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Gaming franchises you feel should be major, but aren't.


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Yes, it's unfortunate that every modern game is based on masochistic pain simulation and obtuse logic grinding instead of fun. I think the origins of this trend can be traced back to the 2015 3DS title Hello Kitty & Friends: Rock n' World Tour. 

 

 

But on topic, someone needs to bring back Lolo, the little blue ball that could. 

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17 minutes ago, Wayler said:

Yes, it's unfortunate that every modern game is based on masochistic pain simulation and obtuse logic grinding instead of fun. I think the origins of this trend can be traced back to the 2015 3DS title Hello Kitty & Friends: Rock n' World Tour. 

 

 

But on topic, someone needs to bring back Lolo, the little blue ball that could. 

Bring back the 1962 Hello Kitty!

 

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For Mario in other games, I submit that those games were actually good to start with and would have been popular even if it had Joe blow random guy tm as characters in them. Yes, Mario was definitely icing on the cake, but Mario didn't make the games. Bad games also feature mario, like Mario through time, or Mario is missing. Both of witch are lack luster edutainment titles, and despite Mario, still more or less unappealing.

 

Forgot about the spyro Englander games. I've played some and they were more "meh" to me, but I did collect some of the statuettes.

 

Ohh, starfox. Should be a larger franchise. Loved the original, and despite the nasty screen door effect, even the 64 game. I even have a game watch that captured the feel of the game well for a segmented single function LCD. Star fox 2 was nearly finished bitd, and sense been finished, but Nintendo missed many opportunities to properly release it. Then starfox adventure, but then, nothing. I (and many others) love space rail shooters, and starfox was/is great. Why no more of those?

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On 3/24/2023 at 3:13 PM, electricmastro said:

It’s strange, because Frogger has had games somewhat regularly since 1997, yet it still hasn’t retained a considerable amount of attention to this day.

 

I thought the PS1 Frogger game actually sold a lot. I mean... Pac-Man's doing fine, even Space Invaders is doing fine. If anything it's amazing that they're holding on the way they have. They're not going to crush God of War sales but they get a new game every so often and they're usually good.

 

On 3/24/2023 at 5:46 PM, pablum said:

IMO Sega's Shinobi should be getting a new entry at least once a console generation, yet here we are...

 

Same for Golden Axe.

A lot could be said about what became of a lot of Sega franchises, lol... you'd hope Streets of Rage 4 being such a big success would have gotten them thinking about dusting off some of the other ones.

 

On 3/26/2023 at 3:25 PM, roots.genoa said:

Or perhaps because F-Zero GX, as good as it was, bombed. 🙂

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_GameCube_video_games

 

Just under Resident Evil 4, comfortably ahead of Metroid Prime 2 and Star Fox Assault. I don't know what the budget or expectations were, but seems like it could have been worse. I suppose they're making easy money on their other franchises, so "could be worse" isn't good enough for a new one. Star Fox lingered on after Assault though (but it's probably pretty dead now).

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1 hour ago, Video said:

Forgot about the spyro Englander games. I've played some and they were more "meh" to me, but I did collect some of the statuettes.

Skylanders is fun if you grew up with it, though it is at its core a mediocre kids game. But there was nothing like having a figurine of your favorite character and putting it on the portal and seeing that figurine manifest in the game. That was the coolest thing on the planet when I was 8. I still have a bin of my favorites, even though they'll never see use again. Imagine my shock when I found out that the one figurine I never used had an entire game franchise.

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Ehhh... Starfox 2 did finally come out, it was finished, now published better later than never. :)  That game gets grief, but it shouldn't, it's more of the let's not read the f'n manual crowd there.  The easier to set it, the less game you actually get to play.  @Video I always wanted that watch, never got one, and now I usually forget about it or remember check ebay and get disgusted at the BINs vs the few honest ones that pop on by I missed.  I have seen video it looks like it plays pretty smooth and with some decent audio over the earphone too.

 

And yes wolfenstein is major, but it still gets games and has been better utilized kind of in more recent times since it was reborn on PS3/PC in that period.  Personally I think it went off the rails after that one, but hey...taste.  I'm not much into wolfen-quake.

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8 hours ago, Video said:

Ohh, starfox. Should be a larger franchise. Loved the original, and despite the nasty screen door effect, even the 64 game. I even have a game watch that captured the feel of the game well for a segmented single function LCD. Star fox 2 was nearly finished bitd, and sense been finished, but Nintendo missed many opportunities to properly release it. Then starfox adventure, but then, nothing. I (and many others) love space rail shooters, and starfox was/is great. Why no more of those?

 

Ah, Star Fox 2 came out in 2017. Hasn't been any more since then though, that said.

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9 hours ago, Daj said:

Just under Resident Evil 4, comfortably ahead of Metroid Prime 2 and Star Fox Assault. I don't know what the budget or expectations were, but seems like it could have been worse. I suppose they're making easy money on their other franchises, so "could be worse" isn't good enough for a new one. Star Fox lingered on after Assault though (but it's probably pretty dead now).

I stand corrected but that's very surprising considering what I had heard. I guess it did better in the West, but it's still not a lot compared to other big Nintendo franchises anyway. Remember it's the GameCube, which was not very successful on the whole (unfortunately).

 

Regarding Star Fox, even though Star Fox Assault did not do well indeed, I always felt Nintendo could use that license to have their own Gears of War-like game, mixed with space shooting levels of course. Having a cute but "modern" TPS like Jet Force Gemini would be cool imho.

