How Did 'Armored Core' Become a 12 Title Series Anyway?

With all these consoles around, it's quite impossible to even keep track on the number of games launching every week. While some of them make a good debut and mark the beginning of a twenty year series, like Final Fantasy, others suck right from the get go but developers keep stuffing retailers "polluting," so to speak, the gaming market. Up on Games Radar, there's an interesting piece on games that should have died right from the first installment, yet they keep haunting us today, even if they simply blow.

Their examples: Armored Core, Gundam, Army Men. The pictures on your left (click to enlarge) are of Armored Core, for the Xbox 360. The game has also been ported to the PSone, PS2, PSP and PS3. The first one on the left is a supposed in-game screenshot. Looks good, what can I say. But buy the game, pop in the disc in and you'll find yourself in a totally different world of boxy robots, (well, of course... they're robots), with poor physics that could easily be mistaken for a PS2 game and even that would give to look a little better. Yeah sure, it's got a great story-line and all that (population growing, everybody's fighting for resources), but it's a game, not a sad movie.

The reason for Games Radar writing on the three games is easy to guess. If developers had stopped at the first installment, everything would have been alright, but they're series. How on Earth does a game like Armored Core become a 12 title series? What, did you think that the question in the title would find its answer in the article? Nope, sorry!