4

Jak And Daxter Went From Wacky Action Romp To "Gritty" GTA Clone

Jak And Daxter was Naughty Dog's spiritual successor to Crash Bandicoot, and while it may have swapped out Crash for a space elf with a snarky sidekick, it was the same crate-hopping fun for all ages.

Sony Interactive EntertainmentIts working title was Mascot & Mascot: Mostly The Same Game.

There were no weapons. These guys still resorted to the old "stomp your enemies until the world is saved" strategy invented by Italian plumbers decades before. The game was a success, but something happened between Jak And Daxter and Jak II that would end up changing the series forever. That something was the release of GTA 3. It seems the developers of Jak II saw the carjackings, open world, and many, many guns and thought, "What if we made exactly this?" So they tried.

Sony Interactive EntertainmentIts working title was Let's Copy A Different Game Now.

3

Advance Wars Sort Of Realized War Is Pretty Grim

The first entry in the Advance Wars series was an adorable strategy game about a cute boy annihilating cute enemies with cute tanks and cute soldiers.

Nintendo"Let's have a terrific war, gang!"

2

Hard Truck: Apocalypse Turned A Truck Driving Sim Into A Post-Apocalyptic Road War

The Hard Truck series is a hilariously titled yet relatively realistic trucking sim about delivering cargo and running a small independent business while carefully obeying traffic laws. It's presumably a handful of methamphetamines and a soda bottle full of pee away from the real thing. Hard Truck: 18 Wheels Of Steel even boasts a lot of real-world truck brands, each faithfully recreated with a dizzying array of realistic factors.

We're not saying it looks fun -- only faithfully recreated.

Strangely enough, the next game in the series opens with a meteor hitting Earth and wiping out most of humanity. Stranger still, the last remaining humans are forced to engage in high-speed battles with weaponized cars. Also, you are ferrying packages between small communities while fighting off vicious bandits. It's like if The Road Warrior had been a sequel to an auto safety PSA.

"What? I was KIDDING!" -- the lead designer of Hard Truck Apocalypse after waking up from a coma, probably.

1

Contra: Shattered Soldier Starts With The Protagonist Blowing Up The World

The original Contra was about as violent and morally complex as an NES game could be. You were two shirtless men filling their entire world with bullets until everything that wasn't them was dead. Most players probably couldn't tell you who they were killing or why, and most of the sequels stayed close to this perfect formula of video game storytelling.

Then came Contra: Shattered Soldier for the PS2. The game opens with the lead character from the first installment setting off an orbital death laser and killing 80 percent of Earth's population. And they were the lucky ones.

Somehow, in the time between the events of Contra: Hard Corps and Contra: Shattered Soldier, Bill Rizer became history's greatest monster, killing most of the planet as well as his partner, Lance. For his crimes, he's sentenced to 10,000 years in cryosleep. But while he's sleeping, an enemy appears that only he can stop, so they thaw him out early.

Yes, it's Demolition Man: The Version With Less Subtlety.

One of the many stupid things that follow: Lance is somehow still alive, but that's barely worth mentioning because Bill kills him again. It's also revealed that Bill was tricked into destroying Earth by the Triumvirate, three old men with linked brains who have ruled the world in secret for hundreds of years. You can watch a cutscene about it here if you want, but we promise you don't.

It's a grim, exhausting shrine to boredom, but with worse graphics than you'd expect.

As a reminder, this murderous story of gut-wrenching betrayal, accidental genocide, and ancient conspiracies was a sequel to this:

Konami"Are we not each of us jungle cyber walls, spitting beach balls at life? Oh, that's good." -- the future writer of Contra: Shattered Soldier, probably

To make things even more grim, when you beat the game, it's revealed that none of these little shapes and monsters you've been killing since the '80s were evil; they only came to the planet to recover a sacred relic humanity had stolen from them. Which means ... holy shit, we killed like four million of those things each. Truly, now we are all sons of bitches.

How great would it be to be able to play all these on a new-but-old NES Classic Edition?

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For more, check out 7 Hilariously Insane Video Game Sequels To Classic Movies and 5 Awesome Game Sequels That Were Screwed Over And Canned.

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