Are your favourite franchises better or worse this generation?

Street Fighter

What this generation brought:

2.5D graphics, Ultra Combo finishes, focus cancels

How the overall package compares:

Last generation, you were either revelling in Street Fighter or you were mourning the series’ passing. As the fighting game scene - and thus Street Fighter III - had become an ultra-hardcore arena for frame-counting, pixel-perfect parry-merchants, the accessible jubilance of Street Fighter II’s joyful depths was lost to many who had loved it in the early ‘90s.

With Street Fighter IV, Capcom sorted that right out. The latest game is arguably the follow-up to SFII we all imagined at the time. Deadly simple to grasp, almost anyone can become a respectable player within a week or two, and the learning curve towards its lofty elite play is a friendly slope rather than an unassailable cliff-face of complexity.

Every character’s design, move-set and animation distils the essence of what we’ve always loved about each one of them, and the visual blend of polygons and paint means that Street Fighter has never been more spectacular. There are dissenting voices of course, mainly those who wanted SFIV to be an even more complicated affair than its predecessor, but surely a bit of streamlining is a small price to pay for a world in which everyone can fight together once more?

When the Awesometer says Street Fighter is best: 

Ratchet & Clank

What this generation brought:

Open-universe exploration, an epic, three-game storyline, time-bending causality puzzles, Mario Galaxy-style planetoid platforming

How the overall package compares:

Ratchet & Clank sequels have long been a case of “more of the same but better”, and given that each has generally come packed with enough fun to inflict an over-dosed physical intolerance to the stuff, we’ve had no problems with that at all.

But this time around, things got even better. Tools of Destruction exploded onto the PS3 in a slick tornado (gun) of gorgeous looks and raucous action, immediately becoming perhaps the definitive R&C game. Quest for Booty was a resoundingly successful experiment in the direction of episodic content, progressing the overall story arc very nicely indeed despite its brief length. And then came A Crack in Time, and with it the biggest revolution the series has yet seen.

ACiT’s freely-explorable, non-linear universe made one of gaming’s most vibrant worlds feel exponentially more real, and by filling said universe with hardcore, Super Mario Galaxy-style mini-levels and sumptuously satisfying Braid-like time manipulation puzzles, Insomniac created one of the most complete and rewarding games ever to bear the celebrated R&C logo. 

When the Awesometer says Ratchet & Clank is best:

Burnout

What this generation brought:

Stunning crash modelling, an open-world city, ECTO-1 and the Back to the Future DeLorean

How the overall package compares:

Like many of gaming’s best franchises, last-gen Burnout had a tight focus on honing a particular experience to perfection. It might eventually have suffered from the tiredness of yearly update syndrome at the hands of EA, but as games about rocketing down the road obliterating everything in your path go, it was pretty much tweaked to perfection by the end of the generation.

So what next? Was Burnout to become another SSX; a series so perfected that it had nowhere else to go? No. Open-world Paradise City is where it went, and despite the radical format change, it worked. Eventually.

Although brilliantly ambitious, Burnout Paradise’s new approach nearly killed the fun to begin with. With a vast area to explore freely and no way to re-try events once you’d found and failed them – aside from driving around for another half hour trying to locate the start again -  the focus was lost, and Burnout’s key appeal was buried beneath reams of blubbery padding. Mercifully though, the inclusion of a simple restart option in a later patch dug it back out, and Paradise finally became a proper Burnout game, only with more depth and things to do than ever before. And with the whale-sized DLC expansions, it’s almost become a whole new game all over again. 

When the Awesometer says Burnout is best: