume, how your powers are colored and look, then... BOOM! OFF TO FIGHT CRIME AND ALIEN INVADERS! WOOT!

Third: The graphics.

The graphics are a mix of eye-bleed inducing, endearing, and decent. Some of the older content is cringe inducing, but the heart is still in it. They did an experimental cell shading that I think looks like ass and some people like. I like the standard look. You can tell the newer zones because they look better, but fuck that, I'm brawling in The Hollows Rebuilt because I'm an elitist faggot.

One thing, if you're prone to flashing lights giving you headaches or seizures, this game will fuck you right in your goat ass. You can have up to 7 people on a team with you, 31 on a Task Force with you, and all those powers going off is going to make your screen flash and your speakers scream. That's a nogo for some people, but hey, you can't have everything.

The enemies are kind of neat. Some are just pallet-swapped, but most of them are individually designed, with their own power-sets and weirdness, and that really makes it feel cool. They're also level dependent. The Freakshow, who look like junkyard cyber-stompers with shitty meme names circa 2005, are teen and lower 20's to meet, but you still fight some of them at level 50. Mostly their zone dependent outside of missions.

And it's funner than fuck to go back to an early are when you're End Game Grind and yelling "YOU FUCKING REMEMBER ME?" and chasing whole mobs down and stomping them.

Because fuck those Hellions. THEY FUCKING STARTED IT!

The enemies are largely easy to pick out because their design either makes it obvious who is what, or (in the case of Malta), they have gear that you've gotta spot. (Fucking sappers, I hate them so much)

But, weirdly, the graphics "feel" better and more in place that a lot of games nowadays.

You can make a SHIT-TON of costumes. Yeah, Champions had more costume options, but Champions looked like refried ass and played worse, and if you like that shitty game I fucking judge you as a human being and you're probably a furry, a pedophile, or both.

The missions are STILL fun. Since you can tweak your threat level from -1 to +4, and how many people you count as (1-8 ), whether you want to fight boss fights in you're on your own, shit like that. Sure, some of them are a pain in the ass, but a familiar pain in the ass.

YOU FEEL POWERFUL!

Most games, you see 4-8 enemies, you're trying to figure out a retreat. In this game, your combatacon archetypes are just charging in yelling "LEEEEEEROY JENKINS!" and there's a good chance you'll win.

Hell, I've been in fights that it's basically a slide-show, where you're hitting the number keys because your mouse-clicks can't register, and going "PLEASE BE ALIVE PLEASE BE ALIVE" because the Dark Defenders are mass-raising everyone who got dropped.
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This is a SMALL Halloween brawl against zombies. Probably a dozen or so heroes and, well, probably fifty or so bad guys.

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I'm in there somewhere. Another small fight between, oh, a dozen or so heroes and a LOT of alien invaders. This is when they're just porting in. Within about 3 minutes of this picture my screen was overrun by Rikti Monkeys.

The "Play with your friends!" bit was really well done. At first, you'd side-kick someone. You could only have one sidekick, but they were only 1 level below you for power balance with the enemies, and they were tethered to you. That was replaced by the "Team Leader" system, where the team leader set the level of the group. So if you had a level 30 leading, the level 50 dropped (temp) to 33, the 12 jumped to 29, and the mission bad guys were all 30 while everyone got XP as if they were in a mission of their level.
For a while they had a system where you could level-pact with a friend and they'd get half your XP, so say you played with your wife, if you logged on and played while they were watching TV, you XP went to help level them, so you were always on par. Apparently that caused some glitches and was exploited to fuck and back, so it got removed.

Your costume is NOT related to your powers or abilities. For that you have your powers (You choose more and more up the tiers as you level up, depending on your primary and secondary power sets, then on odd number levels you add 2 enhancement slots, either both in one power or split them up between whatever 2 powers you want, with 3 slots after like level 35) and your enhancements (Damage, to hit buff, defense (de)buff, whatever) to tweak your powers to how you want to play. Your weapon, if you have one, depends on your power set, but that's the only cosmetic thing that is power dependent. Want to be a pink fairy with two six-guns who can do karate? No problem. Want to be a super-strong invulnerable tank that looks like a cat-girl with leprosy? No problem. Want to make a robots that heals everyone and calls upon the power of darkness to hurt their enemies? Just take the robot parts, baby! From floating skulls for heads to robot legs to like 100 different options just for your legs and chest, City of Heroes had it all.

The costume creator made it so that if you copied some mainstream hero like Supes or Batman or whatever, motherfuckers WILL mock you, because that's basic bitch costuming right there.

You also start with 5 costume slots. Five different costumes. Lots of players make "street clothes" then different costumes for whatever. Most of mine have all 10 costume slots unlocked because I'm a horrible sperg-o-matic. Hell, my favorite characters even have holiday costumes for depending on the season.

Since you can theme your costumes, it's a lot of fun.

There's even villian-side, where you get to act like an asshole and beat up superheroes and cops, rip stuff off, rob banks, fun stuff like that. The maps are really different (some people don't like villain-side maps, I love the tight, claustrophobic feeling of Mercy Island).

You can even play a renegade. Not good, not evil. That came out right before the game shut down, but it added a whole new dimension. My only bitch was that it only lasted till about 20th level, but that has to do with the over-arching metaplot of colliding dimensions.

There's just nothing like it on the market. There wasn't back when it was live and being run by NCSoft, nothing came out to replace it, and there's nothing else like it now.

If you HAVEN'T given it a try, ever, you really should. If nothing else to try out an MMO that even nowadays has a lot of quality of life stuff that none of the other MMO's even bothered putting in.
 
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Danball Senki aka Little Battlers eXperience is Custom Robo to a T. Hasn't been a new entry in a couple years though.

I don't see Wonderful 101 on that list, but I guess we can file it under Viewtiful Joe since it was pretty much the successor to that series.

For my money, I would love to see something in the vein of Robot Alchemic Drive, which I forget the original name of. But controlling a squishy human who's remotely piloting a giant stompy robot from a vantage point atop a flimsy skyscraper was unexpectedly a lot of fun.
RAD was rad, man. A great concept that really deserves a second chance with a larger budget. There was a game released a few weeks ago on Steam called RAD. When I saw the listing I lost my shit for a few seconds before realizing it was some indie game that had nothing to do with giant robots.

Didn't know that RAD's developers are the ones behind Earth Defense Force. I don't think they're going to stray from their cash cow series anytime soon. Disappointing.
 
Someday, someday, they might make a new 7th Dragon game. Imageepoch is dead, but there might still be a chance that SEGA does it.
 
Nintendo didn't turn it into a waifu game because they didn't even try. Sami alone has enough waifu potential to keep a trilogy afloat. Nintendo dumped it to rot along with F-Zero, Custom Robo and Metroid.

It's really strange that no indie dev has ripped off- I mean- gotten inspired by Advance Wars and made a spiritual successor. Maybe after they finish "2D Metroidvania Souls Like #23,581" they can get to work on an AW clone.



Games that I refuse to believe are dead:

Virtua Fighter. Won't see anymore of it because SEGA makes awful business decisions. They gave up Bayonetta 2 when it was almost complete for fuck's sake.

Viewtiful Joe. At least a PC port. PCSX2 crashes every few minutes and it's the only game that runs poorly on Dolphin, so emulating it is a pain. We got Killer 7 and Ookami on PC, why not Joe?

Ninja Gaiden. Even if a new one does come out there's a 70% chance of it sucking, but I'll take anything at this point. Yaiba was cancer.

Metal Slug. I'm autistically optimistic about SNK's rebirth. A new Metal Slug is coming.

Quake. Quake Champions was a misstep. Hopefully they pull a DOOM 2016 and make something closer to the original. It worked for DOOM.

Dead Or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. They got that Gacha game for PC (which has NO gameplay) but it would be cool to see a new one with updated graphics.

Games that I've given up on hoping for a new entry:
Katamari Damacy, Custom Robo, Advance Wars, F-Zero, Metal Arms, Battlefield: Bad Company, Splinter Cell, Metal Gear Rising: Reveangeance, Anarchy Reigns, Saints Row.
It’s funny really, Katamari’s sequel We :heart-full: Katamari pokes fun at the fact it is a sequel. The King grumbles and complains every time a fan requests something and said fans ask for increasingly ridiculous requests and will nitpick the fuck out of your Katamari even if you meet the requirements for their respective levels.

