The first one is still the best one

[Qazimod]

Controversial, but Sonic? For me it had the best balance between careful platforming and hold-right-to-win speed. Games like 2, 3 and Rush are faster and more exciting but they all seemed to gravitate more towards that autopilot gaming.

[Jamie John]

I thought the more linear, Metroidvania-esque style of Batman: Arkham Asylum was better than the more open-world design of both City and Knight, which are still great games, but the first Arkham game is fantastic.

 

Metroid Prime was better than 2 and definitely 3.

 

And it's stretching the definition of "first game" to breaking point, but Final Fantasy VII is the best of the 3D FFs, closely followed by XII. I don't think they'll ever top it.

[Yobo Ahoy]

Arkham Asylum is a great shout. 

[BadgerFarmer]

Some things that came to mind were

 

Dark Souls

Super Bomberman*

Super Monkey Ball

Advance Wars*

Tomb Raider

Halo

Yoshi’s Island

 

But they've all been mentioned already, so well done everyone. With many of them it's a case of spoiling a perfect balance by adding stuff for the sake of change. With others, a sequel was just never necessary at all.

 

*Not technically the originals, but probably the ones most people played first.

[Soulstar]

Alundra moving into a completely shoddy looking 3D game where the first was an amazing Zelda clone with decent sprite work and great playability even though some of the puzzles were hard. 

 

Shadowman - I haven’t played the PS2 sequel but read bad things about it and it’s no wonder I never even knew it existed for years. Shadowman on the DC is brilliant and is a good Metroidvania style 3D game with very little hand holding and superb atmosphere, particularly with the audio. 

 

Broken Sword went down this route although I can’t comment on the newer BS5 reboot that came out as id imagine it’s an improvement over 3 and 4 especially. 2 was alright but didn’t feels as good and I once watched a YouTube video that highlighted shortcomings as far as the quality of the art was concerned compared to the first. I’d never really noticed until I watched it that the first seemed to have had more effort put into it. 

 

 

[the_debaser]

Secret of Monkey Island 

[Nick R]

23 minutes ago, Soulstar said:

Broken Sword went down this route although I can’t comment on the newer BS5 reboot that came out as id imagine it’s an improvement over 3 and 4 especially. 2 was alright but didn’t feels as good and I once watched a YouTube video that highlighted shortcomings as far as the quality of the art was concerned compared to the first. I’d never really noticed until I watched it that the first seemed to have had more effort put into it. 

 

Yeah Broken Sword is one that came to mind for me, but I didn't want to nominate it as I haven't played 4 or 5.

 

The first one was great; the second largely seemed more of the same, but I can imagine that on replaying it the shortcomings you mention might stand out more. I remember that Edge loved the third but I couldn't get into it as I first played the PS2 version with its horrendous loading times. (I later bought the Xbox version which had faster loading, but I couldn't get into it there either.)

[CrashedAlex]

C64 Pitstop

 

and to the person who said 'the original version of Burnout' - how very kind and wonderful of you.

[Stanley]

38 minutes ago, Soulstar said:

Alundra moving into a completely shoddy looking 3D game where the first was an amazing Zelda clone with decent sprite work and great playability even though some of the puzzles were hard. 

 

Shadowman - I haven’t played the PS2 sequel but read bad things about it and it’s no wonder I never even knew it existed for years. Shadowman on the DC is brilliant and is a good Metroidvania style 3D game with very little hand holding and superb atmosphere, particularly with the audio. 

 

Broken Sword went down this route although I can’t comment on the newer BS5 reboot that came out as id imagine it’s an improvement over 3 and 4 especially. 2 was alright but didn’t feels as good and I once watched a YouTube video that highlighted shortcomings as far as the quality of the art was concerned compared to the first. I’d never really noticed until I watched it that the first seemed to have had more effort put into it. 

 

 

Broken Sword 5 is the best after the first, it's really good, but the first is still best overall.

[deerokus]

Dragon Age. 2 is a catastrophe, Inquisition is fine but a bit forgettable and generic. That first one was a brilliant game. 

[MansizeRooster]

Jet Set Willy

[Pob]

What about Virtua Tennis? So much accessibility and depth afforded by two buttons. I could never be arsed with 2 or 3 when they introduced more complexity.

[SF-02]

Driver.

[smac]

Despite the driving test and final level.

[Fry Crayola]

43 minutes ago, mansizerooster said:

Jet Set Willy

 

It's the sequel to Manic Miner.

