I originally planned on doing a month of Top 5 lists, but for various reasons I keep getting side tracked or just get too busy with life.  So I'm going to give it a shot.  Anywhere here we go

Top 5 Worst Sequels of All Time

5.  Tao's Adventure: Curse of the Demon Seal - Azure Dreams may not have been the best known game of all time, but it was well reviewed and developed a good cult following due to its mish-mash of so many game genres (dating/rouge/city sim/monster training/etc.  So when the sequel was announced 8 years later for the DS, fans of the games were ecstatic (all 32 of us).

What we got was pure crap. Tao's Adventure abandoned virtually every aspect of the original was tossed out or completely dumbed down.  What was left was a game that was virtual unplayable and appealed to no one. No more randomly generated dungeons, no more dating, no more city building. Just a weak monster training system and a magic system that just didn't work.

There was some justice mind you. Game Informer ranked it was the #1 Worst Game of 2006.

4.  Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly - Say what you will about the original Spyro game, but Insomniac crafted a pretty good game series that appealed to kids and adults that were willing to give it a chance. There was a very dirty yet subtle sense of humor, and the original 3 games did the 3-D platforming/hunting game as well as anything on the N64.  But when Insomniac sold the rights to the game to Vivendi/Universal the word quality would never be used to describe the franchise again.

Enter the Dragonfly was the first post-Insomniac Spyro and easily the worst.  All elements of challenge were removed from the game.  There were no penalties for death.  Plus it was a technical mess. Slowdown, bad framerates, clipping.  It was like Vivendi just gave it to some highschool interns and said, "do you best kids. This assignment won't be graded."

3. Final Fight: Streetwise - "The game that will show how to transition the brawler genre from 2-D to 3-D." "The game that will set the standard for what modern day brawlers will become."  Well in a way yes it was.  

Streetwise was just a bad game.  No two ways around it.  It looked ugly, combat was mindless, and the camera was awful.  The only thing worse was the side missions/mini-games that just felt completely out of place.  Ultiamtely the only thing the game really proved was that the brawler may truely be a dead genere, depending on your opinion of MadWorld.

2.  Sonic the Hedgehog (HD) -  The game was awful.  I think enough bad things have already been said about it so we can just move on.  The only thing that kept this game from topping the list was the steady decline the series was already doing down by the time this game came out.  After Adventure 2, Sonic Heroes, Shadow the Hedgehog and all the other terrible spin-offs no one was really shocked to see this piece of crap come out.

1. Children of Mana, Heroes of Mana, Dawn of Mana - Choose your poison here.  I don't think there has ever been an A-list franchise that was ever shit on to the degree as the Mana/Seiken Densetsu series. Even Sonic was completely given up on like this series.

Here we have what was once a key franchise for Squaresoft that was pushed to the side (so they could make fabulous games like the Bouncer, Unlimited SaGa, and Crystal Chronicles).  Eventually someone remembered that the Mana games were popular though and tried to bring back the franchise in a grandiose way with the "World of Mana" - multiple installments of the Mana series that will flesh out the world and give new life to this once great franchise. . . and in the process will create a series of games that have nothing to do with any of the things that made the originals good.

First up they released Children of Mana for the DS, a pseudo dungeon crawler that lacked any challenge and anything resembling fun. Next up Heroes of Mana, a Real Time Strategy on the DS which was almost good but unfortunately gets bogged down by its speed. Everything just moves at snails pace and introduces players to an entirely new level of frustration.

ANd worst of all, Children of Mana... the game that was billed as the first true sequel for the series.  It was a very beautiful game, but ultimately unplayable. The camera was disasterous, the leveling system was terrible, and the gameplay itself just seemed to be focused on throwing and breaking jars as your primary combat. . . At any rate it killed the franchise and sadly or perhaps mercifully is probably the last we'll see of it.