The Video Game Revue

Resident Evil

I just spent the better part of ten minutes salivating over the awesome Resident Evil DS gameplay video that I found via 4 Color Rebellion. Nintendo DS certainly has had a steady flow of worthwhile games coming out, and I'm falling more and more in love with the DS platform every month in spite of the facts that a) I never really bought into the value added by the touch screen and I still don't really see it as that big of a deal, and b) Lunar: Dragon Song was one of the games that I originally bought a DS for, and it turned out to suck. All that really matters, in the end, is that steady flow of worthwhile games.

I have a funny long-standing history with Resident Evil. I wasn't much of a PlayStation fan in the early days, and when Resident Evil was new it wasn't on my radar at all (I may have still been reading primarily Nintendo Power at the time, I think.) I got my PlayStation in the summer before Final Fantasy VII dropped (no coincidence, mind you), when Soul Blade (the first PSX game that I bought) was a relatively recent release. I ended up getting Resident Evil for Christmas that year, if memory serves me correctly, and it was the "Director's Cut" with a demo for Resident Evil 2.

At that point I got very deeply into Resident Evil. It is, after all, a completely brilliant adaptation of Alone in the Dark with heavy manga sensibilities and a touch of the X-Files. Overall, that was a dynamite formula for me at the time, and largely still is: Resident Evil 4 dominated my life for a month last January. Having thoroughly enjoyed Resident Evil Director's Cut, I expected to dive right into Resident Evil 2, but alas, the price of a PlayStation game was much more significant for me at the time than it is now, and University has this way of sucking one into it's vast and wonderous realm while blotting out the outside world. I slipped under the spell of my studies and didn't emerge again until about 2002. Even then, it took me a full year to get back up to speed on what was going where console gaming is concerned.

By that time I'd missed out on the Resident Evil remake for GameCube, Resident Evil: Code Veronica for Dreamcast, and even Resident Evil Zero. I was vaguely aware of these games and yet didn't really clue-in that I should be trying them out. For some reason, I'd assumed that everything since Resident Evil 2 had been lack-luster, that Penny Arcade were just being goofs about it, and that Resident Evil wasn't my thing anymore.

Actually, now I kind of remember--it was all of that crazy Dino Crisis crap that first got me thinking "oh, well now Resident Evil is going to suck forever." Also I was somehow convinced that although Onimusha and Devil May Cry were cool games, they also constituted evidence that Resident Evil was no longer the "pure" franchise that I'd enjoyed initially, because the game engine was being recycled. And I distinctly remember thinking that Resident Evil 3 was bad, for some reason, although I've never actually played it. Finally, there was the fact that although I finally got myself a PS2 in 2002, it wasn't until a year later that I finally got a GameCube, so I was mostly only concerned with PS2 and PC titles.

It was Resident Evil 4 that snapped me out of my lack of caring for Resident Evil. Not surprisingly, in the wake of that game, I ended up picking up copies of most of the other Resident Evil games. Resident Evil 2 eludes my grasp, although I did see an original copy for $60 at a hobby shop the other day. I've still never seen a copy of Resident 3 anywhere. I'm sure that one day there will be remakes available, though.

Anyway, that's the drama of my off-again, on-again relationship with the Resident Evil series. Fun times. I can't wait to try that Nintendo DS version.

posted by Parappa @ 1:45 PM