Sequels are safe, but stale, bet for fall titles

This fall’s video games are strictly by the numbers: the numbers 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Visit a video game store between now and the holidays, and you’ll have a hard time finding a high-profile new release whose title doesn’t end in one of those digits.

It’s the autumn of the sequel, with few original games hitting the market, let alone generating big buzz. Still, the season offers some surprises: Some of those sequels are darned good. Others, despite the high quality of their pre-

decessors, are surprisingly blah.

For every sequel as shockingly beautiful and fluid to play as the shooter “Half-Life 2,” you have five or six titles that are strictly average – or at least not much better than the successful titles that spawned them.

“The quality has a tendency to go down, as pressure is applied for development teams to get products out the door without regard to consumer demands,” said Bill Gardner, president of game publisher O~3 Entertainment and former president of Capcom U S A.

It’s not surprising that the video game industry has concentrated on franchises in recent years. It costs upward of $20 million now to develop an A-list title, with some more than doubling that bill. Analysts for NPD Group, a sales and marketing research firm, point out that games cost about 20 times as much to produce today as they did in 1996 – yet they’re still selling for the same $49.99.

“Publishers can’t afford to take many risks, so the relative predictability of sequels is attractive,” said Bill Swartz, president of game publisher Mastiff.

Gamers expect more from top-tier titles, including big-name voice talent, cutting-edge graphics and game engine technology to make things move smoothly and beautifully. But adding Patrick Stewart or Michael Clarke Duncan – Atari’s “Forgotten Realms: Demon Stone” uses both – costs money, and so do the licenses for the best software engines that do things like make enemies intelligent or your character flip realistically in the air.

Moreover, getting the best results from aging hardware – by computer industry standards, today’s major video game consoles are getting long in the tooth – requires some pretty intricate programming. You can see that in the delays that popular titles often experience, as the hardware they run on is pushed to ever-further extremes to make the sequels look better and act better than the originals.

“Halo 2,” whose debut on Nov. 9 will probably cause more than a few Xbox owners to take a mental health day away from work, has kept fans waiting for at least two years. And many other top games expected this fall already have slipped into the first quarter of next year –Capcom’s amazing-

looking “Resident Evil 4” and the quirky online world game “The Matrix Online” among them.

Then there’s the crush caused by the extraordinary competition between publishers for your holiday dollars. Customers have a limited amount of money to spend, and more than 60 percent of the industry’s annual sales are in the fall and over the holidays. As a result, the bulk of the year’s high-profile titles are released in the last three months of the year. That tempts folks on a budget to buy one or two sequels where they know what they’ll get, rather than risk blowing part of their stash on something new that might disappoint.

Finally, add in the expense of national marketing, which eats up almost half the budget of many top titles, and there’s not much room for experimentation. It’s no wonder that many studios consolidated again this year, with big names like Acclaim going under altogether. (It has filed for bankruptcy liquidation.)

On the flip side, people who say they like titles that break new ground and do new things are the same folks who hesitate to plunk down their credit card to spend $50 on an unknown title. Gamers may consider themselves cutting edge, but many aren’t so quick to pull the trigger on a risky purchase.

Take “Prince of Persia,” a beautiful, high-flying action/

adventure title released by Ubisoft last year. It was terrific to play, a close runner-up for my game of the year. It got wonderful reviews from virtually every publication, gamer-oriented or not. But its sales were a tiny fraction of those from established game franchises.

Its sequel, which also has been getting glowing previews, comes out this fall.

Gamers will find this fall’s sequels add up to a mixed bag. “Metal Gear Solid 3,” for example, looks like it’ll advance stealth action with new styles of game play, and it’s definitely different from its predecessors. But “Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 2,” the sequel to the incredibly popular role-playing game, looks like essentially more of the same with a graphic face-lift.

As the video game market continues to mature, we’ll probably see more ground-

breaking titles. The average gamer age is creeping up; it’s about 28 now and will hit 30 soon. Eventually, we’ll get a big enough group of gamers in older age brackets to merit some breakthrough titles, the same way that the independent film market appeals to a more limited segment of the population. Until then, you know what you can count on.