Was there a game series you loved but has now failed? or not.

Hey there, 
just post the series that you loved and tell if you think it has failed or not. 
 
Failed:                                                                                                 Still Love:
Need for speed failed                                                                      Grand Theft Auto still gets better every time a new one
in my heart when Carbon was released,                                     comes out. 
                                                                                                              Final Fantasy is still going strong and yah the new comes  
                                                                                                              out on 360 too, I can still play it! 
 
Just post some you can think of.

need for speed, i liked that game until it started to become bad. i think shift is the newest one that was good.

Failed: 
?? 
 
 
Still love: 
GTA, COD, ..

Toejam & Earl.  The first one was great.  After that...not so much.
 
Also, Doom.  Doom 3 did nothing for me.
 
And, Duke Nukem.  I even tolerated Time To Kill, but the series is dead now.

It killed me inside when Mega Man started sucking. The classic games stopped being made at 8 (until recently), Legends was mediocre, X sucked hard after 4, and Battle Network/Star Force was shallow and ended up being rehashed every year. The only decent to good games to come out recently have been the Zero/ZX series, which I didn't enjoy for a few different reasons, and MM9, which I haven't played yet.

rainbow six because it went totally mainstream all of a sudden... hey and ghost recon as well. 

Guitar Hero.
@sgjackson:
As someone who agreed with everything you said, try MM9, it's great.

" Guitar Hero.
@sgjackson:
As someone who agreed with everything you said, try MM9, it's great. "

Yes that's one I forgot Guitar Hero I'm not happy with that anymore they released like 4 ones this year and Rockband I'm absolutely enjoying that so much.

Failed: Crash Bandicoot
As soon as Naughty Dog stopped producing the series, Crash Bandicoot degenerated into crap.

Battlefield has taken the slow path to directly counter COD. I'm kinda disappointed they haven't stepped up their game a little bit more.
 
Then again one could say they're trying to pave a separate path of their own. I just hate how so COD gets recognized for so much of what BF initially brought to MP FPS.
 
Also GTA4 fell so short of what it could have been. Luckily/sadly the DLC is (also very slowly) making up for it.
 
Many classic Square RPG series have become sour, then again so have some CRPG series. Perhaps I'm growing out of the straight RPG scene.

It's because COD has the bandwagon factor to its advantage; like Halo.
 
Damnit, that was a defensive response. I'm sorry.
 
You are right though. IW knows how to look at an existing idea and innovate on it like no other.

" Failed: Crash Bandicoot As soon as Naughty Dog stopped producing the series, Crash Bandicoot degenerated into crap. "

Failed: Paper Mario (loved the first one)
Still love: Pokemon

megaman. i liked the legends series, the X series but now it's just awful. (not counting megaman 9) 

Medal of Honor up until Allied Assault. 
 
I'd like to see Rainbow Six return to the Raven Shield glory days.

Failed: Oddworld games.
 
Stranger's Wrath was great but just didn't do that well at all, apparently.

Oh wow... this is going to piss some people off but 
 
Failed: 
 
FINAL FANTASY: The game became self absored and focused on graphics above gameplay. You can fight 3-4 battles in the old games in the time it takes you to fight one in a current game. And that's if you don't use summons. And NOW apparently they're just having you mash one button in fights in order to let the game make all the deciions for you. Didn't it used to be a game? 
 
ZELDA: the game is completely broken in every way. A game that used to be about exploration is now about being told to go someplace, going there, being told to go someplace else, going there, ad nauseum. The game economy is broken which breaks the risk/reward system. The majority of the time challengers offer the reward of money that you can't carry beacuse you're already full or hearts that you can't carry because there's no danger in the game in the first place. 
 
CASTLEVANIA: It's the art style to blame here, really, and I accept that others will feel differently. The medieval art of the original games turned into a bishonen sex fantasy where every man is a homoerotic barbie doll.  
 
HALO: The awful story is to blame here. I wrote a whole thinga bout it in the Halo3 thread so I won't repeat myself but... awful. And Halo 1 was so great... 
 
ALONE IN THE DARK: The biggest enemy in the gaming industry today is "badassed-ness". THere's a whole world of interesting stuff out there that has nothing to do wiht "being a badass" but hte gaming industry is hung up on it because they treat their audience like they're 13 year old boys. AID used to be a victorian era game about a mustachiod everyman detective who stared unblinkingly into the occult. ...Then it became about a long haired "badass" toughguy who punches out monsters. 
 
JET MOTO: Jet Moto had a brillaint concept. What if mankind built hoverbikes? And what if we raced them? That was it. It was the fictional extreme sport of racing hoverbikes. Everything else was as close to realistic, in a comic book way, as possible. But as the sequels came out and other people got their hands in it, they tried to turn it into a "futuristic" racing game and pulled out all the cliche's that come with it. Good thing it ended before some 8 year old thought it would be a good idea to add missles... 
 
TENCHU: The original Tenchu was a work of art. Every game after that was trash. The real brilliance of the first game was the amount of respect it had for the player... 

" Failed: Crash Bandicoot As soon as Naughty Dog stopped producing the series, Crash Bandicoot degenerated into crap. "

I actually quite enjoyed NFS-Carbon, but the ones after that were pure shit.

Seriously, no one? Tony Hawk? Man, that series was awesome as recently as American Wasteland. But oh well, maybe Ride will come and take us to the promised land.
 
But I'm not holding my breath.

Failed: Resident Evil series, starting from 4 and up I began to dislike what they had done with it, just feels like an action game now. 
 
Still love: Final Fantasy, Grand Theft Auto.

• Need for Speed.
• Fable.

Some series I feel are lacking now, but used to be solid are:
 
Worms
Sonic
Zelda
Castlevania
 
That's a just a few glancing over my game library.

Failed: 
Star Fox - SF64 was classic, I just wish the games were still the same. 
Tony Hawk - Loved it up until it stopped being THPS...  Now it's all graffiti and poor acting. 
Pokemon - It was all downhill past Red Blue and Yellow.  The first 150 Pokemon (Not 151, Togepi sucks.) will always have a place in my heart.  
Mario Party - Just isn't the same anymore. <3 MP2.
 
Still Love: 
Street Fighter - I've played SFII, SFA3, and SFIV, and all of them are brilliant.  SFIV did a great job of staying true to the series while keeping things interesting. 
Gears of War - Still a young series, but GoW2 was a great improvement on the first.  Cheers to EPIC. 
Burnout - Loved Takedown, LOVED Revenge, LOVED Paradise. 

Fail: Sonic
 
Still Love: GTA and Pokemon.

Quake 4 was a pretty lackluster experience for me while I've loved every other Quake game and played them all to death. But considering I played it like two years after its release as I didn't have a computer at the time that could handle it, and that id was barely involved in making it, I don't think the Quake franchise has failed just yet. 
 
The Settlers, however, failed miserably for a while. I regard the first two games as absolute masterpieces and some of my favorite games of all time. Three was alright but it just didn't feel the same with the RTS style combat. Then it really went downhill... Four was basically three with all the nostalgia missing, five tried to be WarCraft III and failed miserably. Six had the right idea but was so horribly optimized it was unplayable. Now Anno 1404: Dawn of Discovery was a pretty good revival of the series. I wish it had gotten more coverage, but I guess if it isn't on 360 it doesn't exist nowadays.
 
Mortal Kombat failed me pretty bad too. The first three were just awesome fighting games and absolute classics, but as soon as it went 3D it became a joke. I remember playing the shit out of four telling myself it was good just because I loved the series so much... but I knew.

Perfect Dark

Valkyrie Profile is one of my all-time favorite games.  A beautiful, if difficult to uncover story with memorable characters that made me feel rewarded for putting in the effort to get the best ending.
 
Valkyrie Profile 2 is, by contrast, one of the worst games I have ever played.  Not because of the gameplay.  The game plays rather well.  It also has nothing to do with the Einherjar taking a backseat to the main characters.  Instead, tri-Ace thought it would be an awesome idea if the villain traveled back in time and made it so that the events of the first game, one of my all-time favorite video game narratives, never happened.  That plot twist absolutely ruined the game for me, wich was all the more painful due to the amount of time I had put into the game before it came to pass.  I can't even bring myself to try or even care about the Valkyrie Profile DS game.
 
But the original game, the first Valkyrie Profile will always hold a special place in my heart.

Gears of War. But i still have hope that cliffy doesn't fuck up the 3rd.

Dynasty Warriors. I had fun mashing buttons and all, but it got old and the series never did anything new.

Conflict. The Desert Storms 1 & 2 were great, by Denied Ops, Global Storm and Vietnam sucked.

Yeah, but I don't even want to talk about it. :(

Still love
Zelda / GTA /  Resident Evil /  Max Payne /  Metal Gear Solid / Hitman / Splinter Cell
 
Failed
Kingdom Hearts-The first was such a fun game, the second fucked it up so horribly 
True Crime- Loved the first and the second was completely broken
Destroy All Humans-They just got worse and worse....
Prince of Persia-This is a hard one because i loved the first one and the second and third are playable, but the second one went NOWHERE the story was a complete turd. The combat was just really f'ed up in the second and third.

Another that wasn't mentioned was Soul Calibur that was cool until 4.

Failed- 
Tony Hawk's games (after underground really) 
Burnout (Everything after 3 really disappointed me, yes that includes Paradise)
 
Still digging- 
Lego Games (fun, funny and great to play with the kids) 
Guitar Hero (I'm one of the few that don't care how many come out in a year, it still remains the best mixers for alcohol ever)
Valve Games (Let's face it, they haven't made a bad one yet) 

god a lot of ppl on this thread r talking about big time franchises that r still going...for me it was the original Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction on the xbox 1, that was a great game in soo many ways and with the sequel which i wanted soooo bad they fucked everything up. Instead of making things more streamlined they made things more complicated, instead of sticking to the gritty military theme of the first 1 they decided to make some bullshit jungle theme with bright colours n crap, the first game which was good looking for its time, they made the sequel look like crap....ive lost faith in pandemic...they even delayed the game for polish and it still looked like crap and was buggy as hell.....