[lordscotland]

Probably destiny. Had great hopes for the sequel but it doesn’t really improve on anything and adds very little, if anything of note. Expansions for the original would likely have made for a better experience than the standalone ‘sequel’

the interface is even slower on the sequel

[JPickford]

6 hours ago, Gotters said:

Bomberman - again a beautiful simple idea that got over complicated and unnecessary graphical upgrades over the years, never to its benefit

 

I believe my first experience of it was on SNES but somebody will probably say it was on PC Engine before that ?

 

 

 

It wasn't the first though.  It started as a Spectrum game called 'Eric and the Floaters'.  I think.

[Loik V credern]

5 hours ago, Garwoofoo said:

I really loved the original Timesplitters. The second one seems to be the one that everyone remembers, with that Goldeneye level and the stage builder, but the first game is seriously underrated. While the sequels kind of went in a more traditional single-player direction, with longer and more complex levels, the first game was essentially a series of really challenging bite-size challenges, often with very tight time limits, and pretty much everything you did unlocked stuff for multiplayer. I have very fond memories of weekends spent playing this four-player splitscreen (long live the PS2 Multitap) and spending most of the intervening week trying to unlock new characters and stages for everyone to play. Plus it had the Chinese restaurant level which is one of my favourite multiplayer levels ever.  It's insane that this series just died out.

 

Got there before me! Timesplitters' main idea was you get to the end of a level then with whatever energy you have left need to somehow make it back to the beginning while being bombarded by hordes of enemies. That core idea they threw away entirely for the sequel onwards, Timesplitters was fast. Its visual cheapness worked in keeping it feeling light and immediate in a way the sequel wasn't. It was about learning enemy positions, and being more efficient with every go, it wasn't about large evocative environments and doing objectives, it wasn't about any story shown through cutscenes. Timesplitters 2 was quite inventive in a Rare like way where the developers were having fun with it, but it was more like any other modern FPS given a comedic flavour, whereas the original represented something fresher. A game endears itself to me really if its visually a bit bare boned but they nail the controls and immediacy of the gameplay, and get their priorities right. Rockstar had that with their PS2 titles.

 

The lack of speed in T2 was even evident in the death animations, if you're meant to be racing through blasting away you want enemies to spin and fall dramatically, not stumble for 5 seconds before slumping to the ground. Cos of course you don't see that, you're around the next corner by then.

 

Goldeneye was fast, if I ever go back to it I'm going to pick running through Silo so I can feel like a god picking off enemies before they've even noticed me. Nothing has since done anything like it really. Maybe the only thing i can think of COD Zombies, it's the fun of moving through spaces calculating which enemies to kill next as to just clear a path through. It can be really exciting, but more so when you're actually going somewhere as opposed to endlessly moving around a map.

[Wiper]

5 hours ago, Stanley said:

Prince of Persia The Sands of Time. I know technically it's not the first PoP game but it was the first 3D one

 

*cough*

 

 

I will accept "first non-shit 3D one", however!

 

As for my choice; well, Deus Ex is the obvious one. None of its sequels or prequels recaptured its wonderful sense of freedom or scale, replacing its open, sandbox levels with much smaller affairs, whose freedoms came in the form of vents and/or split corridors, rather than entire missable networks of tunnels and rooftops to explore.

 

Honourable mention: Mass Effect. Ain't none of its sequels quite found its magic, as they moved ever further from the alien, epic RPG space opera promised by the first installment and swapped it for encounter-of-the-week space serial drama wrapped around a third-person shooter.

[mushashi]

5 hours ago, Stanley said:

Prince of Persia The Sands of Time. I know technically it's not the first PoP game but it was the first 3D one and very different to the 2D platformers sharing its name. The sequels never even got close to what made SoT great, focussing instead on more combat, the series weakest aspect, and crappy dark character design, the platforming was weaker too. 

 

It's technically not the first 3D either though :P . A German (I think they were) developer did a crap game years before the French-Canadians rebooted it.

 

Surprising nobody has mentioned it, but another classic racing game that was never generally considered to be bettered (even by him!) is Toshihiro Nagoshi's winning entry in the genre:

 

Daytona USA

 

It's been remade twice in Coin-Op form, and has two official sequels.

[partious]

Daytona is great but Daytona 2 is better.

[Girth Certificate]

I always thought Daytona was a sequal to Virtua Racing 

[SpookyMulder]

Dino Crisis (built the suspense superbly... re-master or re-boot it now, Capcom!)

 

Gradius

 

R-Type

 

 

[Loik V credern]

6 hours ago, Plissken said:

I'm going to throw this one even though it was technically a sequel but GTA III.

