The Shinji Mikami / Hideki Kamiya / Hideaki Itsuno Review Megathread - by froghawk
froghawk on 14/9/2018 at 14:34
Damn, props to you! I can imagine it being easier with a controller than a keyboard. Moving the reticule around with the arrow keys makes it very hard to be accurate... a stick with more range of motion is probably preferable. And again, I think a lot about that game is really underrated. It has a lot of merits and I enjoyed a lot about it. But I also understand why people were frustrated with it.
Anyway, 'Devil May Cry' is in the scope of this course, but I don't own it yet, so I'll return to it later. Maybe the DMC series will get its own thread. In the meantime....
RESIDENT EVIL ZERO (2002)
Inline Image:
https://daviscollective.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/250px-rezerobox.jpgExecutive Advisor: Shinji Mikami
Producer: Tatsuya Minami
Director: Koji Oda
Writers: Noboru Sugimura, Hiromichi Nakamoto, Junichi Miyashita
Ah RE0.. where do I even start? This was actually the second game in the series that I played, as it came in a bundle with REmake and uses the same engine. Development on this game apparently started alongside Nemesis and Code Veronica in 1998, and it was originally going to be a Nintendo 64 title - but it ended up being too big to fit on a cartridge, so it didn't end up coming out until 4 years later (which is why it uses pre-rendered backgrounds 2 years after Capcom had already released a fully 3D RE title with Code Veronica).
The main new mechanic in this game is that instead of having a campaign that you can play through with either of two characters, both characters are taken through the campaign at the same time. But this isn't a co-op game - you lead with one character and the other follows, and you can switch between them on the fly and give the follower orders. The characters are S.T.A.R.S. medic Rebecca Chambers (Chris's support character in the original game) and a random escaped convict named Billy Coen.
This game is meant to be a prequel to the original, but the plot doesn't make a lick of sense and it sheds absolutely no new light on the story, aside from showing Albert Wesker & William Birkin (the main antagonists of the first two games) working together. The main villain in this game, however, is a complete non sequitur - a scientist named James Marcus who looks like an anime character, sings weird little songs, and has an obsession with leeches. The opening sequence which introduces him damn near made me turn off the game forever, as it's unbearably cheesy - Marcus stands on the top of a mountain wearing some sort of wizard robes and waves his arms around while singing, which somehow causes an outbreak to begin on a train. How this works is never explained, as he doesn't have any magical powers. It's every bit as embarrassingly awful as it sounds.
This opening train sequence is the only somewhat novel environment in the game (though there were brief train sequences in RE 2&3). It SHOULD be an incredibly atmospheric setting - the art design is awesome (it's got the same dark visual aesthetic as REmake). - but any sense of atmosphere is completely eradicated by frequent cutscenes with annoying banter between the two completely insufferable lead characters. Mercifully, they mostly shut the fuck up for the rest of the game, as the plot becomes incredibly thin and stays out of the way, allowing the atmosphere to take over.
The rest of the game basically re-imagines environments from the early games with the same structure as the first two games... as if they hadn't already done enough REhashing and REcycling? The bulk of the game is a training facility which looks a whole lot like the original game's mansion, which is naturally followed by an underground lab which mostly looks nothing like a lab. Then you take a tram over to the vacant factory from Resident Evil 2, before ending in a water treatment plant. The mansion is much smaller than that of the original game (though the basement is larger), and again, it's a pale imitation - while the graphics look a little flashier than REmake, the camera angles aren't as artistic and it never feels quite as isolated and disturbing as the original while controlling two characters (which require a somewhat wider field of view to fit, eliminating some of that claustrophobia).
But the gameplay more than makes up for all of that by being so unfairly difficult that it makes the hardest parts of the original game look like a walk in the park. It took me exactly 20hrs to beat this game, which is the same amount of time it took to beat REmake - only my final in-game time on REmake was nearly 10hrs, while this one didn't even reach 6hrs 40min. I spent 2/3 of my time in this game dying and retrying. This game made me feel very intense anxiety, moreso than anything else I've ever played, and stays that way all the way until the end.
