Let me tell you the tale of Army Men.
In the early 90's, one Trip Hawkins had big dreams and left his cushy job as founder and CEO of Electronic Arts to found The 3DO Company and release its self-titled console. The console bombed because the business model was never viable and loaded with debt, the company desperately scrambled for a hit. Despite being good games with effort put into them, the likes of Killing Time and Captain Quazar didn't do any better that they did on the 3DO-but when Army Men 3D , in one former employee's words a "crappy game done on the cheap", unexpectedly sold gangbusters, tricky Trip saw green in his eyes and flooded the market with Army Men games, hoping to shore up the failing company.
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That's
21 games between 1998 and 2006. Except no, just listing the individual names doesn't paint the whole picture. Of course you'd expect the PC and Game Boy version of Army Men 1 to be different. But the PS1 version of Army Men Sarge's Heroes 2 is a completely different game from the N64 and PS2 Sarge's Heroes 2. So is the PS1 version of Army Men Green Rogue from its PS2 counterpart. It's pure madness.
And it's all tragic because you see the potential. The high-effort games have personality to spare. A few of them manage to be Pretty Good in spite of the insane production schedule (I recently beat Army Men Air Attack on N64 and it's a fun action game. unironic recommend) and at times, the "main" version of the Sarge Heroes titles playfully realize the promise of putting you in a world where the inside of your fridge is as grueling of a battlefield as any WWII theater. But because they made so many games so cheaply, because they made them in a few months, because they wasted money and time doing downports that were doomed to be crap, the games couldn't be great. They couldn't afford to fine tune the controls, balance the difficulty, or spend any dough on real production values.
It's a testament to the talent of the crew at 3DO that most of these are merely solid 4/5s out of 10 instead of true disasters. And it makes you wonder how good Army Men (and the Dragon Rages, and the World Destruction League: Thunder Tanks
et cetera) could have been if they'd have been afforded the sane thing and make a few, proper games.