Gaming Memories- Resident Evil: Part II

These will probably contain spoilers, so if you’ve never played any of the Resident Evil games, go play them right now. And then come back.

Gaming Memories- Resident Evil: Part II

So by the time I had thoroughly played through Resident Evil 2 many times, Resident Evil 3 had already come out. It was also around this time that my interest in the series had faded a bit. Though I did love the hell out of 2, I had started playing more games on the N64 and lost track of the Resident Evil series for a while. I did play 3 eventually, but I must admit that it’s never quite been my favorite of the series. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still one of the best- however, I just don’t quite have the emotional connection to it that I have to 1 or 2.

Looking back, I do wish I would have had a chance to play it back in the day, because Resident Evil 3 is definitely one of the classics right along with the first and second. There were so many new elements mixed into one- the gunpowder mixing, the different choices to make, and of course, the horrific Nemesis stalking you throughout the entire game. Also, there’s the addicting mercenaries mini-game at the end that just adds to the replayability. I wish I had more to say about this game, but the truth of the matter is, as I mentioned, that I just lack that certain special spark I get when playing through 1 or 2 when I play through Nemesis. And God help me, I still cannot figure out that water quality puzzle at the end of the game without a walkthrough. 

So, over the course of time while I was busy enjoying the many games of the N64, two new Resident Evil games hit the scene: Survivor and Code:Veronica. I’ll get to Code:Veronica in a bit, but first let me discuss Survivor.

When Survivor arrived, I remember it seeming like a really big deal. A Resident Evil game in a first person perspective? No way! It had also been around two years since I last played a game from the series, so I decided to rent it from the local Blockbuster to give it a shot.

Well..like many others, I was a bit disappointed. For one thing, I beat the game in one sitting and never looked back, as opposed to the many, many hours I poured into playing the others. Another thing I wondered was- what happened to Leon, and Claire, and Jill, and Chris, and all the others? It just didn’t feel like it advanced the story at all. Sure, there’s reference to some characters and events, and I did like those tie-ins, but nothing really felt connected to the primary core of the series. Without Survivor, nothing really changed (and, by the way, how surprised was I when they actually referenced the events of Survivor in the intro of Resident Evil 0…it was like, wow! That game IS canon!).

And for the actual gameplay, it just didn’t seem like Resident Evil translated very well to the first-person perspective, certainly not the way that games like Doom or Goldeneye did. In Sum, Survivor sort of felt like an experiment to change up the series that didn’t end up panning out, perhaps for the better.

Survivor was an interesting idea and the first attempt at something different in the series, but it just didn't work too well.

Code:Veronica, on the other hand, certainly did feel like the next in line of the series and the true sequel to 3 (I actually wondered back in the day why they didn’t just call it 4). I remember reading about it in magazines and on the internet and wishing I could play it for myself. The only problem- it was on this strange new console called the Sega Dreamcast, which I didn’t own at the time. I ended up having to wait 2 years until I finally got my hands on a Playstation 2 console instead, after which I promptly bought Code: Veronica X. And I was certainly not disappointed.

Code:Veronica is definitely one of my favorites of the entire series. It combines elements of all three original games into one massive experience. It was the first game of the series to make the jump to 128-bit graphics, and it sure as hell looked like it. The updated graphics just better served to, once again, scare the buh-jeezus out of me. Especially memorable was the torture chamber inside of the infirmary. I remember always dreading having to go into that building. I mean, just listen to the music!

This part of the game always disturbed the hell out of me.

Now that is just purely unsettling. And that’s what this game did very, very well- it builds a lot of ambience through the scenery and music. And it changes up quite a bit- one minute you’re in a dank, decrepit prison, and the next you’re in an aristocratic palace. The new monsters are great too- I especially loved the newly-designed tyrant you do battle with in the cargo bay of an airplane. It was also a reunion of sorts with characters we’d grown to love from the first two games. In the first half, you take control of Claire from Resident Evil 2 as she searches for an escape off of a zombie-infested island. After she escapes, Act II begins and you take control of her brother Chris from the first game, who’s hot on the trail of his lost sister and must now track her down. It was just great to take control of these two again, even if you have to deal with some, ahem, questionable voice acting from the supporting characters of Steve and Alfred along the way. And when they finally reunite during the climax, it just felt so satisfying.  I mean, Claire had been searching for Chris since the second game after all!

In all, I just love Code: Veronica from start to finish, and I think I would rank it at #2 of my favorites out of the entire series. So what is #1? Well, funny you should ask, because that’s just where we’re headed next.

It’s Resident Evil: Gaiden, of course! No, I’m kidding, but I actually did own this game when it was brand new, and I did play through the whole thing. It’s actually not as terrible as some people might make it out to be, and it certainly is unique, but it played more like a weird fan-fiction than an actual Resident Evil game. Still worth a mention, at least. Anywho…

Some time after I obtained my PS2 and played the hell out of Code: Veronica, my younger sister got a Gamecube for her birthday. At first she mostly hoarded it to herself, but eventually I stepped in and played quite a few games on it myself. And just around this time, the remake of the original Resident Evil came out. I was very interested in just how much they reworked the game, but it took me a long time to actually acquire my own copy. I actually rented it briefly before purchasing it, but I didn’t get very far into the game. But when I did eventually buy it…hooooo-lee shit. 

I went in expecting a mere graphical upgrade, but was utterly shocked to find that the entire game was overhauled. The core of the original was still there at the heart of it all, but the new features overshadowed everything and entirely changed the rules of the game. There were new rooms, new items, new gameplay mechanics, new puzzles, and a horrific new enemy in the form of crimson heads. The first time I killed a zombie, I was quite surprised to find it still laying there when I re-entered the same room after I had exited it. I remember thinking to myself “wow, that’s cool, the bodies don’t disappear when you leave.” I just thought it was a new layer of realism added to the game. 

Oh, how wrong I was. For when that same zombie later sprang up and violently chased after me, I screamed my head off and ran for my life. These new monsters completely threw a wrench in my concept of the remake and forced me to adapt and change my strategies for traversing the game. And that wasn’t all. For every puzzle that I thought I mastered from the first game came a new twist. For every spot where I thought I knew exactly what item I'd obtain, a new item had sprung up in its place. And for many doors that I thought led to familiar places, I found entirely new areas lying in wait. 

All of the areas that might have offered a quick mundane scare were now tension-filled adrenaline rushes of fear. Case and point- the aqua ring basement of the guardhouse. What had once been a square room filled with water and easily escapable mutant sharks that can barely even be seen in the first game was now a massive flooded aquatic laboratory straight out Deep Blue Sea (which is really what it made me think of the first time I played through, they were only three years apart after all). You immediately find yourself flanked by two sharks and naturally will try to fight them off. But if you stick around shooting at the little guys for too long…oh my God. Rumbling up from the flooded depths comes the big mother, a massive shark that made Jaws look like a goldfish. And if you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time…bam, you’re sharkfood. My first time playing through, I ran in absolute terror from the mutant sharks (I know, running in terror is the repeating theme here), only to discover that I hadn’t found the control room key yet and I would have to trek back through the shark infested waters. 

Then, if that weren’t bad enough, you still have to deal with a puzzle in which you must operate the emergency drainage system while the big guy is trying to smash his way through a window two feet from your face (once again, a scene right out of Deep Blue Sea). And if THAT weren’t bad enough, once you drain the water and triumphantly emerge into the once flooded room thinking that you’ll get to laugh at the sharks pathetically flopping around on the floor like in the first game, you’ll find that the big guy is STILL submerged in a pool of water deep enough to keep it alive, and you have to WALK RIGHT PAST THE GODDAMN THING TO GET A KEY. Holy shit. If you weren’t clutching your controller so tight it nearly broke the first time you had to walk past the monster, you had nerves of total steel. From there, you get to safely electrocute the monster after it once again tries to chomp your head off, but afterward you STILL must walk past its fried corpse to pick up the key. Even though it was dead, I would still always leave the room and return so that when I came back, its corpse would be gone. You know, just in case. So, to reiterate, what was once a quick little trip in the first game was now an epic struggle to survive against giant mutated T-Virus sharks.

