Sequels. Remember the day when sequels were on-par with movie tie-ins? When sequels were just merciless cash-ins by developers, just recycling old content and calling it new? Where sometimes, just occasionally, there would be clunky new features that even more away from the game, and marred the memory of its predecessor?
It's just a faint memory now, isn't it?

Let's take the Assassin's Creed series. The first was a big success, but it had some flaws. Assassin's Creed II blew the fans away, with tons of new features and content that greatly improved on its predecessor, and gave sequels a good name.

The most frequent installment, Brotherhood, broke some of the rules, and tore away from expectations-adding more features, keeping with the same character, the same feature, and though disregarding much of what made the other Assassin's Creeds so great, but still became a solid sequel.

Naughty Dog's Uncharted have a similar success story, changing very little of the actual game play, but ramping up the locations, story and high-octane action with every installment.

The seemingly never ending Final Fantasy Titles just get a better and better reception, and Dragon Age's add on sequel, Awakening and it's ability to combine with its predecessor to make not quite a sequel, but a longer version of the same game.

Fighting games change very little of their actual premise, just adding more and more depth to the combat system, silimar to how platform games like Mario change very little but the locations and features. Shooting games such as Modern Warfare, add too little to warrant the $55 price-tag.

Though we've come far from the days where all sequels were to be automatically avoided, but there are some games, which will go unmentioned in this column, that still think it's okay to completely recycle. And with the wealth of great sequels out there, it's so much easier to fall into a $50 waist of time.