The scarcity of healing items and ammo is even more punishing this time around, since you have two characters to arm and keep alive. At any given time, one of them will be dying and probably defenseless. Rebecca is particularly fragile, and there are many moments in the game where it makes you split the characters up and send Rebecca into dangerous situations alone. Ammo for the shotgun and grenade launcher is even more scarce than in the original, meaning you're basically going to be trying to survive with a pistol (as ammo for that is quite scarce) - except you basically can't kill the game's hardest enemies with a pistol.
The monster designs were quite uncreative in this game, as it returned to the giant animals of the original - the first 3 bosses are a giant scorpion, a giant centipede, and a giant bat. The bat is particularly unfair, as the game uses auto-aim to help you hit your targets (the camera angles would make it impossible otherwise), but many tiny bats spawn during this fight, making it nearly impossible to lock on to the actual boss. The final boss (Marcus) also made me nearly give up and quit the game forever - I used up all my ammo (as it's quite resistant to heavy weaponry) and had to carefully run around and take it down with a pistol. Said boss was a giant version of the game's meanest new enemy - the leech zombie. These wiggly things look goofy as hell, but they're virtually impossible to take down and can hit you from quite far away. The infected apes also murdered me repeatedly, as they jump faster than you can aim.
There's a new item called a hookshot (similar to the one Ada uses in RE4, for those who have played that game) that allows you to send whichever character is holding it through a hole in the ceiling. I've read that if you use it to send the wrong character up into the lab and then overwrite your saves, your whole game will be ruined and you'll have to start over. Games don't let you fuck up that badly anymore... The other big change in game mechanics in this game is the inventory - they eliminated the magically connected item boxes and replaced them with the ability to drop items. This lead to a lot of backtracking to retrieve items - it wasn't too bad on hard difficulty, as items are scarce, but it was still an annoying waste of time. They may as well have called this ‘Inventory Management: The Game”. Aside from that and the two-character system, this basically plays identically to REmake, complete with the alternate control scheme, but piling those things on top of all the things that already made REmake difficult makes this game utterly sadistic. Ink ribbons (for saving the game) are much more common this time around, but the prevalence of save items almost felt spiteful and sarcastic. I didn't find myself using them more often because saving would involve backtracking through dangerous areas and typewriters are once again rare.
There's an extra mode that's unlocked once you beat the game called ‘Leech Hunter' It's basically an item hunt in the mansion, where you try to collect all the items before dying. I'm pretty sure this mode is LITERALLY IMPOSSIBLE, so I'll pass. There's also Wesker Mode, which replaces Billy with the superpowered Albert Wesker from Code Veronica - it's cute for a couple minutes, but there's not much point to it. PC performance was alright - it ran better than the remake, but again, I could not run it at 1440p. Honestly, that's fine for a game with pre-rendered backgrounds - it still looked good.
I complained that the previous sequels were all just a pale imitation of the excellent original with half the difficulty - well, I guess I got what I wanted. I strangely enjoyed my anxiety-ridden time with this evil mess - I really liked it, to be honest - but I can't recommend it to anyone, and I never want to go through playing it again. NEVER AGAIN. Objectively, most aspects of this game are pretty terrible (except the visuals & music, which are fine), and I simply can't in good conscience give this a halfway decent rating even though I enjoyed it more than most other games in this series.
RATING: 5/10 wiggly leech zombies - STAY AWAY (unless you're a masochist like me, in which case it deserves a solid 8/10)
Inline Image:
https://daviscollective.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/mimicrymarcus.jpg
froghawk on 14/9/2018 at 14:35
RESIDENT EVIL (2002 Movie)
Inline Image:
https://daviscollective.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/resident_evil_ver4.jpgWriter/Director/Producer: Paul W.S. Anderson
2002 was quite a year for Resident Evil. The same year REmake and RE0 came out, this live action film adaptation was released - the first of what would become a 6 film series. It was written and directed by none other than Paul Anderson - no, not Paul Thomas Anderson, who made There Will Be Blood and The Master. This is Paul W.S. Anderson, the man responsible for masterpieces like Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon, Alien vs. Predator, and that Blade Runner spinoff with Mel Gibson that no one ever talks about. It seems like it should have been close to impossible to screw this film up - all they needed to do was make a fun and goofy zombie b-movie. It's not like Silent Hill, where the source material was actually good (and therefore got completely butchered in film form). But of course, they couldn't just make a normal zombie movie with a few series references (like Capcom did with the later CGI movie Resident Evil: Degeneration) - they had to make the whole thing look and feel like a game. Briefing screens with a 3D map of the areas it takes place in show up several times in a row, complete with names for each room and a counter for the mission time.
The film begins in an Umbrella corporate facility, where some schmuck decides to throw a vial of virus across the room and the building's AI responds to the outbreak by killing everyone who works there (by gassing them, drowning them, or cutting the elevator cords lmao). There's some truly hilarious acting in this sequence. Jump cut to our protagonist, Alice (played by Milla Jovovich of Fifth Element fame), waking up disoriented in a creepy mansion. We get to see some sideboob within the first two minutes of seeing her - I guess they were scared the audience wouldn't be titillated enough by seeing someone's head get cut off by an elevator a couple minutes ago. She tries to leave the mansion, and there's some spooky wind, but then some random guy grabs her and pulls her back inside, and a bunch of soldiers in gas masks bust through the windows. What the fuck is going on, you may ask? Actually, you probably won't, because there's no chance you'll care enough to bother.
Alice gets thrown against the wall, and her dress strap seductively slips down her arm. Are you excited yet? Are you? HAVE YOU NOTICED THAT SHE'S HOT? One of the soldiers grabs her and tells her to report. It turns out the random guy that pulled her back into the mansion is a cop on his first day on the job - he looks a bit like an even more moronic version of Chris Redfield, but has Leon's backstory and a new name. This goofy looking guy is the only character in the movie who doesn't work for Umbrella - good job guy.
It turns out the corporate facility from the beginning was actually a secret underground research facility that's made to look like a skyscraper with a fake backdrop from the inside, lmao. The film spends no time in the mansion, and just jumps right to this lab. It turns out Alice and some other dude were in a fake marriage and were actually guarding the mansion, which was the secret entrance to this facility - but they were knocked out by nerve gas, which somehow gave them retrograde amnesia (complete with random silly flashbacks as they slowly remember stuff). Because main characters with no identity or personality are always the best kind, of course. Jovovich gives a blank faced stare in response to everything in the film, and that's kind of the point of her character as far as I can tell - at least until she remembers everything then suddenly tries to be a real person in the last 20 minutes of the film. Not buying it.
There's an adaptation of RE2 train sequence, complete with a boss monster (lmao) which begins as one of the lickers from said game then evolves into some sort of dog thing. Then some dudes in hazmat suits drag the survivors away to some electronic dance music - why is this scene a rave? I blame Marylin Manson, who apparently co-scored this film. The credits roll, and a Slipknot song plays. Be sure to purchase the soundtrack compilation, featuring classic artists like Adema, Coal Chamber, Static-X, and Saliva!
This uses a lot of ideas from Resident Evil, but feels completely unrelated. It always impresses me when film adaptations have to add all this dumb extra shit to make it seem like something is happening, but still end up completely lacking in any sort of substance. There are way too many characters in this film, and I can't even remember what most of them looked like. Basically every character in this film is fodder, to the extent that most of them are murdered by an AI before we even see the first zombie.
There's a reason video game movies have a bad reputation. This was painfully fucking boring, even while multitasking, and the only reason I can think of to ever watch it is to write a scathing review to entertain your friends. And so here we are. There's 5 more movies of this shit?!! And every one of them broke 9 figures? And they're rebooting this? Fuck the world.
Rating: 1/10 blank stares. Just try and survive the horror of Paul W.S. Anderson's filmmaking - I dare you.
Inline Image:
https://daviscollective.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/amodrb.jpg
icemann on 14/9/2018 at 17:38
Weird. The first film is the only one of the Resident Evil movies that I actually liked, as I felt it stuck to the games rules more compared to the later sequels. Silent Hill I've watched numerous times, and it's one of my favorite video game films (alongside Mortal Kombat 1) of all time. The RE sequels are all meh except for the 3rd film which was half half.
froghawk on 14/9/2018 at 21:02
I HATED the Silent Hill movie with a passion. Completely ruined that story. At least RE was fun to make fun of.
Sulphur on 15/9/2018 at 04:08
Yeah, the SH movie was an obnoxious mess of a thing which liberally borrowed the visual palette from the games with none of SH1's creeping dread or SH2's basic humanity intact. It just fundamentally misunderstood how to do the transition of that story from a game to a movie. It's pretty fucking sad considering the potential it had before I actually saw it.
froghawk on 15/9/2018 at 14:03
That about sums it up. I was irked by several things.... first, that they used the story of SH1 rather than the vastly superior 2 but didn't even manage to get that plot right... the ending was quite an egregious mangling that totally missed the point. Secondly, that they inserted pyramid head, who had a very distinct purpose in the story of 2, into an adaptation of 1 just for pointless fanservice. There was more, but I haven't seen it in a decade. I actually think the awful sequel may have been an improvement.
Anyway, skipping over the Resident Evil: Outbreak games since I've never had any luck with PS2 emulation and they were meant to be played online anyway... we finally get to the second truly great game in the series.
RESIDENT EVIL 4 (2005)
Inline Image:
https://daviscollective.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/resi4-gc-cover.jpgProducer: Hiroyuki Kobayashi
Writer/Director: Shinji Mikami
After several attempts at developing this game that were either transformed into a new IP or aborted, Shinji Mikami finally returned to direct another Resident Evil game. Unsurprisingly, said game ended up turning out to be the second best in the series. Mikami recognized that the formula was becoming stale and the horror was no longer working, so he decided to switch things up and make a fully 3D 3rd person action game with an over the shoulder camera.
RE2's Leon is the star of this game, and he is now working for the American Special Forces. He's been tasked with saving the president's daughter, who has been kidnapped and taken to a remote village in Spain. When he arrives in this village, it turns out all the villagers have been infected with a parasite they call Las Plagas.
The whole affairs is a fun commentary on the ruling class - we have the masses living in squalor, literally mind controlled by a religious leader (through Las Plagas). An aristocrat living in an enormously extravagant castle who thinks he's on top but is really just another pawn. Despite taking place in Spain, it seems like the whole thing is a jab against America to me, with a douchey American action hero who has no interest in saving anyone but the president's daughter (despite the massive number of people affected, who he blows straight to hell without a second thought instead of making the slightest attempt to help them).
While the switch of genre to a 3rd person shooter isn't really to my taste, this game is simply so well made and so much fun that I can't argue with it. While it never gets anywhere near as anxiety inducing as 0 or 1, it does manage to evoke a terrific sort of frantic tension. This game really isn't about survival, as there's a ton of ammo and healing items - the focus is on chaotic action. It's much easier to marathon that the earlier games, as it never gets too frustrating or anxiety inducing. It's all a bit more linear than its predecessors, but structured similarly, with locked doors and key hunts. Item boxes are still gone here - you can drop items, but your inventory is much bigger now, so you'll almost never need to. They also introduced a merchant to the game, so you can buy a larger inventory case and upgrade your weapons. The merchant also has some shooting galleries where you can earn more gold.
The first 4 chapters (the village and castle) are particularly well put together and have a ton of atmosphere. Unfortunately, the game becomes very unfocused in its fifth and final chapter, which constantly changes setting and style in a highly jarring manner. It begins on an island, which already feels like it belongs in a Tomb Raider game instead of Resident Evil, but then we're quickly taken through a secret lab (of course), a few tomb ruins, a waste disposal plant, a hilarious Call of Duty style war zone setpiece (complete with barbed wire and a helicopter assault), and an oil rig. It's really hard to know what to make of that last chapter when it jarringly changes tone from horror to action or past to present styles so frequently. This leads to really strange things like guys dressed as mercenaries carrying flails and crossbows, or destructible wooden barrels sitting in the middle of an urban waste dump. A brief moment of a creepy prison (literally just for one hallway) followed by a jetski escaping a wave then riding into the sunset.
The monster design in this game is truly excellent - it reaches the logical endpoint of the body horror aesthetic introduced in RE2. It's quite satisfying to blow off someone's head and see some sort of bizarre mixture of insects and innards pop out of the neck. The boss designs are also very cool along this front - there are two in particular which involve some awesome bodily transformation. The music is a mixed bag- some of it is very nice, and some of it is annoying.
This is the longest game in the series thus far - my cleared save file was 15hrs. I also died far less, as, once again, hard mode is not available from the start, so it ended up taking about the same amount of time as REmake and RE0. This game is the opposite of RE0 in terms of difficulty - it's hard to die multiple times in a row, as the game actually adjusts the difficulty in parts where you die. Not my favorite feature, and while I understand that's not the case in hard mode, I'm not about to replay any of these games right now.
As in RE2, there are segments where you play as the main supporting character. In this case, that's the president's daughter, Ashley. As with Sherry from RE2, she is largely defenseless, and all she can do is throw lamps at people, so these sections involve a bit of stealth - a welcome addition. The worst new gameplay addition is the quicktime events during cutscenes - these are quite annoying and easy to miss, forcing you to rewatch the cutscene. There's even a boss fight made entirely of QTEs, which is not much fun. To make matters worse, the key combinations change each time, so it's easy to miss them multiple times in a row - I generally ended just pressing all the possible keys simultaneously every time to cover all my bases.
Ada Wong (the main supporting character from Leon's parts of RE2) returns in this game, and there are extra modes where you can play through segments of the game from her perspective, RE2 style. This is better executed than RE2's scenario split but not as well done as Veronica's split, as it still involves a lot of repetition from the main game, and there's only one new section (though it's decently large). Wong is working for Albert Wesker, who didn't appear in the main game, so it was nice to see him show up (no hint of superpowers this time). Overall, I wasn't thrilled with these modes. There's also a Mercenaries mode (kill as many zombies as you can on a timer), which is great fun if you're into arcade modes, as gloob has pointed out.
As for the PC port, I played the Ultimate HD edition, which, from what I understand, is an entirely new port, separate from the oft-maligned original Sourcenext PC version. It has proper widescreen and mouse support, and is quite playable. The performance could be better, though - I should be able to run any game from 2005 at 1440p, but I experienced occasional slowdowns in certain sections even at 1080p. Compared to the much newer and shinier RE Revelations, which I was able to run at native resolution without a hitch, this leaves a bit to be desired on the performance front.
RATING: 8.5/10 insects exploding out of your head - Shinji Mikami's final Resident Evil title is a winner and has stood the test of time. Definitely recommended.
Inline Image:
https://daviscollective.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/2637098-cephalo_allyson.jpg
froghawk on 15/9/2018 at 14:05
RESIDENT EVIL: DEGENERATION (2008)
Inline Image:
https://daviscollective.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/biodposter.jpgProducer: Hiroyuki Kobayashi
Director: Makoto Kamiya
Writer: Shotaro Suga
The first CGI movie in the series is a sequel to RE2 which takes place right after RE4. It's about a new outbreak of the G-virus from RE2, and again features Leon and Claire as its lead characters. Given the quality of writing in the games, I was expecting the worst from this film, but it's actually quite fun for what it is! It manages to retain a lot of the hallmarks of the games without feeling too fanservicey, and while the writing isn't exactly high art, it does exactly what it needs to do. it's ambiguous who the real bad guy is for most of this film - there's a crooked politician, a bioterrorist, and a big pharma CEO, and doubts surround all of them, leading to multiple plot twists. A solid zombie B-movie.
RATING: 7/10 G-virus eye thingies
Inline Image:
https://daviscollective.files.wordpress.com/2017/05/gmonster4.jpg
icemann on 15/9/2018 at 17:06
I remember enjoying that film.
froghawk on 15/9/2018 at 18:53
RESIDENT EVIL 5 (2009)
Inline Image:
https://daviscollective.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/resident_evil_5_box_artwork.jpgProducers: Jun Takeuchi, Masachika Kawata
Directors: Yasuhiro Anpo, Kenichi Ueda (also writer)
So what did Capcom do with their first Resident Evil title without Shinji Mikami? Well, given that RE4 was such a success, the logical thing is to copy that, right? People like multiplayer games, so why not turn RE into a multiplayer franchise and make this a co-op game? It generates publicity when you do touch on hot button issues, so why not set it in Africa?
And that's what we got... a slightly shorter co-op clone of RE4 set in Africa. This came out just after Team Silent dissolved and the Silent Hill series moved to American developers who utterly butchered it. This game is certainly not a disaster on the level of those later Silent Hill games, as it's a decently fun cooperative action title once you get through an endless sea of menus and technical problems, but it's a terrible horror game.
Chris Redfield is the star of this one, and he's magically become about twice as buff as he was in the older games. Since it would be unacceptable to have a white American guy murdering hordes of Africans on his own, they introduce a British half-African woman named Sheva Alomar as his partner. Neither of them have half as much personality as Leon in RE4, and neither does the game as a whole. The dialogue is as bland and the voice acting is poor. RE4's memorable shopkeeper is nowhere to be found, and instead the store is just part of the ready screen. The dumb quicktime events are still present (though this time they're often assigned to individual players, and thankfully never change buttons on retries), and there are also some awful new bits that are staples of generic action games, like vehicle gun sequences. Another new sequence requires one play to carry a lantern through pitch dark mines while the other fights. Most of the game takes place in broad daylight, which feels pretty strange for a Resident Evil game.
The opening sequence is basically identical to RE4's - you're in a small, poor village, and are locked in the area, swarmed by people infected with parasites that make them try to kill you. You try to survive for a certain amount of time, and a new path opens up. A few alterations were made to fit the co-op gameplay - they did away with the typewriter save system and introduced a simpler inventory that operates in real time, complete with item trading. Gone are the days of spending half the game on the inventory screen, and instead the inventory is used as another way of generating tension, as you generally have to manage it in the middle of a gun fight. Every item takes up one slot now, regardless of size, so inventory management basically comes down to trading things back and forth with your partner. Healing is also a bit different - they've eliminated the blue & yellow herbs entirely, and the only way to live when you get below a certain amount of health is for your partner to run over and save you before time runs out. If you get too far apart and one of you is nearly dying, you're screwed, but the level design is also more linear than RE4 to prevent you from getting too far away from your partner.
As expected, this game generated controversy - one critic said “It plays so blatantly into the old clichés of the dangerous ‘dark continent‘ and the primitive lust of its inhabitants that you'd swear the game was written in the 1920s”. The game went under review in Europe due to accusations of racism, but it was not found guilty thanks to its anti-imperial themes. That is to say, after you're swarmed by a goofy band of parasite-infested Africans on motorcycles, you find out that they've all been infected by a white guy with an embarrassingly horrible (new jersey?) accent. Said white guy is holding Chris's old partner Jill Valentine hostage (and, of course, despite discovering a secret imperialist operation, Chris is interested in nothing except finding his old partner). But despite all that, the game does have one truly racist chapter which portrays a small African tribal village where the men are covered in war paint. It's embarrassing and offensive, and the developers should be ashamed. I assume that the European reviewers didn't get far enough into the game to witness that part, as it's the only explanation I can find to justify their conclusion that the game isn't racist.
The PC port is quite well optimized and the graphics don't look half bad for an 8 year old game, but despite the shinier visuals, the environments look a bit indistinct. It can become hard to navigate, even with the increased linearity of the level design, as every room in a given area looks the same. It doesn't help that the beginning of the game is basically an endless string of the ambush setpiece moments from RE4 without that game's inventiveness, making the gameplay as indistinct as the environments. It does change things up after the first few chapters, but in a way that makes the whole thing feel as scattered as RE4's final chapter. There's a chapter in a tomb that plays exactly like a Tomb Raider game, with the exact same kinds of environments and puzzles. Then you reach the hidden lab (of course), and after a boss fight there, the game turns into an awful cover shooter with the infected mercenary enemies from RE4's last chapter. But even that is broken up in strange ways, like with a horror sequence that only lasts for a single hallway where you have to quietly walk past blind enemies to avoid a massacre. This brief sequence (and every other use of the lickers) is truly excellent, and makes the rest of the game all the more frustrating.