Come on, you can't just walk past a gigantic mutant shark without pissing your pants a little.

By the time I got to play the remake, it had been over 5 years since I played the original, and I wasn’t quite as easily scared by video games anymore. But this game quickly brought back that feeling of terror I had all those years ago when I played the original. Every moment of horror had greatly increased in intensity. All of the things that hindered the first game were gone. The cheesy dialogue, the stiff controls, the overall campiness, it had been completely erased. It was the closest you could get to playing an entirely new game without actually playing a new game, so to speak. 

To this day, this is definitely my favorite game of the series, and one of my overall favorite video games of all time. I can play it any day of the week and still enjoy it. I actually did just recently, after I had picked up the Japanese version for no real reason other than to say I own it. And I must say, this is a truly beautiful game graphically. Even after thirteen years, this game still blows me away with how good it looks at all points. And I’m not talking about the recent HD version for the new gen. consoles either- I’m talking about the bonafide original Gamecube edition. I just think about other games of the same era and how far they were from the level of depth this game achieved graphically. Every room in the game had a new look to it, from the dimly-lit halls of the mansion to the vegetation-filled rooms of the guardhouse to the dank, concrete passages of the laboratory, and every scene from every camera angle is just exquisite to look at.

I recently bought the Japanese version, Biohazard, for the Gamecube just because I love this game so much.

So this, to me, is the perfect Resident Evil game. I’ll just have to keep my fingers crossed that Capcom will give the same loving treatment to the remake Resident Evil 2, which was just recently announced. Only time will tell. Anyway, maybe it’s because this game was just so hard to top in my mind, but it seemed to me that the games following the remake were the point in the franchise where things started to go downhill. So check back soon for Part III, where I’ll delve into the turning point and some of the more recent games of the series in my continuing Resident Evil retrospective.

Gaming Memories- Resident Evil: Part I

 Hi there, my name is Steve and I love video games. I have since I was roughly 4 years old and I held a Sega Genesis controller in my hands while playing through Sonic the Hedgehog for the first time. Anyway, I have a lot of random thoughts about video games, and here will be my outlet of opinions. Enjoy!

These will probably contain spoilers, so if you’ve never played any of the Resident Evil games, go play them right now. And then come back.

Gaming Memories- Resident Evil: Part I

The Resident Evil series. What's to say about it that hasn't already been said a million times before? It's become one of the biggest franchises in modern video gaming, helped bring the survival horror genre to the mainstream, has amassed a tremendous loyal fanbase, and has spawned an endless amount of merchandise and five (I think they're up to five now) pretty bad movie adaptations. So what unique insight can I provide to this game's storied history? 

Well, probably not a whole lot. However, I can say with pride that I've been there since the very beginning, and I certainly have a lot of personal opinions regarding where the series ended up and just exactly how it got there. But let's start at the beginning. 

