Resident Evil rant (Spoilers)

Resident Evil rant (Spoilers)

Recently I decided to play through pretty much every main title resident evil game at least one time on stream. So major and minor spoilers ahead, where I talk about ups and downs about the lot of them. Though spoiling a b movie schlock game plot is very hard regardless, it all ends with a boss fight and selfdestruct.

As far as Resident Evil game goes Zero added a lot of brilliant features and some excellent graphic design and raised a whole bunch of new questions. The game follows Rebecca Chambers a highly skilled and very young genius chemist, that apparently graduated early and became employed by a special force police squad. Then there is Billy an escaped convict she comes across in the forest after the special forces helicopter is shot down. The rest is a serious of improbable events, a lavish that crashes train, then more bosses and cramped corridors than I can shake a fist at. The brilliant new feature is having to individual characters to switch between, then the ability to drop items on the floor, instead of discarding them or running back to an item box. Which really do make inventory management a lot more manageable and sensible. If I look away from any weapons but the knife and pistols taking up two squares of inventory space. Then there is the extra mode, where you can play as a super powered Wesker with the voice of Billy and a mode where you clean out the mansion and stuff the inventory full of leech charms that cant be dropped. A bit droll, but not a bad mode, unless I consider the most irritating aspects of the game. Hunters are absolutely the worst thing ever. These insufferable gits are fast, deadly, very hard to dodge and should they ever get close enough they’ll stun lock me to death. On top of that they are often placed where the only way to really stop them is to fire the grenade launcher the moment I enter the room. So the first time around this is the most likely way a player die. Run into room, get stuck in corner and shredded into ribbons, the game is also a bit ammo stingy. Other than that I found it an okay experience, even if I had rage quite a lot. The moon logic of the puzzles are a mediocre challenge, considering how many of them there are in Resident Evil Zero, apparently Umbrella used the escape room logic to train promising candidates.

Resident Evil HD, the remake game of the first title is not that bad of a game, getting through the mansion can be a bit tricky and writing notes on a map really helps to cut down the confusion and the puzzles are not that insane. They make no sense in the practical sense of the word and does not explain how people actually navigated the place while it was still functional and how Chris got captured in the first place, unless you play as Chris, since there are two independent scenarios with no overlap what so ever and slight variations on events. Jill is easy mode and Barry shows up all over the place to help her out. At one point I had around 10 first aid sprays at hand. I can only assume Wesker the villain can phase through walls or has a teleportation device. Because I can not fathom how he got any where inside there as well. Then again how Rebecca chamber navigated the complex itself without any weapons but can of mace is never answered. Technically she should be more heavily armed than Chris Redfield at this point and when I consider how many pesky hunters I have murdered in Zero she should be unfazed by them at this point. That and she clearly knows that Wesker is a bad man and that Umbrella is guilty of this whole mess. The biggest letdown is that the voice-acting and the cheesy intro video is gone. The bosses are very easy and aside from being eaten by a shark, crushed by a boulder and decapitated by a hunter the experience itself was fun but flawed.

The Resident Evil 2 remake is a lesson in both good, bad and annoying the hell out of me design. Most of that has to do with stupidly long animations when grabbed or when getting killed, because they cant be skipped. Not to mention that the pesky zombies have the ability to instant one eighty lock-on grab. Sure they learned the lesson and that is to not have any quick time animations what so ever. Which is very good and the map highlights pickups and puzzle locations once interacted with. Mr. X is now a permanent fixture as well and as annoying as ever before, especially in tight corridors with no place to dodge and almost no ammo. Unless you count jabbing a knife in a zombies throat, feeding it a grenade or walking backwards as it lounges as using ammo. No wonder the speed run strategy is to stagger with headshot then bypass. I’m quite amazed that the game can be completed in under to hours though. Consider how very boring the sewers are and how much back and forth I had to navigate to get anywhere. Mr. X is a relentless giant of a monster that shows up at the most inopportune moments of my playthrough, unlike the the Resident evil 2, he is not that interesting or as memorable in his encounters. I can not recall him ever hanging from the third floor balcony in order to ambush me. The real terror is the hunters, which are more deadly, ferocious and terrifying than ever. That is until I realized they can not pass through doors, so with a bit of careful positioning, they are declawed as I stab them with a knife. Figuring out that part was fun. Too bad there is little or no overlap between Calire Redfield, the sister of Chris and Leon the rookie coop that came late to his first day on the job.