The superpowered Albert Wesker from Code Veronica is the main antagonist here, and he's basically turned into Neo from the Matrix, wearing a leather trenchcoat and dodging bullets. The final boss fight against him is truly ridiculous - the final stage of it takes place in a volcano and features numerous quicktime events, including Chris repeatedly punching a boulder (lmao). It was so unclear what to do in this fight that we spent 15 minutes trying to knife him after running out of ammo, only to later complete the stage in under a minute.
The enemy design isn't all that novel - people infected with the parasite Las Plagas are again the main enemy here. There are also bat-insect hybrid things which look like mutalisks from Starcraft (I guess they figured they already had giant bats and giant spiders, so why not have giant spider-bats?) and reprised enemies from past RE games, including the licker from RE2 and the giant cockroach things from RE3. There are also bosses which looks just like the leech zombies from RE0 (and are just as resilient), and a reprise of RE4's El Gigante in a truly awful mounted gun boss fight. While the boss fights in this game largely suck, that one is by far the worst.
The reprised enemies aren't surprising considering that this game makes more effort to tie into the stories of previous games than any other RE title so far. Even RE0 and Code Veronica are referenced frequently here, and the rather scarce readable logs tie together the story of the whole series so far. Unfortunately, the game has a number of story problems - mainly, extensive and utterly lame retcons.
As of this game, Chris's main antagonist Albert Wesker was actually engineered as some sort of experiment, and the whole point of Umbrella was some old guy trying to become immortal.The PC version is missing local multiplayer, and is online only (previously through Games for Windows Live). Since that awful service no longer exists, it's been removed from the game - which meant getting this to work properly was a huge pain in the ass. The only way to join a game together was for me to invite him from the Steam overlay (for some reason the opposite wouldn't work), and half the time it still wouldn't let him join my game for no real reason. He also got dropped from the game once. This was quite a pain in the ass, as it felt like we spent almost as much time trying to get the game started than we spent actually playing it, with no clear rhyme or reason to the errors we experienced. Thankfully, it stopped giving us issues after the first two chapters or so.
The Gold Edition comes with 2 bonus episodes (~1hr each) which have to be completed in one sitting. I played solo to experience the AI, which was actually ok - it wasn't as dumb as I expected in terms of constantly getting killed, but didn't seem to know how to switch weapons or consistently smash barrels to get items. You gain points in both of these modes by picking up stars. The first episode, ‘Lost in Nightmares', fleshes out a flashback that appears throughout the game. It's a recreation of the original Spencer mansion, despite taking place after the original game (and I think in a different mansion? It isn't clear, but the architecture is a little bit different). It even goes into first person for a second every time a door opens to imitate the door opening videos in the early games. It's darker, more atmospheric, and more horror and puzzle-oriented, showing that they could have actually created a real horror co-op game with the spirit of the original and the style of RE4. This is actually scary, and it's really good, so it's a shame they only pursued this direction for a brief episode.
The second episode, ‘Desperate Escape', plays up the action side of things. Similarly to the Ada DLCs for RE4, this one runs parallel to the main game, showing what Jill Valentine (after you rescue her) and your partner Josh were doing while Chris and Sheva defeated Wesker. Thankfully, they didn't pad out this DLC with recycled areas as in RE4, and instead kept it short and sweet, leading to a timed climax where you try to survive as long as possible. As a side note, I am not sure why Jill's hair color changes in every game - it's hard enough to follow these characters as is with the changing voice actors and shinier graphics.
And, of course, there's a mercenaries mode, which is quite similar to the one in RE4. The main difference is that you're only given one map to begin with and have to unlock more as you go, but instead you're given multiple modes to choose from - solo, duo (co-op), No Mercy (more enemies), and Reunion (more characters to choose from). There's also a pvp Versus mode, which I did not try.
I haven't mentioned the music since it goes in one ear and out the other. The save music was always the most remarkable music in the series, but since there are no typewriters here, that's gone. The only music I can remember was the annoying orchestral climax music in the final chapter, as its obnoxious blaring was also the only thing making the final stages feel ‘epic'.
Rating: 6/10 mutalisk spiderbat thingies
Inline Image:
https://daviscollective.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/kipepeo.jpg
froghawk on 17/9/2018 at 22:28
A slight detour....
