61 Frames Per Second : resident evil

Up All Night: Dino Crisis

John Constantine — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 16:00:00 GMT

When a refined sort decides that it is time to once again stay up all night, they must make certain preparations to ensure that their endeavor goes smoothly and that they will arrive at the dawn richer having survived their trials. They must ensure the room is properly lit, that they have sustenance to last the long hours, and they must make sure that they have chosen a game that is either appropriately terrible or admirably trashy in its content. They must also make sure to say a quiet prayer to the reining deity of trashy videogames: Shinji Mikami.

Shinji Mikami’s reputation is impeccable, no doubt. The man created Resident Evil. Remember though, that even though the original Resident Evil was a genre warping success and Resident Evil 4 was one of the best games ever created, they’re also prime candidates for Up All Night. I mean, hell, the plot and dialogue alone are enough to qualify them. The rest of his resume is an even better fit; Mikami’s Gamecube debut, P.N.03, was Up All Night’s very first subject.

After finishing Resident Evil 5 last month, I found myself hankering for Shinji’s distinct flare for the absurd premise and awkward control scheme. Lucky for me, there was an enormous Mikami-shaped hole in my gaming history: I had never played Dino Crisis. So, I journeyed to eBay, walked away with a shiny black Playstation disc and prepared to stay up all night.

Man, did I stay up all night. To say that Dino Crisis is just Resident Evil with dinosaurs is a disservice to Resident Evil. For all of its talk about masters of unlocking, at least Resident Evil had a coherent plot. At no point during my four hour playthrough of Dino Crisis was I clear on what was actually happening. Here’s what I got out of it: this chick named Regina, who has red hair and wears a one piece bathing suit over dancer’s tights, goes to this island with two dudes to find some other dude who may or may not be a scientist. When they get there, there’s a base on the island that was at one time filled with scientists. Now it is filled with velociraptors and giant-headed purple velociraptors. Three pterodactyls and a tyrannosaurus rex hang out outside the base and occasionally break some windows. Your goal is to walk Regina through the base. That’s pretty much it. Some doors are locked and you need to find keys to unlock them. Sometimes Regina talks to the two dudes, but I really couldn’t figure out what they were saying. It is a piece of trash.

Not all Up All Night games are bad games. Just because they’re trashy doesn’t mean they don’t have redeemable qualities. Dino Crisis is not one of those games. And now, having said that, Shinji Mikami is going to strike me down.

Previously on Up All Night:

X-Blades and the D-List Preservation Society
Up All Night With Jaleco: Never the Best, But Never Forgotten
Blackthorne
Doritos Dash of Destruction
Mortal Kombat Vs. DC Universe
Power Blade
Cannon Spike
Parasite Eve

The Four Greatest Videogame/Drug Combinations of All Time (Speaking From Personal Experience)

John Constantine — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 20:00:00 GMT

The world’s worst fears are true: you need to take drugs to play Grand Theft Auto. The only way to get the most out of your time in Liberty City is to eat ecstasy, let the chemical take hold, and swim in an ocean of thick joy as you wreak impossible acts of havoc on the digital world’s citizens. I’m sorry I’m stealing your car, I need it right now, but I looooove you, man. Just the way it is, I guess. Bold choice, Rockstar! I kid. It was no doubt an unpleasant surprise for Richard Thornhill, a father of two, to open his recently purchased copy of GTA and find four mysterious pills sitting in the game’s case. I can’t imagine the confusion and fear. My god, what have I touched? Is this poison?

There’s nothing more noisome than someone telling you that drugs of any stripe enhance an experience. Oh man, you can’t listen to Dark Side of the Moon if you aren’t stoned, man. Shut up. You’re a moron. I would, however, be a liar if I said that I haven’t had a marvelous time playing videogames while using illicit substances. Yes, like President Obama, I too inhaled during the heady days of my youth. Amongst other things. Let us take a brief stroll down memory lane. I will be your pharmacological guide across the gaming landscape.

For the record, you don’t need to eat ecstasy to play Grand Theft Auto. That is, unless you’re British.

Marijuana and Resident Evil 4

I don’t like pot anymore. I find it to be, as Warren Ellis described LSD, abrasively psychological. It makes me feel stupid and completely out of control of my own brain. Back when, though, I found THC’s sloppy haze of goodwill and creativity very pleasant. It was never conducive to anything that requires paying attention, though. With one exception. A few puffs of Maple Leaf Indica before I fired up Resident Evil 4 for the very first time made a memorable game beginning an unforgettable claustrophobic terror. The first time I took control of Leon Kennedy, the camera was so uncomfortably close to him that it felt like I was there peeking over his shoulder. No, Leon don’t go in there! Let’s get the hell out of this forest! There are demon Spaniards everywhere!

Alcohol and Burnout Paradise

Drunk driving is one of the stupidest, most detestable things a human being can do. If you’ve had a drink, don’t even get into the driver seat of a car. You can’t operate it. You will hurt someone. If you want a quick lesson in what will happen, fire up Burnout Paradise next time one drink’s turned into three. The game’s already about terrifying reckless vehicular feats, but the shock of colliding with a wall while intoxicated is outrageous. You can’t help but laugh as your cheeks flush. That was freaking TERRIFYING!

Ecstasy and Duck Tales
MDMA is dangerous stuff. It leaves you exhausted. Even more dangerous because everything you’ve ever heard about its effects are true. It feels very good. The flood of serotonin into your system fills you up with a powerful and irresistible feeling of intimacy with everything and lends even the most mundane experience a nigh on spiritual level of profundity. Much as playing Capcom’s Duck Tales does. Sensing a good thing, I mixed the two. Scrooge McDuck’s happy greed became a desperate struggle to hold on to everything in the world because it just meant so much. You think the Moon theme was bittersweet before? Whew. Yeah, ecstasy made Duck Tales a moving spiritual journey. That’s why I don’t do ecstasy anymore.

Nutmeg and The Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time

I like to think of myself as the kind of guy who will try anything twice. Life’s meant for living, right? That’s what Chicken Soup for the Disaffected Urbanite says at least. Truth is I’m pretty meek, afraid of new experiences and change. Sometimes, you just have to roll with it. Like when I found out that nutmeg — you know, the spice — can be used as a psychotropic. Uh huh. There’s a reason you don’t put more than a sprinkle of the stuff on your eggnog. Not because it induces a hallucinatory state for close to twelve hours, and not because it’ll make you incapable of pooping for a day, but because it tastes like god damn turpentine. Eaten in large quantities though it can and will make you feel like you are TRAVELLING THROUGH TIME. There’s only one thing for it under those conditions. You must become the Hero of Time. Obviously.

Related links:

GWI: Gaming While Intoxicated
Boy Addicted to Call of Duty 4 Found Dead
The Duck Tales Moon Theme--With Lyrics
OST: DuckTales

Question of the Day: Why Can’t I Play Online?

John Constantine — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 01:00:00 GMT

It’s getting bad. Ugly even. A friend walks up to me and asks the simple question, “Hey, John, what are you playing right now?” Then I think of the backlog. It’s a pile of games sitting by the consoles, a gargantuan mass of briefly played games, none of them seen to completion. I started Persona 4 in December! MadWorld? Yeah that first stage was a hell of a good time, for sure. My plan to beat Vagrant Story by March? Didn’t work out so much. What’s worse than the line up of single player games sitting by the boxes is the pile of those other games. Some of them I’ve even “finished”. You know the ones I’m talking about. The games that you’re supposed to play with other real live human beings over the internet. Resident Evil 5 without pushing around an artificial intelligence. Left4Dead with more than two people in split-screen. Racing in Burnout Paradise against, you know, drivers. Those games. The ones that keep slipping to the bottom of the backlog.

As playing online has gone from niche to ubiquity over the past decade, I’ve found myself completely unable to jump on the bandwagon. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a good multiplayer session. I can sit down with a group of like-minded folks and play Street Fighter (any of them really) for as long as everyone’s willing. I adore a good splits-screen session, co-operative or competitive, racing, shooting, puzzling, or, hell, Jenga-ing in Boom Blox. I’m all for it. When it comes to playing with people online, though, I just can’t muster the enthusiasm. I’ve had just as many positive experiences playing with complete strangers as I have miserable ones. Like everyone else, I’ve had some intellectual cripple call me every racial/misogynistic epithet, real and made up on the spot, during a simple game of Halo 3. That’s not what keeps me away. Even playing with friends, people I know, doesn’t appeal to me in the same way playing with them in the room does, not to mention playing solo. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why.

My question for you is how do I break out of the cycle and learn to embrace anytime-anywhere multiplayer? What is it about playing together in a room that just can’t be replicated by playing across broadband? What am I missing here?

Related links:

Question of the Day: Valkyrie Profile and the Need for Voiced Dialogue
Question of the Day: Ogre Battle and How Much Tutorial is Too Much?
Question of the Day: Your Ideal Controller?
Question of the Day: Yu-Gi-Oh! And Card-Based Videogames?

The 61FPS Review: Resident Evil 5

John Constantine — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Resident Evil 4 is one of the greatest videogames ever made. It is top three, desert island material, the one to play before you die. It is Shinji Mikami’s definitive statement as a creator. It is the best three-dimensional game to ever come out of Capcom across all of their internal teams. It is Dark Side of the Moon to Super Mario 64’s Sgt. Pepper. These are not things that can be argued. These are facts. So when every single person that plays Resident Evil 5, whether as a demo or as a finished, ten hour game say that it is just “gorgeous Resident Evil 4", you know they are not damning it. That is a compliment. And an accurate one.

Producer Jun Takeuchi and his team of toughs followed the recipe precisely: Mix claustrophobic, over-the-shoulder gunplay, careful resource management and a dollop of flip-the-switch puzzling. Add an adventure through a forbidding village of transformed locals, then some marsh land hiding a water-bound monstrosity, then one industrial complex. Slowly blend in one spooky castle/ruin and one evil laboratory. Garnish with final confrontation that culminates in rocket-launchering a monster in the mutated face. Do battle with human, canine, insect, and various oozing grotesques. Let rest occasionally near save point, serve chilled.

It is an expertly-made game, its only serious flaw being the partner AI’s occasionally spastic behavior. Sheva Alomar (or Chris Redfield on a second single-player run) is capable throughout the chapters, but useless in boss fights, especially the last. The addition of a constant partner, whether AI or player controlled, does not change the rules, the flow of Resident Evil as a game. It can, at first, make the game feel quite different, giving combat a refreshed sense of immediacy and panic. Every Resident Evil game has a companion, but they’re typically a cosmetic servant of narrative, a dependent you must protect to proceed, or a pack mule, not an active participant in the fight-and-heal rush of combat. This is misleading in the game’s opening chapters because once the newness of it wears off, RE5 settles into the same ebb and flow of its predecessor. It is, however, made a less lonely game, though not only because of your partner’s presence. This Resident Evil has fewer ponderous moments sandwiched between its gaudy set pieces, a bit less story and, at first, seemingly less exploration. Resident Evil 5 has done away with back tracking entirely, making the game more linear by making its environments less circuitous. This is a necessity for keeping the game palatable to play with another human being — not everyone wants to look in every corner for bullets and gold. But in taking away Resident Evil’s maze structure (even if, as in Resident Evil 4, it’s just the impression of a maze) and removing opportunities to soak in Kijuju’s atmosphere, RE5 loses the series’ je ne sais quoi, its inherent Resident Evil-ness.

That’s the last metric to measure the game and the series’ worth. There isn’t anything left to say about the game you play in Resident Evil 5. These rules are perfect and Capcom has made a version that can be played by two people at once. Its art, its sound, all of its clockwork parts gleam in sync. But how does it hold up as a sequel, as a Resident Evil game? It does okay. The atmosphere and tone have always been the most rewarding aspects of the franchise, and they’ve taken a hit because of the aforementioned structural changes — not terminally but noticeably. It is also steeped in continuity without being forbidding to potential new players. No one’s going to give a damn who Jill Valentine if they’ve never played another Resident Evil, but the game is very conservative with its cutscene melodrama. It even does you the courtesy of including a timeline of the entire series, chunks of which pop up during load times.

Every review, every preview, every mention of Resident Evil 5 says the same thing: this game, no matter what, will live in the shadow of Resident Evil 4. Following up a masterpiece is an impossible task. To look at Super Mario 64 again briefly, Resident Evil 5 took the same approach Super Mario Sunshine did, making a few slight tweaks to a proven formula. Sunshine, however, was rushed out the door, had frustrating level design, and some questionable aesthetics thrown on top of the proven rules of its papa. Capcom was patient with Resident Evil 5 and they produced a game that may not surpass its papa, but at least honors it. What more can you ask?

Grade: B+

Previous Reviews:

MadWorld
Star Ocean: The Last Hope
Killzone 2
Noby Noby Boy - part 1 & part 2
Big Bang Mini
Retro Game Challenge
Edge
Game & Watch Collection
Valkyria Chronicles part 1 & part 2
Karaoke Revolution Presents American Idol Encore 2
Prince of Persia
LittleBigPlanet part 1, part 2
Dead Space
LOL
Dragon Quest IV
Ninja Gaidan 2 part 1 & part 2
Metal Gear Solid 4 part 1 & part 2
Wii Fit
Grand Theft Auto IV part 1, part 2 & part 3

You Like Resident Evil, eh? How About All the Resident Evil in the World!

John Constantine — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 01:00:00 GMT

After one last cold snap here in good ol’ NYC, spring is finally in the air. Yesterday had itself a brutal chill, but today, it’s been nice and mild. Spring is full of all kinds of great stuff. A young man’s fancy turns to love, flowers bloom, it rains a lot, and every last one of us post-industrialized humans have horrific allergy outbreaks because we’ve never lived lives that necessitate a hearty immune system. Modern living rocks. Spring is also the season for rumors! The fiscal year is just about to end and all kinds of precious secrets are starting to ooze out of corporate orifices like nobody’s business. Yesterday, it was Pandemic taking over Star Wars: Battlefront III. Today, its Resident Evil: Code Veronica on Wii.

Let’s dive headlong down the internet rabbit hole, shall we? First, Capcom’s product manager Mark Dahlgren tells Game Focus that fans of Code Veronica should pay attention to the news on March 12th. Look for an announcement that they’ll be “very pleased with,” he said. Dahlgren then stoked more flames in an interview with Joystiq and said that Wii fans will be “very happy, very soon.” Then Kotaku wrote about it. Then I wrote about it. Like a hack.

Seems a little silly, really. I mean, you can already play Code Veronica on Wii. Just go online, type “Code Veronica Gamecube” into Google and, provided you have forty dollars and a little patience, you’re good to go. You can play every Resident Evil worth playing on Wii, dag nab it. Bunch of jerks, that’s what you are, Capcom.

Ugh. I apologize, dear reader. This was not post worthy. This is rumor mongering trash you can get all over the net. I just wanted to write that headline. It mixes Resident Evil with Simpsons quotes and I love both of those things. I’ll make it up to you, I swear.

Related links:

Resident Evil Arguments that Need to Die
Resident Evil 5: Continuing on the Transformation Trail From Horror to Suspense
Games to Film to Games to Film: Resident Evil Degeneration
Once More Into the Breach: A Final Peek at Resident Evil 5

Sailing the Internet Seas, Historical Preservation, and The Great Rumble Roses vs. Silent Hill vs. Metroid Dance Party Throwdown

John Constantine — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:30:00 GMT

Beware! Sail too far to the east, brave soul, and you will come upon that most dangerous of seas. The sky changes to a sickly fresh bruise color, all angry purple and yellow, and the waves will toss madness and froth against the bow. Even the sturdiest ship, the steadiest mind, will be shaken by the foul humors waiting for them beyond the horizon. Ye have been warned. Beware! Beware the internet!

I got lost in an internet vortex this afternoon. It all started innocently enough. Smooth sailing, reading Multiplayer’s interview with Steve Papoustis about Dead Space: Extraction. This led to Matt Hawkins’ Fort 90, and that’s when things started to veer off course. For anyone unfamiliar, Matt’s one of NYC’s great games journalists, but he’s also a madly prolific renaissance man. Fort 90 is a dangerous place, dense with images and text. It’s an easy place to lose your bearings, and that’s what happened to me. Matt linked to the Garry’s Mod work of one MrWhiteFolks. MrWhiteFolks made some spectacular high resolution images of No More Heroes character models stripped of their cel-shading. Very cool stuff. He also made this:

Oh there’s more. Much more.

The internet vortex is perilous, but when you’re hounding for anything and everything related to the videogame landscape, it reveals riches just like MrWhiteFolks’, erm, folk art. That’s what you call this right? That’s what you call it when Heather from Silent Hill 3 dance battles Pyramid Head from Silent Hill 2 in front of the assembled casts of Halo, Metroid, Rumble Roses, Dead or Alive, Gears of War, and Resident Evil 4?

I would like to close with pointing everyone to Edge’s recent feature on preserving videogames’ cultural history. It’s so easy to lose yourself bouncing between one article, one review, one preview, one speedrun, one ROM hack, one actual game to the next that it’s hard enough to process it all when you’re experiencing it in the moment. How do we even begin to preserve things like MrWhiteFolks’ creations? Do we preserve them? Are they important parts of gaming’s history?

Bet you’re all as lost as I am now.

Related links:

10 Years Ago This Week: Silent Hill
Resident Evil Arguments that Need to Die
Metroid Prime Trilogy Retrospective

Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun Li Is Not For Critics

Nadia Oxford — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 17:23:00 GMT

There's a famous Penny Arcade strip—the very same strip that first introduces the quaint and chaotic cartoon duo Catsby and Twisp—that begins with Tycho making some remark about how Kevin Smith had decided that his film “Jersey Girls” was “not for critics.” Gabe responds, “Wow, I didn't know you could even do that.”

Seems you can. The latest film to shut out critics is “Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li.” That is to say, there won't be an exclusive screening for Ebert and his kin. If they want to review Chun-Li's searing soul-search, they'll have to get in line for tickets and popcorn with the rest of us mortal slobs. Chances are they won't.

But hey, no reviews mean that we'll go into the film with clear heads, right? Yes and no. “The Cutscene,” a Variety blog, confirms what even the most optimistic Chun-Li fans know deep in their hearts:

[I]n 95% of cases, not screening a movie is the studio's way of admitting critics are sure to hate it -- usually because it's bad, occassionally because it's a genre, like horror, that critics rarely appreciate.

This actually might not be a bad move on Fox's part. We already know this movie isn't going to go up for any Oscars. Leigh Alexander actually wrote an interesting column exploring the reasons why video game films will never thrive. Fans made fun of Resident Evil: Degeneration, but the film's story played out true to a Resident Evil game. Seems like there's a choice that needs to be made between being faithful to the source material, and appeasing an audience outside the gamerbase. Video game plots just aren't yet mature enough to strike a satisfying balance between the two.

On the other hand, the same was surely said about comic book movies, once upon a time.

Related Links:

Games to Movies: Why Is It So Gad-Danged Hard?
Watch Out Kids! Video Games Can Hurt You
Where, Specifically, Did The Street Fighter Movie Go Wrong?

Unsolicited Scares: Terranigma and the Desert

Nadia Oxford — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:27:00 GMT

When we talk about games that made us scream like grandmothers treed on a kitchen chair by mice, we default to the obvious. “Ohhh, Resident Evil 4 made me poop myself in fear,” one contributor gasps. “That's nothing,” another counters. “Silent Hill made my poop poop itself in fear!”

And so on.

It's only natural that we think about the survival horror genre during these conferences of memory. But I've been thinking lately about games that gave me the chills when I certainly didn't expect them to. I won't say I have the hardiest soul around, but even JRPGs and Super Mario games have some genuinely creepy moments that can blindside you. Not necessarily the whole game (unlike Resident Evil or Silent Hill), but maybe a specific scenario that comes back to haunt me when I wake up from a nightmare and fail to conjure something soothing to help me sleep again.

First example: The “Desert” music from Terranigma.

Terranigma was Enix's follow-up to Illusion of Gaia for the Super Nintendo. It's best known for never showing its face in America despite demand. It's known almost as well for its haunting soundtrack.

“Desert” is a sound clip that tends to visit my memory when I'm alone in some dark place, usually when my imagination is already engorged with fear. The clip doesn't have to be taken in context for its haunting whine to skittle down your neck and back, but it helps a bit.

Terranigma's protagonist, Ark, is the video game equivalent of what Adam would be if Adam's reaction to getting kicked out of the Garden of Eden had been, “Well, okay.” Ark is evicted from his village after eating the metaphorical forbidden fruit—or opening the literal Pandora's Box, if you like—and he's charged with reviving the dead Earth that he had no idea existed outside his little hamlet. When “Desert” first plays, Ark is preparing to leave everything behind for the unknown. That, to me, is what the piece reflects so well: an uncertain future. Though the unknown is a more subtle scare than omg zombies blaaargh, it is by far mankind's greatest fear.

“Desert” hits me even more strongly thanks to personal context. I played Terranigma around the time 9/11 struck, and to a degree, I associate the track with the days of unease that followed the attack. Nobody in the world knew what, precisely, was going to happen next. A World War? Another attack? Indeed, the unknown is frightening.

Related Links:

Time For Terranigma
Question of the Day: Why Can't I Emulate?
Question of the Day: How Do You Make a Horror Game Horrifying?

Take a Look Back in Hunger with the Resident Evil Retrospective

Bob Mackey — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:00:00 GMT

With the much-anticipated Resident Evil 5 about to hit store shelves in a month, I'm sure we're all going a little survival horror crazy; hell, I had to stop myself from replaying RE4 for a third time through careful consideration of all of the crap I own that I still have yet to finish. Instead, I've decided to cut out the middle-man and turn my attention to the significantly less time-wastey Gametrailers Resident Evil Retrospective. Like all of Gametrailers' retrospective pieces, the series promises to be a pretty comprehensive piece of work--and it even covers the pre-RE roots of survival horror, though they could have devoted a lot more time into that section. So far, one out of six episodes has been released; the only thing that worries me at this point is how increasingly convoluted the franchise's timeline gets by Code Veronica. The only way to explain anything at that point in the story would have to involve Back to the Future's Doc Brown and several hundred chalkboards.

We'll see how well they do.

Related Links:

Resident Evil 5: Continuing on the Transformation Trail From Horror to Suspense
Games to Film to Games to Film: Resident Evil Degeneration
Trailer Review: Resident Evil 5

Once More Into the Breach: A Final Peek at Resident Evil 5

John Constantine — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:00:00 GMT

Sitting down for one last taste of Resident Evil 5 before the game finally comes out on March 13th, I received the saddest possible news: the shopkeeper from Resident Evil 4 is gone. That’s right. No more buying it at a high price. No more good things on sale, stranger. No more gunning down the purple-bandana-wearing-sumbitch when he won’t sell you any more first-aid sprays. In RE5, you do your buying and selling from a cold, faceless menu. Maybe it’s for the best. Like the original demo, now available to all on Xbox Live and PSN, Chapter 3-3 of RE5 makes it clear that there isn’t a whole lot of down time to be had in Kijuju. Chances are if you stopped to hang with your old pal Shopkeeper, a zombie would bury an axe in your shoulder. Then your co-op partner would swear at you for window shopping so long. It would be bad.

The chapter’s a bit different from the shantytown survival-gauntlets of the previous demo. Sheva and Chris ride a small boat down river, flanked by steel platforms and gates covered with Majini, the buffed-up bad guys infected with the parasitic progenitors of both RE4’s Las Plagas and the original game’s T-virus. The on-rails sequence is frantic, with attacks coming from all angles, and it’s peppered with low-hanging barriers that must be ducked as you ride by. At multiple points, you have to disembark to open floodgates and procure fresh ammunition. These areas are small, but still warrant exploration for a couple of hidden weapons and treasures. (As in RE4, you sell treasure to procure extra cash, the quickest route to weapon upgrade funds.) Waiting at the end of the river is one of the game’s first bosses, some nutter named Irving. I wasn’t treated to much story, so all I know about the guy is that he’s evil and has a hilarious haircut. After injecting himself with a parasite, he transforms into a whale-alligator-tentacle-beast with a gigantic eyeball growing out of its neck. (What is with the T-virus and its variants causing random, gigantic eye growth?) The fight’s good fun; Chris and Sheva use gun- and rocket-turrets placed around the boat to take shots at Irving the Whale’s glistening tentacle and back pustules. It’s the sort of pattern-based, wait-for-the-weak-spot-reveal fight Resident Evil has traded in for over a decade, spiced up by having a partner to work with.

That’s Resident Evil 5 in a nutshell: it’s Resident Evil 4 but bigger, prettier, louder, and with a friend. That’s great, the perfect makings for an excellent game. But it raises some serious questions about the final product. I was playing with Capcom’s Chris Kramer the whole time; would the river ride and monster mash have been as manageable with an AI partner? I was also told that, despite earlier statements from Jun Takeuchi, RE5 will actually be slightly longer than RE4. Without the quiet exploration to balance the game’s shoot-outs, will RE5 end up being an exhausting endeavor? And the most important question: will Resident Evil 5 be free of the troubling racial imagery that plagued its first showings? Compared to the original trailer, the Majini are noticeably diverse, but if Eurogamer, who have played a far more extensive preview build of the game’s beginning, is to be believed, the demonization of Africans is even more problematic and offensive in the complete game. I have a lot of questions, but luckily answers are only one month away.

Editor’s Note: Nerve Editor Peter Smith is sad that he had to miss this demo session, and he doesn't even like Resident Evil. Hi, Melody!

Related links:

Resident Evil 5: Continuing on the Transformation Trail From Horror to Suspense
Resident Evil Arguments that Need to Die
The Resident Evil 5 Demo is Now for Everybody
Trailer Review: Resident Evil 5

Resident Evil Arguments that Need to Die

Bob Mackey — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 03:00:00 GMT

With the recent release of the Resident Evil 5 demo, I've been subjected to something far more stomach-turning than hordes of the undead running amok in an African village. Of course, I speak of the Resident Evil fanboyism I assumed had ended long after the release of Resident Evil 4; you see, with the newest RE being made in the model of the series' previous game, purists are still upset that many of the things they've come to cherish about Resident Evil have been left to rot nearly 5 years ago. If you're a sane and functioning member of society, then you've probably realized that the Resident Evil 4 renovation was the best possible thing to happen to the series--and I commend you for your common sense. However, it's entirely possible that the drastic shift in the franchise still burns the living hell out of your beans; if this is the case, I bear you no personal grudge. I simply wish to ridicule your wrong opinions out of existence.

And now, friends, I present the Resident Evil arguments that need to die.

1. The game isn't even survival horror anymore.

This is correct. Resident Evil is now an action game--and it's so, so much better as a result. The series used to be about running past as many enemies as you could, while only taking out the few that were a serious threat--and the GameCube remake of the first RE even punished you for killing zombies by bringing them back to "life" in an even more ferocious form. Now, it's all about systematically clearing out areas full of ghouls, all while watching the ammo supply that the game gives you juuust enough of. There's a slight loss in scariness--to the point where even a notable wuss like me can now play RE--but the sheer joy added to the experience far outweighs the amount of pants-wetting you could be doing.

2. What happened to my precious Resident Evil story!?

You might have noticed that Capcom nearly washed their hands of the whole Umbrella/Raccoon City arc after Code Veronica. This is because A.) the logistics of basic plot elements barely made sense on their own and B.) there's no way in hell you could tie the events of the first four games together without several plot holes the size of Alaska. If you don't believe me, consult the Let's Play series of Resident Evil walkthroughs and see how little the stories make sense when someone is actually analyzing them.

3. ARGH why can't I strafe!?

The unique stop-and-pop fighting system of Resident Evil 4 and onwards is one of the few holdovers from the game's survival horror roots, and it really creates a set of mechanics unlike any other. Instead of Z-targeting an enemy (used in every 3D game since Ocarina of Time) and quickly turning it into Swiss cheese, you're forced to find a safe place and slowly kill the hordes of zombies that are on your tail--and said zombies usually block any way out on their approach. You could argue that the inability to run-and-gun in RE is an artificial way to add difficulty, but I respect that fact that it doesn't play like most action games.

4. Th-th-th-these aren't even zombies!!!

No matter how many Max Brooks books you've read, and despite how elaborate your undead apocalypse plans may be, zombies are fictional. And--God willing--they will be forever. This means that the definition of "zombie" is entirely reliant on whoever's interpreting the concept. So long as you get a bunch of humans who attack in large mobs, revert to completely animalistic states, and eat living flesh, I'm going to say you've got some zombies on your hands. But if you want to argue zombie semantics, I'd wager there are many areas on the Internet where you can do this. Just please don't bring it here.

Related Links:

Resident Evil 5: Continuing on the Transformation Trail From Horror to Suspense
Games to Film to Games to Film: Resident Evil Degeneration
The Resident Evil 5 Demo is Now for Everybody

Meet People (Yay!) On the Internet (Oh.) Play Games With Them (Fine, I Guess…)

John Constantine — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 22:30:00 GMT

Personality tests are stupid. Unless they are being given to you about by a psychiatric or sociological professional, a series of multiple choice questions meant to reflect some fundamental aspect of your nature is almost assuredly complete, fragrant bullshit. Like everyone else wandering the wide halls of the internet, I find myself clicking on them incessantly, the stupider and more specific they are the better. Of course I want to know what character I am from The Adventures of Pete & Pete! Why the hell wouldn’t I? Yes, certainly, tell me what type of pants I am, internet. Let me know how compatible I am with dogs, tell me how the music I listen to defines my past lives. I insist that you judge my abilities as a lover on a sliding scale of temperatures!

MyGameMug, alongside their gamer personality test, actually provides a service. The site is about, in their own words, “connecting similarly-minded gamers together through a proprietary matchmaking algorithm, for all games and all platforms.” It’s a noble ambition, but I cannot attest to the quality of said algorithm. I can tell you that their personality test labeled me a Helping Hand:

The Helping Hand
Deliberate Sociable Fun Veteran (DSFV)
Generous, helpful, kind...a few of many positive attributes people see in you, the Helping Hand. Nothing satisfies you more than helping your teammates or friends out in all the games that you play. You may even look to assist people in some cases if there is no one around asking for help. In fact, the enjoyment that you receive from helping people rivals that of solving a puzzle, winning a battle, or achieving a hard objective in a game.

Heavily social intensive games tend to be what you enjoy the most although you can probably find something to take pleasure in with most games. For instance, if you happen to find yourself in a competitive first person shooter, you'd probably take the support class. We recommend you stick to games (and crowds!) where people will appreciate you more; these include more casual gamers seeking fun and excitement from games rather than the serious competitive ones.

Right. This completely explains why, when hopping into Resident Evil 5 with Derrick Sanskrit, I immediately ran away, leaving him to be devoured by angry monsters. Regardless, there are worse ways to waste your time on the net than by taking this quiz. Go let a computer tell you who you are! And then, who knows, meet some cool people to play videogames with. Or something.

(Link: NeoGAF)

Related links:

Resident Evil 5: Continuing on the Transformation Trail From Horror to Suspense
The 61FPS Review: LOL - Never Party Alone!
Halo Multi-player, Spitzer Style
Left4Dead: The Most Important Training Simulation You Will Ever Play
Developer Journal part 3: Beat Me Up Too

Resident Evil 5: Continuing on the Transformation Trail From Horror to Suspense

John Constantine — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

It might seem strange, considering how often I’ve expressed my adoration for the genre here on 61 Frames Per Second, that I wasn’t always a fan of horror. In fact, being frightened was not something I considered a good time in any way, shape, or form. Call it a symptom of an extremely over-active imagination, but even a scary story told at summer camp was enough to keep my childhood self wide-eyed and sleepless, sheets pulled over my head while my mind conjured even greater terrors than the ones in fiction. Scary movies, scary stories, and even scary games were simply too much for me. It wasn’t until I was in my mid-teens that I started to come around to the thrills of being afraid for fun, but it was still a slow process. The original Resident Evil was, in many ways, horror training wheels for me. I’d be lying if I said the game didn’t still freak me out a little. It was never the “BOO!” moments either, the dogs jumping through windows or the rushing camera POV that signaled the arrival of the first Hunter baddie. It was the atmosphere, the lonely clacking of feet on the floors of empty hallways, the score, and that very first zombie, its grisly visage slowly turning to the camera, rendered in CG just abstract enough to seem unreal. The campy dialogue and ridiculous live-action intro weren’t enough to dull the menace, but the action and puzzles kept me hooked. By the time Resident Evil 2 came out in 1998, I was converted and I’ve remained a devotee of horror gaming since. I’ve stuck with the series too. But Resident Evil hasn’t really been about horror, or even fear, in almost ten years. Each successive entry has brought the series further across that delicate line, from horror into suspense. Resident Evil 4 was a true sea change, but it’s the upcoming Resident Evil 5, which Derrick and I got to play at Capcom’s New York preview event today, that cements the franchise’s transformation into a full-bore action experience, one whose tension comes from overwhelming numbers and a sense of claustrophobia instead of limited resources and lurking dread.

The two stages we attempted, putting the new co-operative play through its paces over two networked Xbox 360’s – though local co-op was confirmed through this set-up, Capcom did not confirm a splitscreen option – are the same two that have been shown since E3 ’08. Both are tightly focused, linear runs through sundrenched shanty towns and crumbling buildings, though the second culminates in alleyway boss fight against a chainsaw wielding goon. For RE4 players, RE5 is a strange mix of the familiar and new; enemies still drop copious amounts of ammunition, you still push bookcases in front of windows to keep them out of buildings, and your pistol is still your very best friend. But everything in 5 is faster, letting you switch weapons and access your menu on the fly, in a way not dissimilar to Resident Evil’s newest cousin, Dead Space. Even the Kijujuan Ganados – Kijuju is the fictional city situated between Kenya and Ethiopia where RE5 takes place – seem sprier than their Spanish predecessors.

The constant presence of two characters, Chris Redfield and Sheva Alomar (AI or player-two controlled only,) also emphasizes Resident Evil’s metamorphosis. Where past Resident Evils’ character duos only shared screen time for some of the adventure, even in the character-swapping Resident Evil 0, RE5 is designed to constantly have two able characters in the environment at all times. The two demo levels were laid out to either separate me and Derrick in the environment, meaning one had to provide cover fire while the other solved an environmental challenge, or put us in cramped spaces where we had to constantly watch each other’s back. One player’s death means a complete gameover, so the game’s new speed and layout means that you have to constantly be communicating with your partner. Derrick and I failed at this completely.

The taste we had today didn’t give a complete impression and it left me wondering: what is Resident Evil 5 like when it gets quiet? What is the game like when you’re not constantly under siege from a stalking horde of people with heads full of brain slugs who are trying to set you on fire or axe you in the neck? RE5 is not a scary game. It is an intimidating game. I’m anxious to see more of what the series has become.

Related links:

Games to Film to Games to Film: Resident Evil Degeneration
TGS Trailer Time: Resident Evil 5
Interview Round Up: Suda 51, Shinji Mikami, and Mikami’s Replacements on Resident Evil
Whatcha Playing: Weight of the Stone
The 61FPS Review: Dead Space

The 61FPS Review: Dead Space

John Constantine — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 00:00:00 GMT

1986 bore witness to one of gaming's watershed moments, an event whose profound impact on the medium is still seen today, in games released every week. Protagonists, game worlds, sound effects and art direction; there is no facet of design that this single creative work hasn't influenced. It isn't The Legend of Zelda or Metroid. It isn't Out Run, Adventure Island, Kid Icarus, Bubble Bobble, or Castlevania. It isn't even a videogame.

The gaming legacy of James Cameron's Aliens cannot be overstated. Ignore all thirty games actually based on Aliens and consider the past twenty-two years of gaming as a whole. Syd Mead's art and designs cover every game from R-Type to Halo 3. H.R. Giger's titular xenomorph is mirrored in hundreds of enemies, even beyond Contra. The film's group dynamics and character archetypes are the template for almost every squad-based shooter ever made. And the forbidding labyrinth of colony LV-426 has defined entire genres, particularly the first-person shooter. This movie is the womb of the space marine, modern videogames' essential lead. Aliens made many, many games what they are.

But no one game has ever gone as far in recreating the Aliens experience — allowing you to enter a dilapidated, abandoned science-fiction world full of monsters hunting you from the shadows — as EA Redwood Shores' Dead Space. The Ishimura and its broken, dimly lit passages, the bloodthirsty and relentless necromorphs spawned from the ship's dead, the weapons you wield as Isaac Clarke (pulse rifles, flame throwers); even the dissonant score is lifted straight from the film.

And the gameplay follows Aliens' episodic structure precisely: at the start of all twelve chapters in Dead Space, you are instructed to go to a place, locate that chapter's MacGuffin (a machine that needs fixing, a creature that needs killing), eliminate a specific obstacle and survive a constant and seemingly unstoppable, unpredictable threat aided only by limited supplies and unreliable supporting characters.

Dead Space's premise and aesthetics aren't the only things on loan. The game's third-person shooting and adventuring are straight out of Resident Evil 4, but Dead Space improves on every aspect of that classic. RE4's great advancement in combat was enemies who responded dynamically to gunshots; shoot a zombie in the leg and it falls down, shoot it in the arm and it drops its weapon. Dead Space makes this surgical gunplay its focus: the only way to defeat its disgusting monsters — who are, admittedly, less Aliens and more The Thing — is to remove their limbs. So the majority of encounters are exercises in precision, and each new enemy type offers a tense moment of strategizing.

Dead Space's greatest evolution over Resident Evil 4, though, is its environmental challenges. On the surface, Dead Space's puzzles don't seem to deviate from RE4's find-the-key-then-flip-the-switch approach, but in execution they become wonderfully distinct. One scenario half-way through the game finds you manually jettisoning a gigantic meteor into space (the Ishimura is a "Planet Cracker," a ship that gathers huge chunks of planetary mass and space debris to process for raw materials). Four tethers hold the office-building-sized rock; you have to sever them in zero gravity. Two are in plain sight, so you jettison yourself across the room and quickly disable them. But two others are labeled as objectives on your holographic map. (Menus and maps are projected in front of the player, so you're never pulled out of the action for anything. It's the game's most original piece of design and you should expect to see it imitated by many others in the future.) The map indicates that they're outside of the room, and that's when it dawns on you that you'll need to go into the vacuum of space, crawling over the surface of the meteor, to find the remaining tethers. There's no prompt, no tutoring voice telling you exactly what to do. In oppressive isolation, you have work out the solution on your own. Dead Space transcends its influences in moments like these, becoming more than the sum of its borrowed parts.

So, as an interactive entertainment that works to recreate a very specific experience, Dead Space is an incredible success. In its graphics, audio, controls and design, the game is a paragon of quality. Few games are this beautifully and carefully considered. But Dead Space falters as a narrative. Its story (about an alien artifact that transforms human beings into genocidal monsters) is as derivative as everything else in the game, but devoid of the creative spark that enlivens the play and setting. The few human characters that populate the story are just as shallow; both the plot and cast end up as little more than facilitators for the action. The game would have worked better with you completely isolated: no human contact whatsoever, a lone engineer sent to fix an a ship adrift in space, up against insurmountable odds. I'd hope for the sequel to take this tack, but given EA's support of the game with all sorts of multimedia — a comic series and animated movie are already available — meant to enhance the narrative alone, I doubt it will happen.

The story isn't bad, per se, just beside the point. Dead Space is a flawlessly constructed ride, a digital suit for you to wear that lets you go to a place, see and do things, that you could never do. King Aliens has birthed a shrieking prince. Go play it.

Grade: B

Previous 61FPS Reviews:

LOL
Dragon Quest IV: Chapters of the Chosen
Metal Gear Solid IV
Ninja Gaiden 2
Grand Theft Auto IV
Wii Fit

TGS Trailer Time: Resident Evil 5

Bob Mackey — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:00:00 GMT

A trailer for Capcom's upcoming Resident Evil 5 debuted at the Tokyo Game Show, and--fortunately for you--watching it is now mandatory. Note to Capcom: if you're going to introduce a female character by first showing us her butt, you might as well go all the way and throw in a cartoony thumping bass drum for full effect.

This is the most story we've seen out of RE5 yet, which may be why this preview reminds me so much of Metal Gear Solid (mainly when the stirring music kicks in). And the real return of longtime series villain Wesker should delight all of the RE fans who poo-pooed 4 for essentially being a side-story. Yes; there are seriously people who didn't like RE4 because it was only tangentially related to the series' tortured, ludicrous continuity--and they walk among us, so watch out for that.

If you really need to see how awful and nonsensical the connections are between the first four games in the series, head on over to the Let's Play Archive and check out The Dark Id's annotated playthroughs of the Resident Evil series. You'll be glad you did.

Back to the trailer: really, no big surprises here--but the RE series has never been full of unpredictable twists and turn. Duh moment #1: Wesker is behind all of this (he became even more evil when he picked up a British accent at some point during the series); duh moment #2: This whole mess is once again caused by his God complex--seriously, getting impaled by a bio-weapon was the best thing that could happen to the guy. This time around, it looks like he has a sexy British (or vaguely European) sidekick, who, for some reason, is giving me flashbacks to season 2 of Dexter. I guess that's a good thing.

It looks like RE5 isn't going to miss its March 13 release date, and I really hope it doesn't; four years is far too long to wait for a game that appears to be of Resident Evil 4's caliber.

Related Links:

Games to Film to Games to Film: Resident Evil Degeneration
Interview Round Up: Suda 51, Shinji Mikami, and Mikami’s Replacements on Resident Evil
Rumors, Rumors, Riz-u-mors: Resident Evil 2 Wii and The Glory of Speculation

Whatcha Playing: Weight of the Stone

John Constantine — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Videogames are rich with memorable moments. Born of both play and story, there are those images, those brief passages of achievement, that are emblazoned in your memory: the first time you clear 100,000 points in Tetris, the dogs bursting through the window in Resident Evil, the booming march that begins to play after the baby metroid’s sacrifice during Super Metroid’s climactic battle with Mother Brain. We are tied to these events thanks not only to those games’ mechanical and artistic design but because of our agency in them. We facilitate these conclusions and, since the game is well-made, we feel them. Another classic: Solid Snake’s first fight with the cyborg ninja, Grey Fox. Like so much of the Metal Gear Solid series, this sequence is ludicrous: simplistic to play, overdramatic, over-everything. But when Grey Fox begins screaming, “Make me feel!” and your controller begins to shake in time with his uncontrollable gesticulations, the scene becomes something else. In 1998, rumble technology was still relatively new in home gaming, so having this drama reflected in the physical world made that much more of an impression. Every time Snake was kicked in the gut or when you landed a hit amidst this half-man’s yowling was tangible.

I feel a lot like Grey Fox when I play videogames these days, particularly action fare. I want an action game to make me feel. Not necessarily a profound emotional reaction – though that’s always a plus – so much as a physical one. When I’m playing an action or sport game, it’s essential that the game translates the physicality and impact of my actions well lest the aesthetic façade covering the game’s rules be ruined. It’s no easy thing to affect either. This past week, I finished playing through what may well be Lucasarts’ final in-house game, the damn-near-ubiquitous Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. TFU is a good game, not a great one; its big-scale Jedi power fantasy is marred by some serious glitches and questionable design choices, like its over-reliance on quick time events. Even though I had a good time playing through it, I was perturbed by how weightless much of the action felt. It’s incredible that TFU’s three physics engines allow me to pick up almost every part of a game’s environment and toss it about willie-nillie, but a mammoth, building crushing boulder shouldn’t feel like it has the same mass as shoe-sized robot. (Before any of you Star Wars nerds pipe-up about size mattering not, shut up. Idiots.)

Alternatively, Sega’s Yakuza 2, a nearly three year-old game running on hardware that couldn’t hope to run the engine beneath TFU’s hood, has been an eye-opening physical experience. Yakuza 2 is, at heart, a modern Japanese role-playing game that trades ponderous turn-based fighting for beat’em-up combat that recalls Die Hard Arcade. Yakuza 2’s combat is deliciously precise and, more importantly, visceral. Every impact of the fist is felt in Yakuza 2, and it keeps what would otherwise be a very repetitive game constantly rewarding, but it takes every facet of the game working in concert for this to work. The fights are fast, never lasting more than ninety seconds, and there’s no discernible delay between your button inputs and your character’s moves outside of what seems natural (throwing a fat guy over your shoulder or landing a jump kick should, after all, take a few more seconds than a jab.) This is on top of impact sound effects (grunts, the exaggerated thump-pop of a blow landing). What puts it over the top is the game’s “Heat” moves, a one-button super move that activates a contextual one-hit kill provided you’ve filled a meter. “Heat” moves are brutal enough to make Tony Soprano blush, but their presentation is remarkable. The screen becomes slightly washed out, the camera provides a shifting, dramatic perspective, the controller shudders, and the onscreen characters enact serious violence like, say, ramming a thug’s head through a car windshield. But it all takes little more than five seconds. Every single aspect has weight and every aspect of the game is built to translate that weight to the player.

This marks the difference between a good game and a great game. Not every game needs to translate literal physicality, but every game should leave you feeling like you’ve transcended the many, many barriers between you and the actual game. When the controller, the television screen, and the cognitive dissonance between your brain and making something happen on screen disappear, that’s when the game becomes something more. It becomes unforgettable.

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Men Are From Hyrule, Women Are From Simville: If Gender Defines the Games We Play, Why Does Everyone Play By the Same Rules?

John Constantine — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The problem with working on the internet is that you inevitably find yourself plummeting down some horrible information vortex while trying to be productive. It could be some hyperlinked sentence in a Newsweek article or that godforsaken new email icon popping up on your screen, but no matter the form it comes in, your cognitive process is sent down the road of endless consumption, natural curiosity leading you by the nose, sniffing out even more useless information. Today, Pete Smith sent me a nugget of knowledge from the Wikipedia entry on game addiction and, so, I fell down the information rabbit hole.