Overlapping with these events there is the story about how Jill from the first game is trying to escape from the city whilst being hunted by a relentless nemesis. A rocket launcher armed version of mister X, only with a more terrifying face. This creature keeps mutating in weird ways as Jill murder it in increasingly brutal ways. Recently it had a remake which I have yet to play. Overall it is a fun experience with the most memorable boss in any horror game to date in my opinion. The puzzles are much more toned down or the solution is often in the same room, not to mention that easy mode start the game with an assault rifle. Jill can also frame dodge if she raises the weapon at the right moment and various environmental hazards are scattered across the city, making it a lot more smooth ride. There is some reputability and a lock of nifty unlocks but its considerably shorter than the other games. Mostly due to less backtracking and fewer puzzles. If looking at a projector and then typing the product name onto a computer is considered one.

Code Veronica X is the first venture into full 3d with a fantastic new engine and fairly smooth gameplay, where Claire decided to infiltrate an Umbrella facility and get caught. From there she has to escape from a crazy jail filled with the most insane puzzles as of yet. Not because they are hard, but because they are downright improbable. To summarize one part of an item chain. The crazy doctor in the jail is found inside a bodybag which he burst out from during the course of the game. After I brutally murder this sadistic bastard, I have to take his fake glass eye and insert it into an anatomy figurine at the complex. Nothing weird about that right, well think again. This eye open the door to a secret passage, leading down into a torture room in the cellar. Down there is a room with many statues, the one in the middle of the room holds a rusty sword. Once I grab that blade, the room fills with lethal gas, so I have to rotate the statue to face the a specific wall before croaking. This reveals an iron maiden on the wall hidden behind a shield wearing statute. In order to open this dang torture device the rusty sword is stabbed into a slot. Unlocking the coffin where a zombie stumble out and decides to attack. For the most part this game plays very fair, until I have to deal with the Tyrant yet again, a very reoccurring enemy type in all of these games and usually the last boss. In code Veronica it is not, it’s more like a pesky unforgiving and unmovable progress stopper. The first fight against him is in a small corridor with fires behind the Clair which he will gladly push her into unless he is shelled hard until he dies. God forbid I try to run past his meaty meat hooks. Now this fight is bad enough as it is, but he shows up yet again inside the cargo room of an airplane where he hes beefy as all hell, got some new vicious attacks and is almost impossible to fight fair. The thing the game did not mention to me is that I forgot to pick up three B.O.W gass rounds from a random shelf that strips his health in half, making all my weapons a lot more potent in that fight, followed by launching him out the back door with a cargo crate. This boss is very bull carp and all the following cut scenes are unskippable, yes whenever I die I had to load the game and watch various scenes over again. I rectified this by save stating, since this game is console only. The last boss was fairly easy to cheese all things considered. I just had to place my butt then the right top corner and shoot the pesky ankle biters with my machine guns, then give Alexia several rounds of magnum to her face and she eventually died. Yes the main boss is an insane couple of genetically enhanced twins that turned their father into a test subject for another viral strain of the Resident Evil virus of the game.

And yes, the true Resident Evil enemy has stuck again, the ARCHITECT! There must be something in the drinking water within the world of Biohazard. Throughout the ages humanity has a bile fascinating with elaborate machinery and insane feats of construction. If you thought the Umbrella training facility, the Spencer mansion and the Police station was bad, then you have not been introduced to the madness that is not Spain and Resident Evil 4. Leon decided to become a well trained and skilled bodyguard for the presidents daughter after the events of Resident Evil 2. Unfortunately she got kidnapped by crazy parasite infested peasants being pestered by a local lord and a crazy cult. Naturally it is Leons job to rescue her and kill his way through the weird world of European architecture and chainsaws. Unfortunate this is the first game to introduce quicktime events into the series and there are a ton of press x to not die scenes. The plot is a lot more silly and very self aware and cranks the action level up to eleven and made the knife a lot more efficient. Though I do wonder where he learned that suplexing grown men is a valuable survival skill. As for the reoccurring theme of insane architecture there are very few puzzles this time around, but the castle the villain lives is insane. Not only is it humongous with improbable and impractical design, from the top there are five more mega castles in the background and I do not envy anyone wanting to got to work within this country, let alone live there. Overall a memorable and fun experience with some nifty new visuals and not taking itself seriously at all.

Resident Evil 5 Follows the same crazy concept of action, quicktime events and the introduction of how much this world is nothing like our own. From the looks of it the bad habit of hurtful, over-sized and impractical architecture goes back centuries, even African tribes can build gigantic underground structures with very elaborate puzzles and moving objects. This game includes coop and even more press button a lot to not die events on top of a turret sequence, a broken bosses and cameras taking the attestation away from the action. Plus several chainsaw enemies as well and even more humongous bosses. Chis got ripped and is now murdering plague infected African people. Some might call this a bit racial insensitive, they might be right. But if anything resident evil is a very egalitarian world, the series cares very little about gender and almost everyone dies or has brutal death animations. Overall a good coop experience, with a very bad field of view and a spruced up minigame with an insane amount of onscreen enemies on pc.

I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this but, I love, loathe and enjoy the insanity that is the world of Resident Evil.

Zaceron Signing Out