 

Because it was the first to go properly 3D and every single iteration after is bloated in some way or other.

 

YES. What bothers me most about sequels is when developers move forward but do so without retaining the elements what made the first one so good. Which...is maybe an obvious thing to say written down like that, but it only feels like years later when you look back do you really notice the most important things that needed to be retained and weren't. Because sequels can do lots of impressive things and at the time they make up for it lacking elsewhere. Something like Perfect Dark was phenomenal in so many ways, but at the time i didn't understand why I wasn't quite enjoying it as much as Goldeneye. And it is the simple things, maybe a noticeable drop in pace, fewer enemies, more focus on objectives rather than the developers trying to force situations where you need to shoot your way through entire corridors of enemies. Goldeneye had the alarm, did anyone ever think 'fuck' when that happened rather than 'fuck yes i'm looking forward to this'.

 

It took until after finishing San Andreas to realise its cities weren't as tight and compact or busy as GTA 3's, that the more realistic vehicle handling meant 5 star FBI chases weren't nearly as fun and addictive or essential; i never did them, that part of GTA3 that made it special was lost. In San Andreas the FBI send black suvs after you rather something like black mercedes, they're not as mobile, too bulky to bounce off. 5 stars in GTA 3 was basically like the FBI were a nuisance, they crash into you but you carry on, turn a corner sharply, look back and watch them leap into the sea. But eventually you'll need to swap vehicles and they'll shoot you and wear you down that way. The game did a better job of throwing more cars at you more quickly once you've dispensed with the 3 following you as well i think. Again that's a little thing that if it's missing it affects the immediacy of the game. GTA 3 got so much right.

[Nick R]

3 hours ago, the_debaser said:

Secret of Monkey Island 

 

I do love LeChuck's Revenge and Curse of Monkey Island, but I agree the first is the best. The video below is one of the best things I've seen or read about adventure games, but when I first watched it I was disappointed by how much it dismissed MI2. But on reflection its discussion of character (from 12:53) is pretty persuasive about why the first game shows Guybrush at his most appealing and Elaine at her best-written:

 

 

[mushashi]

16 minutes ago, Naieve said:

I always thought Daytona was a sequal to Virtua Racing 

 

Different sort of racing game, just happens to be designed by the same person. Nagoshi's track record is pretty damn good, having made classic games in multiple genres over his long career.

 

 

19 minutes ago, partious said:

Daytona is great but Daytona 2 is better.

 

I've only ever seen it once or twice on location, never had much interest in playing it though, it looked to have evolved wrongly. 8-player Daytona USA on 777 is still up there as an all-time greatest racing experience.

[acidbearboy]

F-Zero. I had a lot of fun with the N64 version but I love the aesthetics of the SNES original and go back to it regularly. GX was pretty but too hard and the portable games I haven’t spent a huge amount of time with. 

[squirtle]

4 hours ago, CrashedAlex said:

C64 Pitstop

 

What? I don't even... Pitstop 2 was far superior.

[Timmo]

Probably unpopular, but I had more fun with the first Burnout than the others. I think it was due to how ball bustingly hard it was. Most modern games let you progress really easily, in that it felt earned.

[Nick R]

Earthworm Jim

 

I'm counting this as its own series, not part of a Dave Perry/Virgin Interactive platformer sequence including Aladdin and Cool Spot.

 

I know it has its detractors, but I always loved the first Earthworm Jim game. The central run-and-gun platform gameplay was generally a good progression from that of Aladdin, and the gimmick levels (bungee jumping, the Down the Tubes submarine, the "Naked Worm" and "Who Turned Out The Lights?" levels) were mostly fun, and kept brief enough that they didn't outstay their welcome.

 

The second was funnier (at the age of 11, that ending was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen), and had a tone that was both more cartoony and upbeat (Jim's jogging on the spot idle animation) yet also darker and weirder. But it only had about two levels that were really based around the core run-and-gun platforming that the first game did well; the majority of the game consisted almost entirely of one-off gameplay gimmicks. Most of those gimmicks worked well (drilling through the dirt in Lorenzo's Soil, the Quiz Show, the last level's on-foot chase) but some did not: the Flyin' King isometric shooter level and the Inflated Head circus level are the kind of stages that sometimes go well first time and feel too easy, but if anything goes wrong it can be frustrating to recover; and the Puppy Love interlude levels were fun at first but went on too long. So overall I never liked it quite as much as the first.

 

I never played Earthworm Jim 3D, but I've never heard anything positive about it.

 

 

Here's a Bad Influence clip where Violet Berlin went to interview Dave Perry during the making of EWJ2: