News just in: Chess 2, the sequel to the incredibly popular turn-based strategy boardgame, has been released across all formats. To increase the unpredictable thrill of combat, the developers have introduced a new piece, the Spin Doctor, which can change its move at every turn. The queen’s bishop of both sides has finally come out as a gay bishop, introducing a graceful arc to the previously straight diagonals on which it operated. Extending the field of battle beyond the simplistic 8×8 grid of the original, Chess 2 now comes with 50 new built-in maps with terrain features and weather. And that most boringly humble of pieces, the pawn, is now equipped with a laser cannon. Say the developers: “Popular as it was, chess needed to be updated for a contemporary, hardcore audience.”

Such would run one kind of satirical comparison between the Royal Game and today’s sequel-happy videogame industry. But chess as we know it today is already in fact a kind of multiple sequel. Before most aspects of the modern game solidified in 1475, the queen was one of the weakest pieces, and she herself had been a replacement for the fers, a minor medieval piece which in turn had supplanted the Arabic firzan; so too the modern bishop replaced the diagonally leaping aufin. The rule changes of 1475 had a revolutionary effect: almost all the endgame theory that had been acquired during the previous 900 years became obsolete overnight.

We are already, in effect, playing Chess 2.0, a sequel with extraordinary staying power. Many new versions of chess have since been proposed - from 3D chess as seen on the bridge of the starship Enterprise, to “Fischerrandom Chess”, a variant invented by ex-world champion and latterday paranoid anti-Semite Bobby Fischer, in which the starting positions of the pieces are shuffled randomly, so as to negate the effect of memorized opening theory. But none has supplanted the five-century-old standard game.

This brief history of chess’s evolution, then, poses the pertinent question to our pastime of electronic entertainment: when is a sequel a true improvement and perfection of its predecessor, as with the new chess of 1475; and when does it, contrarily, betray the balance and beauty of the original, as in my facetious chess sequel? I have been thinking about this problem this month while playing two very different sequels: Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising and Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness.

Core Design, it must be noted, has no lack of experience in making sequels. There was a certain logic to each PlayStation iteration of the Tomb Raider franchise, as Lara gradually acquired new abilities that managed to complement the ones we were familiar with, and as environments became more varied and architecturally ambitious. On the other hand, there was a clear law of diminishing returns in operation, as levels became too sprawling and unforgiving, and increasingly riddled with spatial and other incoherencies, to keep the attention of all but the most hardened ponytail fetishists. I still consider that Tomb Raider 2, however, was one of the best videogame sequels ever made: it retained the virtues of the original while expanding the environmental and dynamic palette considerably.

For all their increasing sins, each subsequent Tomb Raider sequel at least knew at heart what the core virtues of the game were: environmental awe, and the pleasure of learning to take precise, fluid control over Lara’s complex acrobatics. The first thing you notice, then, about AoD is that the fundamentally broken control system - the most disgracefully unresponsive and woolly in recent memory - has eliminated that second virtue entirely. Oops. Add to this insult the miserably incompetent voice-acting, a feast of comedy visual glitches, and the dismaying “physical upgrade” system (a malignly perfect example of level design through arbitrary limitation of player action), and you have a sequel that, despite flashes of architectural splendour and an excellent orchestral score, is inferior to every other game in the series.

Advance Wars 2, thankfully, poses subtler problems, and yet it may still be wondered whether it is in fact a coherent step forward from the first game. (Advance Wars itself of course was a multiple sequel, being the sixth in Nintendo’s series stretching back to 1988’s Famicom Wars, but for most of its audience it will have been the first experienced.) One of the touches of deadpan comedy I loved about AW was the moment where you were introduced to a huge new type of tank that could more or less obliterate anything in its path - only to learn that it was called, with beautiful understatement, a Medium Tank. In Advance Wars 2, however, we have the Imperial Walker-style Neotank, which outguns its predecessor, and so the Medium Tank is now just - well, medium. Moreover, the Neotank could obviously not be made too powerful, otherwise the balance between units would have been ruined, and so it is not as scary or impressive an addition to the arsenal as it might have been. The same is true of the Missile Silos, which are fun to use but seem to have been made artificially puny - taking only 3 hitpoints from affected units - in order not to wreck the context.

And finally, it is a complete mystery of gameworld logic why aircraft cannot fly over pipes. It is true, of course, that all you really need to know is that pipes function symbolically to subdivide the map. (Advance Wars is at base a brilliant example of satisfyingly rich symbolic interaction, much like chess itself.) Yet it must be accounted a slight blot on the sequel’s consistency that pipes are the only gameworld structure that does not have a recognisable real-world analogue. (I am supposing that we are not really meant to envisage pipes that are 30,000 feet tall.) In sum, though I am currently blissfully hooked on Advance Wars 2, I must nevertheless regretfully conclude that it is not quite as beautifully pure a success as its predecessor.

You can see the problem for developers, though. Since chess was not a commercial product but a communal gift to humanity, there was no money to be made from “upgrading” it every couple of years. But it is an irresistible proposition to try to profit from the success of one game by making an “improved” version. Advance Wars 2 is still an outstanding product compared to the great mass of videogame sequels that are basically bug-fixes, resolution enhancements or mission packs; but the seemingly insuperable problem for Intelligent Systems was that in the first Advance Wars they had produced the videogame equivalent of the 1475 version of chess: a decisive refinement of its predecessors that resulted in a game which was, to all intents and purposes, unimprovable.

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