There is a bit of a topic trend going on for Blapril, started by Krikket, where people name their top four or five favorite video game series.
The Blapril commeth
This is week four, which has its own topic, but since I haven’t come up with anything else I took “series appreciation” as falling under the “developer/creator appreciation” umbrella and decided I should run with it.
March 29th – April 4th – Blapril Prep WeekApril 5th – April 11th – Topic Brainstorming WeekApril 12th – April 18th – Getting to Know You Week- April 19th – April 25th – Developer/Creator Appreciation Week
- April 26th – May 2nd – Staying Motivated Week
- May 3rd – May 9th – Lessons Learned Week
Looking at video game series seems pretty reasonable. In the last decade or so especially the large video game publishers have gone all in on series and sequels for games, eschewing much new in favor of a reliable return on investment that churning out annual change ups on standard formula has proven to bring.
So I started thinking about which series I might put on a list… and I sort of ran into a bit of a wall. This is different than, say, picking my 15 most influential games.
Part of that was I immediately put bounds around the possible answers. It is just what I do out of habit. First, to my mind, a “series” requires there to be three or more games. So as much as I may have enjoyed Defense Grid and Defense Grid 2, they are only a game and its sequel and not really a series. And that along knocks off a lot of possible entries listed over on Wikipedia.
I also felt that unless I had played a substantial and representative number of titles in a series… arbitrarily I figured I needed at least half to cover… I couldn’t really count that series as a favorite. Playing only Need for Speed: World or Dirt 3 does not really give me enough to make a claim on either series. I can say I love Mario Kart, but I only ever played Mario Kart 64, Double Dash, and that version on the DS. I never even bought the Wii version! Can I really complain about the blue shell if that is all I have experienced?
Likewise, although I had played four of the nine games in the Ultima series, those were the first four games of a series that expanded quite a bit from humble origins. I enjoyed Ultima III the best out of what I played, which probably means I am not down with the series as a whole.
I did wonder for a bit if MMORPG expansions ought to count. Is EverQuest one game, or a series of 27 games churned out over 21 years? But I decided that way lay madness and discarded the idea. (Also, how many expansions would I have had to have played to be legit in counting EverQuest? More than I have I am sure.)
This would have been much easier if I had been a big console gamer. Or a sports focused gamer. There are so many series there. But as an online and/or MMO gamer, series haven’t been a huge thing for me and, as I have noted here in the past, I have been playing online games since 1986.
So what series of games had I played enough of to meet my own criteria?
Cilivization – This series of games came up on a some lists and I am good here. I have owned I-VI and a couple of the side games in the series, like Alpha Centauri. I played the hell out of the original, the first sequel, and the fifth entry, along with Alpha Centauri.
Pokemon – Or at least the main line Pokemon RPG titles. I think I am covered on that, having played every title on the DS/3DS handheld series as well as Pokemon Sword on the Switch. I even played two of the GameBoy Advance titled back on my original DS Lite, because it had the GBA cartridge slot. And I played the re-release of Pokemon Blue on the 3DS and have the blog post to prove it. I’ve even played Pokemon Ranger and a couple of the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon titles.
Age of Empires – The RTS winner here, though of the three core games I was only really a fan of Age of Empires II – The Age of Kings. That was the pinnacle of the series to my mind, though I owned and played all three. The original was a bit rough and unbalanced and the third seemed like Ensemble had lost its way. But I have Age of Empires II in my Steam library.
Diablo – There are three games there, so meets the bar for a series and I have owned and played all three games plus their expansions… multiple copies of a the first two even. I owned a copy of Diablo II and the expansion for both home and work because we could play games on the work network after hours back around the turn of the century. Those days are long gone, but if Blizzard made a credible Diablo II remaster I would throw money at my computer screen.
LEGO Star Wars – I thought I was done when I hit four series, and then this run of games finally popped up into my conscious thought. There are six titles and we own four of them… more if you count the combo edition that reworked and repacked the first two games when Traveler’s Tales got the vibe right on the series.
And that’s it.
By my own criteria I cannot really come up any more, though at least I made it to five. I can declare these as my five favorite series by virtue of being the only five. I imagine if I rack my brain I can probably shake out one or two more… but it would be stuff from the 90s, things long forgotten.
Oddly, I have the games listed in the order to which the series came to mind, which corresponds roughly to a the descending order for both how much time I have spent playing them AND how I would probably rank them. Seems natural enough.
Others who have posted their lists, some of whom felt less self-constrained than I:
