Blood by the buckload!!! (Resident Evil (PS))

Member Name: trussellp

Product:	Resident Evil (PS)
Date:	02/03/02 (61 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: controls, graphics

Disadvantages: too scary for younger gamers

Titanic – an epic, tragic love story that was hailed by many as one of the greatest movies ever made. It scooped enough Oscars to keep James Cameron and 20th Century Fox in paperweights for years and sailed to the top of the Highest Grossing Films Of All Time list with box office takings that could have cancelled half the Third World’s debt.

And yet, despite the phenomenal success of Titanic, 1998’s biggest-earning entertainment thing was not a film. It was a videogame. A videogame called Resident Evil 2.

If that piece of trivia didn’t make you gasp you’re either comatose, dead, living on the Moon, completely apathetic to all things modern… or one of the millions of gamers who’d played the original Resident Evil two years previously and, understanding its brilliance, were not in the least bit surprised.

Resident Evil, it can honestly be said, caused a sensation when it was first released four years ago. Just like the Empire’s destruction of Alderaan, Resident Evil’s emergence sent tremors throughout the gaming Force. Simply watching someone play it was enough to make children cry, grown men faint and old ladies wet themselves.

Arguably, it was the world’s first, genuine interactive movie.

Defining its genre as “survival horror”, Resident Evil saw a group of Government agents wander into a huge mansion and find themselves battling against zombies, mutants and various other horrifying monsters.

The visual concept of 3D characters walking around pre-drawn, static backgrounds had been seen before in the cult Amiga/PC hit, Alone in the Dark; indeed, the use of atmospheric “camera” angles was Alone in the Dark’s forte. But Resident Evil took the premise several stages further, employing an unprecedented level of detail in both the backgrounds and the characters. The effect was a fully immersive world where fear was the rulin
g emotion and panic the prevailing action.

Resident Evil was an adventure game, first and foremost. It was also a rather fiendish puzzler. As well as the standard find-the-key-to-open-the-door problems, there were other decidedly more taxing conundrums to be deciphered.

You had to solve a perplexing keypad puzzle to gain entry into one particular room. You had to drain a corridor of water so that the massive shark that was blocking your progress would suffocate and die. You even had to create a chemical formula that would destroy a giant, mutant plant.

There were two difficulty levels that represented playing the game as either Special Agent Jill (feisty, young, piano player, “master of unlocking” and handily equipped with a gun right from the very start) or Special Agent Chris (calmer, older, not a “master of unlocking” and stupidly not equipped with a gun). There were even different endings depending on how fast you finished the game and how many save-games you used.



And it was HUGE. Absolutely massive. It was easy to forget where you were going and what you were meant to be doing when returning to a saved game (the sheer multitude of nasties waiting to be dispatched soon got you back on track, though).

The big baddies, including the giant snake, tarantulas and that trouser-browning end-of-game boss, were so beautifully animated you could sit and stare at them moving for hours – were they not moving in your direction, preparing to rip your head off.

The whole experience was polished off by the finest collection of “ham” actors ever assembled and the best dialogue this side of Plan 9 From Outer Space (having narrowly avoided being squashed by a falling ceiling, Barry casually remarks to Jill “You were almost a gibble sandwich” – what the hell is a “gibble”, Barry?).

Now an increasingly successful game series spanni
ng a number of different platforms and an impending Hollywood movie directed by Paul (Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon) Anderson, the original Resident Evil will always be the true classic for me – blood by the bucketload, suspense by the sack full and enough horror to give Wes Craven nightmares.

When entertainment is this satisfying – who needs sinking ships?

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