1. The Typing of the Dead
The Original:
The House of the Dead was an arcade light-gun shooter about killing zombies while waiting for the 3 o'clock showing of Wild Wild West to start at the mall. An endless army of corpses, monsters, and horrible dialogue attacks you as you weave your way through a blood-splattered mansion built by a mad scientist to house his ultimate creation, which turns out to be a naked claw monster you must defeat by firing bullets into its dick. There have been five or six sequels so far, all following the same basic premise of having the player endlessly pull a trigger into a violent gore explosion while occasionally scaring the shit out of them by suddenly throwing half-skinned jawbone maniacs into their faces.
The Spinoff:
Some coke-nostriled developer decided that eviscerating the prowling legions of the undead would lend itself perfectly to an educational game, and came up with The Typing of the Dead, which regrettably is exactly what it sounds like. Zombies attack you, and you have to successfully type phrases that appear onscreen before they juice your eyeballs with their teeth.
2. Pokemon Channel
The Original:
In the Pokemon series, you kidnap adorable creatures and force them to battle other adorable creatures so that you may collect more adorable creatures and become the master trainer of all adorable creatures (it's less a game and more a self-fulfilling prophecy). The majority of Pokemon titles were developed for handheld systems in order to make absolutely certain that they became life-dominating obsessions.
The Spinoff:
Some gamers rabidly defend video games as a legitimate art form, and Nintendo, apparently with the singular purpose of forever silencing those arguments, released Pokemon Channel. This was the gaming community equivalent of dressing an alcohol-sweating boxcar drifter as Santa Claus and having him run through an orphanage screaming "FUCK YOOOOOU" over their Christmas porridge.
The "gameplay" of Pokemon Channel consists of you watching Pikachu while he watches different television shows. That's it. That's not just us reducing the game down to broad strokes for comedic purposes -- that is literally the game in its entirety.
There are no missions to accomplish, no enemies to defeat, and no way to skip through any of the shows, even if you've already been forced to watch them. The only way to progress in the game is to watch Pikachu sit through different shows in real time, which in turn unlocks more shows for him to watch. This is basically a simulator for anyone who had to suffer through hours of Bonanza marathons because their dad kept the remote wedged between a can of Keystone Light and his regret-soaked Fruit of the Looms.
3. Bomberman: Act Zero
The Original:
The Bomberman series features an adorable robot of the same name running through a colorful world and setting off explosives to solve puzzles. He's dressed like a harmless cartoon Eskimo, and his bombs are giant time-fused balloons that deliver the most nonthreatening explosions in recorded history. Bomberman could not be more child-friendly if he were wearing a BabyBjorn.
The Spinoff:
Somebody decided that Bomberman needed a dark, gritty reboot similar to a Darren Aronofsky fever-tainted nightmare about the Teletubbies and turned the character's bright Saturday morning cheeriness into Jacob's Ladder.
Act Zero, Bomberman is a cyborg slave forced into a televised deathmatch against other cyborgs, sort of like Gerard Butler in Gamer, only somehow less interesting. Essentially, they took everything fun about Bomberman and made it crazy and depressing.
The vibrant gameplay that had been carefully refined for over a decade regressed to a gulag of miserable sameness wherein you march one of the generic bounty hunters from The Empire Strikes Back through a forest of giant lunchboxes to try and kill your enemies, who belt out screams of blood-curdling agony when they expire.
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