In 1996 I was just eight years old, and like many gamers who were riding the glory of the 16-bit era to its very end, I was ready to make the jump to bigger, better consoles. The arrival of the Nintendo 64, the Sega Saturn, and a newcomer to the gaming market in the form of the Sony Playstation were spectacles like nothing we’d ever seen before. However, in the beginning, I didn’t know a single person who owned a Playstation. All of my friends had opted for Nintendo’s next-gen console, the N64 (as did I). It seemed that just about everyone I knew had gone straight for the N64 and had either ignored the Playstation, or had not even known about it to begin with. Perhaps it was the fact that Nintendo was already a big name in the video game market, as opposed to Sony, who everyone at my age only really knew for making VCRs and TVs. Or perhaps it was simply because the Playstation was more expensive at its launch compared to the N64 ($300 as opposed to $200). Whatever the reason, it went largely unnoticed by me after its initial launch. Thus, I didn’t know much about the Playstation or any of its games when they were first released. I was too busy collecting golden puzzle pieces in Banjo-Kazooie, throwing turtle shells at my friends in Mario Kart 64, and turning into a brick wall in Wayne Gretzky’s 3D Hockey to notice. However, it all changed for me the day I first set eyes on Resident Evil’s gameplay. 

When I was much younger, I played on a weekend soccer team and spent nearly every weekend morning at a game. If our team won the game, most of us would usually end up at a teammates’ house for a sort of after-game mini party. One particular Saturday after a game, I was at one of my teammate’s houses where he was showing off his new Playstation that he’d just gotten for his birthday, and Resident Evil was the first game I got to see showcased. I’d never heard of the game before or had any idea what it was about. Little did I know that I was about to be terrified beyond belief, and before the actual game even started at that. The brief intro scene with the man walking down a hallway as something creeps up from behind and kills him, followed by blood splattering across the screen as the title of the game comes down was burned into my mind from the very beginning. 

Now bear in mind that in 1996, many of us gamers had never seen full-motion video clarity in a video game before; we were all used to seeing 16-bit pixels.  The only time I’d ever even seen it before was in the game Sewer Shark for the Sega CD, and I would hardly count that as “clarity.” Therefore, seeing a scene such as that was very much like watching a horror movie instead of playing a game. The introduction further reinforced that idea through another FMV in which the S.T.A.R.S. team is chased by mutant killer dogs into an abandoned mansion. The transition between the opening scene and the game itself seemed to come so abruptly that you might have forgotten you were even playing a game. Suddenly, it seemed like you were IN that horror movie that you were just watching a moment ago. That alone was a horrifying concept to me, and as I watched on, I grew more and more frightened by the game’s chilling atmosphere. The images of the doors opening every time you entered another room amped up the suspense of playing; you never knew what would be lurking behind the next door. The haunting music left you with the feeling that something horrible was watching you from the shadows. And when you came across that first zombie, you had to have nerves of steel not to throw your controller away and run like hell. 

But the real moment of terror, the iconic moment of the first Resident Evil game that shocked not only me, but gamers around the world, had to be the dogs bursting through the windows for the first time. I remember watching my friend playing the game and literally jumping out of my seat when those dogs crashed through the window and attacked. He ended up dying and played through another two or three times, both with the same result. Yet, each time, I was more and more terrified, even when I knew it was coming. And this was just the very beginning of the game; I hadn’t even seen what horrors were in store for the rest of the game. My friend stopped playing after getting killed each time he tried to take on the dogs, and eventually gave up and we moved on to playing Twisted Metal instead.  It was the last I’d hear of Resident Evil for a while, but I never forgot the terrifying images I’d seen that day. 

Fast forward to 1998. In the two years since the release of the Playstation, it seemed that the world finally caught on to the charm of the new console, and many people were starting to obtain consoles of their own. One such person was my good friend Dave, whom I frequently spent many an afternoon with after school playing video games non-stop.  I remember clearly the day I went to his house and he revealed to me the newest game he’d just gotten for his Playstation: Resident Evil 2. Of course, it conjured in my mind the horrifying memory of the first game that I’d seen years ago. Yet, somehow, this new one seemed even more frightening than the first. I distinctly remember picking up the CD case and reading the back of it, which chillingly stated: “If the suspense doesn’t kill you…something else will.” Those nine words resonated with me so deeply that I was once again scared before the game even started. Dave started up the game and as soon as the opening cutscenes had ended, we were thrust into the nightmare. I watched through my own fingers covering my eyes as Dave traversed the ravaged streets of Raccoon City, fighting his way through an army of bloodthirsty zombies. When he arrived at the R.P.D. building after what seemed like an eternity, I thought maybe we had reached safety. How wrong I was.