VANQUISH (2010)
Inline Image:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/2/29/PG_Vanquish_box_artwork.png/220px-PG_Vanquish_box_artwork.pngDeveloper: PlatinumGames
Director: Shinji Mikami
Writers: Hiroki Kato, Jean Pierre Kellams
Shinki Mikami left Capcom after directing God Hand. His seventh game as a director is his first and only title for PlatinumGames - a shooter which reuses some ideas from his fourth game as a director, the commercial failure P.N.03, as well as taking influence from the anime Casshern (both involve humans battling robots). I didn't review P.N.03 or God Hand on account of neither being available for PC, so this is the only non-horror title I'll be reviewing from Mikami. Vanquish is a far cry from Resident Evil and Dino Crisis - it's a highly linear 3rd person squad cover shooter in a futuristic war setting which fits quite nicely with the rest of the Platinum catalogue.
To be quite honest, this style of game really isn't my sort of thing, but I can't deny that I was having a blast by the end. It undeniably accomplishes what it sets out to do, which is delivering fast-paced dumb fun. The plot is a bit of send-up of American action movies - a gruff-voiced, chain-smoking, augmented-reaction-suit-wearing (read: bullet time and regenerating health) DARPA agent named Sam Gideon battles Russian robots on a pretty cool looking cylindrical space colony. Russian separatists used the space colony as a weapon to destroy San Francisco, and now Sam has to stop them from using it to destroy New York. He is assisted on the field by an equally gruff-voiced draconian Marine Colonel named Robert Burns and his company of Marines. Another DARPA agent, Elena Ivanova, provides him with extra information and assistance via comms. The writing is terrible, but seemingly intentionally so - the dialogue is periodically self-aware, featuring lines like 'This is starting to sound like a bad video game'. I think it would have been more effective if it had played up the ridiculous and comedic side of things a little more - as is, the story is pretty much just there to fill space between gameplay bits.
The game's central mechanic (and most influential, as it was widely imitated after) is a sliding boost, allowing the player to traverse the levels at extremely high speeds for short amounts of time. Aiming while sliding activates bullet time mode, which also automatically activates when the player's health is low, allowing them to more easily destroy whoever is killing them. The suit overheats after using bullet time or slide boosting for too long, leaving the player vulnerable to attack and needing to seek cover. However, cover objects are often easily destroyed by the enemy, and the player's score is penalized for using it with a time-based score deduction. The player can only carry 3 weapons at once (though there are ample opportunities to switch weapons in the environment, and the available arsenal is vast and diverse and can be upgraded, quite unlike Mikami's early titles). The player is also tasked with acting as a medic for Bravo squad and is rewarded with weapons and ammo upon saving someone. The combination of all these mechanics makes Vanquish's gameplay extremely fast-paced, frantic, and chaotic. The game is most enjoyable when it throws a boss at you in combination with hordes of enemies for maximum chaos, as it does frequently towards the end.
It's a brief game (my play time came in just under 6hrs), which is a good thing - it's so fast paced that it works better in small doses and doesn't feel designed for binging. There is a little bit of extra content to stretch out the value, however. The game is split into 5 acts, each of which has multiple missions. Completing each act unlocks a tactical challenge - basically a time trial type arcade mode of very high difficulty. Beating the whole game unlocks 'God Hard' mode. If that's not enough for you, there are rumors that a sequel is currently in development - the ending is prime sequel bait, after all.
The PC version is quite well optimized and features loads of graphics settings to tweak, including an option to run at 60fps. Apparently using this framerate in the launch PC version caused enemies to deal increased damage, but this bug has since been fixed. Even on high settings, the game looked a bit washed out and consoley to me, but perhaps it's because I was streaming it off a cloud and one of the settings was wrong. Still, while the visuals are not the flashiest in the world, the art design is often quite cool thanks to the novel setting. There isn't a huge amount of variation in the enemy design, but the game is short enough that it doesn't become monotonous on that front. There bosses were especially well designed, and some of the fights were quite creative.
RATING: 7.5/10 scorpionbots
Inline Image:
https://i.neoseeker.com/ca/vanquish_conceptart_8nWkq.jpg