Edited by roots.genoa
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6 hours ago, Tanooki said:

And yes wolfenstein is major, but it still gets games and has been better utilized kind of in more recent times since it was reborn on PS3/PC in that period.  Personally I think it went off the rails after that one, but hey...taste.  I'm not much into wolfen-quake.

 

Wolfenstein went off the rails after 1984 if you ask me.

 

 

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15 hours ago, electricmastro said:

Is Wolfenstein considered to be a major franchise?

I would say so,  seems to get a new entry every few years

 

9 hours ago, electricmastro said:

Wolfenstein went off the rails after 1984 if you ask me.

I always thought it was odd how Wolfenstein made the jump from lesser known 2D games to become the first major first person shooter, created by a different development team and publisher from the original.  

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Started 2 got officially released? I mean, I have the hack (or homebrew) from the early 00's area, soon after it WA found and unofficially released if you didn't mind sending in a sacrificial cart. Outside that, I heard it was on the Nintendo mini, but I was thinking its own official launch, more than a packin.

 

Still, more space rail shooters please!

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3 hours ago, zzip said:

I would say so,  seems to get a new entry every few years

 

I always thought it was odd how Wolfenstein made the jump from lesser known 2D games to become the first major first person shooter, created by a different development team and publisher from the original.  

 

Ah, it was Silas Warner who created the series, after getting this idea of to combine the movie Guns of Navarone and Berzerk together, but it was John Romero who suggested the idea of a 3D remake of Castle Wolfenstein while brainstorming ideas on what game to make after working on Commander Keen.

 

"At that point when Castle Wolfenstein came out of course it was...It supported our program, supported our company right up until the time it collapsed 1985. It supported mainstream publishing while they still had it, and now it's supporting a new generation of folks. I want to talk to some of these folks who wrote Wolfenstein 3D." - https://www.kansasfest.org/wp-content/uploads/Silas-Warner.html

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36 minutes ago, Video said:

Started 2 got officially released? I mean, I have the hack (or homebrew) from the early 00's area, soon after it WA found and unofficially released if you didn't mind sending in a sacrificial cart. Outside that, I heard it was on the Nintendo mini, but I was thinking its own official launch, more than a packin.

 

Still, more space rail shooters please!


Star Fox 2 was also released on Nintendo Switch.

 

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Funny he wants a rail shooter asks for Starfox 2 -- no rails there :D

 

Star Fox 2 is such a fascinating bit of history, a sad bit of it for a long stretch too, and with lots of weird curveballs along the way.

 

Yes it was finished basically, then killed in 1995.  It was killed because N64 was well as if it hadn't been delayed hard it would have been a 1995 system.  N64 was the nail in the coffin to open the floor for itself of both Star Fox2 and Virtual Boy as well, perhaps other canned 1995 projects that had been announced or even printed to be out shortly in Nintendo Power.  The developer only found out it got smoked after thinking it was going to release.

 

Decades later Nintendo decides hey...cool idea, let's do this and finished up the last little bits to make it master quality and quietly stuffs it on the SNES CE, and guess who had no idea?  The developers.  They found out when the public did, when the system arrived, and they were happy.  I cant blame them given the time and effort involved, though they did get fully paid for it, but to have a paid for work just snuffed out and put into a vault blows.  So with the SNES CE off the market 5 years now about, it's no surprise they'd put it on a huge defacto freebie on the Switch since it's included in the basic package for all their network/cloud services.

Edited by Tanooki
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Just for fun, as a refresher, Nintendo franchises that haven't received new games in over five years, and thus aren't as big:

 

Wave Race - 2001
F-Zero - 2004
Custom Robo - 2006
Magical Vacation - 2006
Balloon Fight - 2007
Elite Beat Agents - 2007
Starfy - 2008
Excite - 2009
Punch-Out!! - 2009
Puzzle League - 2009
Sin and Punishment - 2009
Golden Sun - 2010
Kyle Hyde - 2010
Pilotwings - 2011
Steel Diver - 2014
Chibi-Robo! - 2015
Pushmo - 2015
Rhythm Heaven - 2015
Cruis'n - 2017
Star Fox - 2017

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13 minutes ago, electricmastro said:

Is River City a major franchise?

Very, google Kunio (or Kunio-Kun) as it's a huge property we just didn't get much of, and usually had random names: Super Dodgeball, River City Ransom, Renegade, Crash and the Boys Street Challenge, World Cup Soccer (these are just NES and GB, there are more yet.)

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4 minutes ago, Tanooki said:

Very, google Kunio (or Kunio-Kun) as it's a huge property we just didn't get much of, and usually had random names: Super Dodgeball, River City Ransom, Renegade, Crash and the Boys Street Challenge, World Cup Soccer (these are just NES and GB, there are more yet.)


Yeah, for a time there were more sports games localized over here than brawlers, and even then the branding was repeatedly changed in a way they didn’t even come off as being apart of the same series at first glance. I suppose it wasn’t until 2016 that Kunio experienced a sort of rebirth outside of that sports reputation when Tokyo Rumble released.

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15 minutes ago, Tempest said:

I was always surprised that the Shining Force series kind of fizzled out.  Yes there's been a game here or there over the years but they're nothing like the older entries in the series and they tend to remain obscure. 

Shining pretty much switched its focus from strategy RPGs to action RPGs in 2002 with Shining Soul, and evidently stayed with it as recently as Shining Resonance Refrain.

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