So I was looking at games in the year 2012/2013. We have great games to play with. But there was one thing that I noticed. The sequels are from the games which were about 4-5 years ago. How? Here is the list.

Games of 2008 --> 2013

• Devil May Cry 4 --> DmC
• Dead Space --> Dead Space 3
• God of War: Chains of Olympus --> God of War: Ascension
• GRID --> GRID 2
• GTA IV --> GTA V
• Metal Gear Solid 4 --> Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance

Games of 2007 --> 2012

• Assassin's Creed --> Assassin's Creed 3
• Halo 3 --> Halo 4
• Crysis --> Crysis 3
• Mass Effect --> Mass Effect 3

Games between the interval 2007 --> 2013

• BioShock (2007) --> BioShock Infinite (2013)
• Far Cry 2 (2008) --> Far Cry 3 (2012)
• Lost Planet (2007) --> Lost Planet 3 (2013)

As you can see, some game are direct sequel that took 5 years. Devil May Cry is a reboot yet a new entry to Devil May Cry saga. Some games took 5 years to have 2 successive sequels. God of War had a prequel to the original and now we will have another prequel to the prequel. GTAIV had DLCs that expanded th GTAIV but now after 5 years we have a direct sequel. It is just like Oblivion (2006) then we had the direct sequel Skyrim (2011) which took 5 years. I am no adding Call of Duty, Need for Speed and FIFA series since they get released annually.

So what are your thoughts about the gaming industry nowadays. If you have other suggestions, put it in the comment.

Today I came up with an interesting topic. I hope you will find it entertaining. It is about how video games can make us lose hope in playing games. I found several factors that you will agree with me:

CHALLENGE MODES

I was playing Modern Warfare 2 last night and I began playing with Spec-Ops mode. It is a challenge mode that forces you to play with all your might and skills to clear the mission. If you play it on easy difficulty it is a piece of cake, but if you play it on the most difficult setting, you are going to cry. For example, you are in a shanty Brazilian town and your objective is to eliminate all of the illegal weapon dealers. There are 50 of them including war dogs. On top of that you are not allowed to kill more than 3 civilians. It may sound easy but since you are alone and the town looks like a labyrinth and dogs attack from nowhere and the terrorists are moving as a group it is really difficult. It took me about an hour to clear that mission. But in the later missions it is really tough! Many people brag that they finished the game but what about clearing the game on the hardest difficulty or trying to complete the challenge mode? Many gamers think themselves as a hero when they beat Halo 3. Try beating the game on legendary difficulty. You will cry!

This goes the same for the RPG games like Final Fantasy and Persona. Story missions are so easy that all you have to do is level up to a certain level and equip the latest equipment. Unfortunately it is not the same when it comes to side quests. Your party's level must be very high and you equip items that you must prevent yourself from a certain weakness. You must retry several times to defeat that boss since you learn its weaknesses via trial and error.

So an expert gamer brags when he/she completes the game on the hardest setting or completing the dreadful challenges. Many gamers lose hope when they are incapable of completing challenge games. Some even becomes very depressed since he/she finds themselves very noob.

RANKINGS

How many of you tried to clear every mission with S rank or with Gold medal? Some people don't bother them but a real gamer takes it serious. Have you ever felt that you are so cool when you are playing Devil May Cry but then you rethink that you are lame when you get the D or C rank? To be honest I do. You go crazy trying to figure it out where did you go wrong! As you keep earning poor ranks you lose hope in playing the game and you turn off the console.

You may say its useless to earn high ranks but sometimes it is very important. In Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, you unlock secret weapons and items by earning S rank in certain missions. Those weapons and items helps you to complete the most hardest missions. Apart from unlocking secret content, you feel earning the highest ranks to unlock an achievement or trophy. When I bought Xbox 360 for the first I was playing N3. The game was so boring and earning A rank was a pain in the back that unlocking every achievement was a nightmare. Thankfully I got 1000G and that's the only game that I unlocked all of the achievements.

So have you ever felt noob when you got very poor ranks? If so did you lose hope in playing that game again?

MULTIPLAYER

I guess everyone has faced with this problem. You might have felt that you are awesome in Street Fighter or in Forza Motorsport 3 or in Gears of War but when you play against a human rathern than the CPU things change a lot. The reason is that the human and the CPU plays totally different. Both of them have weaknesses and strong points. Unfortunately there are some uber expert gamers that pawn you in few seconds like those ones in Tekken. Some people utterly punish you with 10 hit combos and you don't stand a chance against them. You lose your sanity and you can't concentrate with your game. After getting pawned several times in a row you just throw the controller away and cry.

GAME OVER

Finally the next-gen games have checkpoints in every moment. I remember those games which I used to play on PSone where most of the games drove me crazy when I used to see those game over screens since you had to replay a large chunk of the game in order to reach the point where you died. Save points and checkpoints were very scarce that you had to play the games at ultimate concentration. Thank God that many of the shooter games have very frequent checkpoint locations. That saves some demotivation of gaming entertainment but that's not enough. You will still go crazy to see the same game over screen over and over. How many times have you seen the game over screen when you were trying to defeat a certain boss or defeat an opponent in a fighting game. I bet we saw a lot. The most painful part is when your clear rank gets very low and you earn very low amount of money like in Bayonetta. Since you clear missions with bad rank you can't afford to buy upgrades that will help you to finish the other missions. So you have to replay the previous missions to farm some cash. Still we all cry when we lose a life in Super Mario games :)

So now I ask you guys. What demotives you when you are playing a game?

Video games are awesome! It is one of the best inventions ever made on earth (it has no use other than keeping us entertained for few hours)! I bought a gaming laptop last year and I am happy with it. I just bought some new games and you need a 'little' monster PC to play the game at 30fps (actually we all want to play games at 60fps or more). I was planning to buy a new laptop for better specifications but they cost more expensive, a little bit heavier and consumes more battery. So I gave up and now I am planning to buy a desktop PC. I checked the prices and they are fine but still the top-notch CPUs and GPUs are extremely expensive. On top of that they consume more 'electricity'. So before double clicking the game you want to play, you must think twice. Since the day I bought Xbox 360, the electricity bill was bit heavy for my pocket. I must pay more than the usual, unfortunately.

My point is that every year, gamers must pay more money for new hardware to play games. Here are the examples:

- Disc Readers: a standard PC game was about 700mb, then it became 4,7gb now 7,3gb. As their size change, their disc type changes too. CD-ROM is not enough now, you need a Dual-Layer DVD reader. So you must change your disc reader as years pass.

- CPUs: remember the time when Pentium 4 was released, it was a boom gaming history (don't mention the price of it)! Now we have dual-cores and quad-cores. Some games work with single-core but with lags and it gets stuck after a while. I heard that AMD has already made 16-core processor (if it is true). If you want to play games faster, you must pay for better CPU.

- GPUs: I am tired of nVidia and ATi graphic card competition. nVidia has 3D vision feature whereas ATi has eye-finity feature. I don't care their features but some games works smooth on nVidia or on ATi only. So you must have two PCs with different brands. standard PC game needed 128mb of VGA, now some needs 1gb of VGA. Can you remember the release date of Crysis? There was a 50% boost in graphic card sales. Not only that but now we have DirectX 11! I mean what the hell!? My graphic can barely run DirectX 10. So how many DirectXs are we going to see until the end of the world? I want to play DiRT 2 in DirectX 11, but I can't. I bet that there will be DirectX 12 in 3 years.

- Power consumption: as I stated earlier, video games consume more electricity as the performance of the PC increases. More consumption means overheating too. So you must buy coolers if you don't want see smokes coming out from your PC. We all have seen that you can cook meat or eggs with Xbox 360's or PlayStation 3's hardware. Using coolers also consume more electricity. Damn, as if we are installing an intercooler to a turbo charged V6 car!

- Online features: You may have said that you don't need to buy new disc reader for your games since you can buy and download it from the internet, but wait. You need a strong internet connection since you are downloading a 7,3gb game. Imagine downloading Mass Effect 2 which is a double disc game! Not only that if you play multiplayer on Xbox 360 you need a gold account by paying 60 dollars annually. Now I heard that PlayStation 3 is bringing premium account feature on PSN (I read this from a gaming magazine).

In conclusion, video games are getting more costly every year. I hate to see the word "only for $300". Things are getting more and more expensive rather than getting more cheaper of efficient (decrease the size of the game or lower specifications). So what do you think about the video games?

Hello Gamespot users

I would like to write my first blog about videogames. Nowadays video games are popular among us. There are millions of games to play with. They are classified into different genres; arcade, simulation, MMOs or even flash games. It is great to have such massive videogame library in our life. You have large selection of games to keep you amused. The most annoying thing about videogames are the unnecessary 'sequels' and this is the topic about my blog.

I would like to exemplify with the sports games. Unfortunately we get annual releases of each sport games like football, soccer, basketball etc. Every year we get an annual release of Pro Evolution Soccer or FIFA games. I bought Winning Eleven 2008 years ago and it was enough for me. But the next year Winning Eleven 2009 got released and now Winning Eleven 2010 is released. The only differences between the sequels are the additions of some new official football teams or the substitutions of some football players between the teams and on top of it there is no major improvement in the graphics or the gameplay. The ideas of the football games are simple: 2 different teams with 11 players in each, chasing after the ball for 90 minutes trying shoot at the goal posts! So why do we get these annual releases of these game? Can't we just connect to the internet and update the game every year for once? If there is a big addition to the game like adding officially licensed teams, buy the update for $10 or $20 and change the game title from Winning Eleven 2009 to Winning Eleven 2010. They are just wasting time and money in producing the copies of their games. They have to burn millions of DVDs and produce millions of game boxes for a game that has very few changes in the sequel.

The game is the same but the titles of the game are changing from Winning Eleven to Pro Evolution Soccer

It is not the sports game only but we also Guitar Hero and Rock Band series. It is like an endless struggle in the gaming history. Activision must publish a music rhythm game of every famous rock band on earth! Last year we got:

- Guitar Hero 5

- Guitar Hero: Metallica

- Guitar Hero: Van Halen

- Guitar Hero: Smash Hits

- Band Hero

- Rock Band: Beatles

- Rock Band: Unplugged

- Lego: Rock Band

Just wow! Aren't the developers of Guitar Hero being ashamed of themselves for publishing such unnecessary sequels? At least they came up with a fresh idea which is DJ Hero. The gameplay can be the same but at least it is played in a different way. Now DJ Hero 2 is coming, yet I am neither surprised at all nor interested about it!

Same game, only the titles and the musics are different

I would like to give my final example and that is the Dynasty Warriors series. Since Dynasty Warriors 2 came out on PlayStation2 it had 4 more sequels to its game plus loads of spin-offs but I merely call them as sequels. Koei is very smart in making sequels to its own games. They add few more new characters, new maps and some new little game elements but in the end the game is the same. The story is always the same, you start fighting with Yellow Turbans, then defeat Lu Bu then fight against the Three Kingdoms till one of the kingdom survives. Not only Dynasty Warriors but his brother game Samurai Warriors is using the same idea. As if Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors series didn't have enough sequels, they made another game called Warriors Orochi! It is just the mixture of Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors contents. They even made a sequel to the Warriors Orochi. Last year Dynasty Warriors: Strikeforce was released on PSP and it was much more different than the original installment yet the story was the same. I wonder how many Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors sequels will be made. There are also sequels on PSP, Gameboy Advance and even on PC.

...there will Dynasty Warriors 7, Dynasty Warriors 8, Dynasty Warriors 9 and forever!

The only way to solve this problem is the DLCs. I really love those DLCs and online patches. Plug the internet, download the latest patch to fix the game's problems and buy more additional content if you want to have more fun with your favorite game. At least I don't have go to the store, buy the sequel in a box (that is more like an expansion pack) and take space in my library. Like Fallout 3, instead of making sequels, DLCs are published. The game is the same but only the content gets some new elements such as weapons, enemies, quests etc. One game disc but loads of new contents of the game on my HDD. That's what I want!

We only need sequels to the game when there is:

- Complete new story line (Final Fantasy games are all the same but the storyline of the games are completely different and none of them has relevance to each other)

- Major changes in the graphics (Forza Motorsports 3 has much more better graphics than Forza Motorsports 2 due to its new graphic engine)

- New next-gen consoles (having Tekken 6 on Xbox 360 is a great idea because Xbox never had a Tekken game)

That's all I can say folks! I hope you enjoyed my blog and agree with my point of new. Please leave a comment about the blog or add some more game references that suit the topic of this blog.