Sometimes, the King will even remark about how boring and repetitive rolling gets at times. Ironically, that would be a major source of criticism for the game and the games that would come out right after.

It was also the last game the game’s original creator was involved in. (Not sure about Reroll but I’d assume not.)

God that game was ahead of its time...
 
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samurai warriors series. its so sad two was the last good game and how the series got overshadowed by sengoku basara (i stiil like basara but the gameplay format of warriors is better). three was rushed trash on the wii and four was ok but could have been so much better if they did not cut the game in half with samurai warriors 4-2 that was clearly suppose to be an XL game but koei for some reason got sued by capcom of all people over how extreme legends were their rightful name to use and koei had to pay to use the name and features that came with it even though they been doing extreme legend games for years. they lost the case and koei i guess released the game anyway without adding stuff that was in the first edition such as story modes and stages. never really got into the rush mechanic. its mindless fun at first but gets boring over time.

i still have not find a way to play complete XL edition of SW2 since the disc size was bigger then your average ps2 game so you could not pirate it on a disc and you cant merge save files on a emulator without some tecno fuckery i rather not bother with.
 
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Would Classic Phantasy Star Count? Despite it ended with IV.

I would love a remake of 2 and 3 as 2 had bad dungeon design and 3 had slew of problems but it did have a interested premise that I would love to play as a more competent game.
 
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I would love a remake of 2 and 3 as 2 had bad dungeon design and 3 had slew of problems but it did have a interested premise that I would love to play as a more competent game.

IV is one of my personal faves and I recently downloaded 1 off the Switch's E shop. I use to have the GBA version where it had all three games, but the port had some flaws where it crashed in some segments.
 
I keep searching on any information about a Dark Cloud 3 despite the fact I know Level 5 won't make it. Dark Cloud 2 is one of my favorite games of all time and I would love to have some sort of game coming after it.
 
IV is one of my personal faves and I recently downloaded 1 off the Switch's E shop. I use to have the GBA version where it had all three games, but the port had some flaws where it crashed in some segments.

I had that GBA version and it wasn't the best introduction to the series with that save crash and the lack of IV being on the collection. Even with the problems, I did enjoy and somehow beat the 1st Phantasy Star 1. IMHO, they should have remade each game as its own with better improvements like they did with Final Fantasy on the GBA.
 
Playing through Dead Space since it's almost Halloween, and it makes me sad how EA threw the series in the trash.

I actually liked 3, I'm talking about how the series ended up getting binned when the game didn't sell as much as their ridiculous expectations. For fuck's sake, not every game has to make FIFA numbers to be a success, but EA is so insistent on it that other IPs have to languish for it.

God, I miss the days of cutting the limbs off of Necromorphs, why did Visceral have to suffer so much?
 
Playing through Dead Space since it's almost Halloween, and it makes me sad how EA threw the series in the trash.

I actually liked 3, I'm talking about how the series ended up getting binned when the game didn't sell as much as their ridiculous expectations. For fuck's sake, not every game has to make FIFA numbers to be a success, but EA is so insistent on it that other IPs have to languish for it.

God, I miss the days of cutting the limbs off of Necromorphs, why did Visceral have to suffer so much?

These studios know the deal when EA buys them. Any employee who stays with a company after an EA buy out is a fool.
 
Playing through Dead Space since it's almost Halloween, and it makes me sad how EA threw the series in the trash.

I actually liked 3, I'm talking about how the series ended up getting binned when the game didn't sell as much as their ridiculous expectations. For fuck's sake, not every game has to make FIFA numbers to be a success, but EA is so insistent on it that other IPs have to languish for it.

God, I miss the days of cutting the limbs off of Necromorphs, why did Visceral have to suffer so much?

Dead Space games was always like meh to me. The game play is nothing to write home about and so is the story. It always came off as Silent Hill in space to me.
 
Big fan of the TimeSplitters series. I know there's talk of developing a new product in the series, but I don't know if it's been outright confirmed yet. Hope so, had so much fun with those games back in the day.
 
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