After unlocking the doors using the key card, Dave headed to the East wing of the station, entering an innocuous-looking waiting room. It seemed harmless enough. I let my guard down a little bit, seeing as we were no longer in imminent danger of being devoured by zombies. However, as soon as he walked in front of the window next to the door leading to the adjacent room, the most disturbing and shocking moment of my memories of playing video games (besides those of Silent Hill 2, but I’ll leave that for another time) occurred: something quickly darted across the window and out of sight. It was so unexpected, so out of nowhere, and such a surprise that we just completely froze with fear. There are no music or sound cues, nothing really building up to that moment when it just…boom, hits you out of nowhere. I will always remember that brief instant as the definitive moment of the Resident Evil series, the thing that both terrified and enticed me at the same time. 

Anyone who enjoys things like rollercoaster rides, skydiving, bungee-jumping, or some other death-defying act will tell you that fear is the best kind of adrenaline rush. I agree with that sentiment, though I’m way too chicken to do any of those things. However, I love the kind of fear a game, a movie, or even a good book can produce, and I think it all stemmed from that moment with the licker and the window. I was horrified, but I had to see what would happen next and what was behind that door. I was addicted to the fear. When the licker dropped from the ceiling in the next room, we promptly shut the game off and ran screaming out of his basement. But from that moment on, I was hooked on the series.

The following Christmas I obtained my own Playstation console and proceeded to buy both the original Resident Evil and the sequel. For the first time, I braved my fears and played through each game on my own, experiencing both in their entirety. Now, the fear experience is only half of what made Resident Evil so enthralling to me; the other half was the story. The pivotal moment comes in the first game when you reach the Umbrella laboratory and watch the slideshow report that documents each B.O.W. you’ve faced off with throughout the game. Suddenly, it hits you: these aren’t just random monsters that materialized from nowhere. They were all the product of an insidious corporation’s secret experiments, and not only that, but one of your own comrades was in on it all along. That plot twist hit me like a ton of bricks and instantly made me want to learn more about the universe of Resident Evil lore (hell, I still do!). 

The first game was great in many ways and will always receive credit for being the one that started it all, but in my humble opinion, it hasn’t really aged well. The dialogue between characters is beyond laughably lame (Jill sandwich, anyone?), the controls are pretty stiff at times, and the graphics aren’t quite as nice as 2 or 3. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a wonderfully crafted game and I’d play it over an overwhelming majority of the other games in the series, but admittedly, I prefer the remake for the Gamecube over the original (more on that another time).

Resident Evil 2, however, is what I will call a masterpiece of survival horror gaming. The cheesy dialogue was gone, the horror had intensified twofold, and the storyline was even more captivating than the first. The new monsters, the weapons, the characters, it’s all just so great. And now, there were four whole unique scenarios you could play through, as opposed to the two from the first game. That to me was always such a genius concept. It’s essentially the same game, but completely different at the same time. I’ll never forget finishing Leon’s A scenario and moving on to Claire B, only to find that I was suddenly being stalked by a humungous monster that was completely absent from the first scenario, I had to figure out new puzzles and fight new bosses, and that there was a completely different ending from the first one. And many years after first playing through, I even discovered that by completing certain actions in the first scenario, you could unlock some awesome things in the second, such as the extra machine gun ammo you can collect in the lab.

I can still play through Resident Evil 2 to this day and enjoy every minute of it. And it still even manages to make me jump at certain points. Even though I know it’s coming, when the licker bursts through the 2-way mirror in the interrogation room, it ALWAYS gets me. Every time. And that, in my estimation, is the mark of a truly great game.

Stay tuned for Part II of my Resident Evil retrospective!