Somehow I missed this back at the end of May, but Professor Allan Reiss of Stanford University published a study on the effects of videogames on male and female brains. The experiment entailed monitoring a number of men and women’s brain functions while playing a simple strategy game; players gained control of territory from other players by clicking on dots on a screen. MRI scans of the players’ brains, both male and female, showed activation of the mesocorticolimbic centre, that lovely chunk of grey matter associated with addiction and reward. The scans, however, showed more activity in the mesocorticolimbic centre in men than in women. Reiss’ conclusion was that this explained men having greater interest in the common videogame, one in which territory is at stake, than women.

I find the Professor’s findings damned peculiar in light of the most successful PC game in all of history. The Sims is well-known for having an all ages, cross gender audience but the game was an undeniable watershed moment for bringing more women into videogames than ever before. Thing of it is, The Sims is every bit as much a game about taking control of and dominion over territory as a shooting game or sports simulator. Its aesthetics and pace may be fundamentally different, but the rules and goals are very much the same.

Leigh Alexander, of the inestimable GameSetWatch, published an essay earlier this week entitled What Do Women Want From Games? The answer she came to is that female gamers aren’t drawn to casual games in the vein of Nintendogs, Bejeweled, or even The Sims over more epic, blockbuster games like Resident Evil because they aren’t interested in a more complex or narrative based experience. They don’t play them because they aren’t marketed and aesthetically designed for them. “…just because women aren’t excluded doesn’t mean they feel welcome in a widespread way, and that’s definitely something it’s possible to change.” Hear, hear, Miss Alexander. We’re already playing by the same rules, we just have to find a better way to play the same game.

Related links:

She’s a La-day, Whoa Whoa Whoa: The Top Twenty Women in Games
A Letter to the Industry: How to Destroy the Female Gender Barricade
Fat Princess Gobbles Her Way into Blog Drama

Rumors, Rumors, Riz-u-mors: Resident Evil 2 Wii and The Glory of Speculation

John Constantine — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 21:00:00 GMT

When discussing videogames with my extended family, I usually have to use a lot of different language than I would when talking with a casual game fan or writing for 61 FPS. Certain words and acronyms go straight out the window. You can’t say platformer or RTS. You can’t say Capcom and expect it to carry the same contextual weight it would when chatting with someone who can name multiple Street Fighters. My grandparents in particular are mystified by my obsession and so I usually have to rely on the power of metaphor. When it comes to describing what blogging about videogames entails, I tend to fall back on sports coverage. Just like following the NFL or NBA, a lot of excitement can come from following trades (corporate mergers), defeats (marquee creators leaving publishers), and scandal (Hot Coffee). Following videogames isn’t just about the games themselves, but following the people who make them, the industry that publishes them, and, most importantly, the delectable drama that results. And rumors. Oh, rumors are the best.

A Wii remake of Resident Evil 2 really doesn’t seem that implausible. It’s one of the best selling games ever made and Capcom’s already building a new game on the Resident Evil 4 engine. It’s a little disappointing that the rumor about it (originating at the always reliable 2chan) turned out to not be true, but it was fun just debating the validity of the rumor when it first popped up. The other “confirmed announcements” from the same source were even better. Soul Blazer 2? Shadow Hearts 3? The teams behind those series don’t even exist anymore. But for a brief while, we got to entertain the notion of the impossible, that something absurd would happen and we’d have fun when it did. Like anything else worth loving, imagining the what might happen is one of the greatest joys in gaming.

Our many thanks to Siliconera’s help with constructing this piece.

Related links:

Turnabout Animation
Street Fighter IV: Maybe Hitting an Appropriate (and Tragic) Number of Arcades
NSFW: The Top Five Game-Based Pornos
The Ten Greatest Fire Levels in Gaming History
OST: Soul Blazer

FMV Hell: Star Studded Casts - Do you Give a Crap?

Cole Stryker — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Boy, I don't.

EA has announced that the new Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3 will star the following B-listers:

Gemma Atkinson (the UK's Hollyoaks), Tim Curry (Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Hunt for Red October), Andrew Divoff (LOST), Kelly Hu (X2, The Scorpion King), Jenny McCarthy (Scream 3, former Playboy Playmate of the Year), Ivana Milicevic (Casino Royale), Jonathan Pryce (Pirates of the Caribbean), J.K. Simmons (Spider-Man, Juno), Autumn Reeser (The OC), Peter Stormare (Prison Break, Armageddon), George Takei (Star Trek, Heroes), and two of the most recognizable names in competitive mixed martial arts Randy "The Natural" Couture (former UFC Heavyweight champion) and Gina "Conviction" Carano (Undefeated Elite XC fighter, American Gladiators).

Jenny McCarthy was just blown away:

"I wasn't sure what to expect when I came in to work on a video game," said Jenny McCarthy from the set of Command & Conquer Red Alert 3, while playing Tanya, Allied commando and the most beloved heroine in the history of the Command & Conquer universe. "What I realized is Red Alert 3 is not just a video game, it's absolutely an interactive movie.

Ho ho HO! Absolutely!

Diff'rent Strokes' Dana Plato in Night Trap, Mark Hamill in Wing Commander III, Dennis Hopper in Black Dahlia -- live-action Full Motion Video has historically been populated by washed up Hollywood rejects. In the go-go nineties, development studios could only afford also-rans, which brought middling acting to the medium. Within a few years of FMV's birth, 3D rendering technology evolved to the point where developers could easily create pretty characters at a fraction of the cost of hiring from Hollywood. It was too expensive, not that fun for players to watch, and eclipsed by superior technology. The infamous live-action sequences from Resident Evil could probably be considered the swan song of live-action FMV.

And yet, some folks are still utilizing it. Why? Does a "star-studded" cast really move more units? Would the inclusion of celebrities (even real ones) inspire you to pick up a game?

My personal favorite celebrity FMV: Dennis Hopper in Black Dahlia, which also boasted the talents of Terri Garr.

Interview Round Up: Suda 51, Shinji Mikami, and Mikami’s Replacements on Resident Evil

John Constantine — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:00:00 GMT

This is what happens when Shinji Mikami and Suda 51 work together.

The greatest interviews in the gaming world can’t all come from 61 Frames Per Second, dontcha know! While we’ve been chatting with the OCRemix crew about Street Fighter II HD Remix, Gamasutra’s Christian Nutt has been chatting with director Yasuhiro Anpo and producer Jun Takeuchi of Capcom about their controversial sequel, Resident Evil 5. Nutt gets into far more interesting territory than new weapons and enemies and broaches the geographical background of Capcom’s creativity as a Japanese developer:

Nutt: Is there something creative at Capcom, too, that's part of the equation? Ultimately, Resident Evil, all the way back to PS1, is the game coming out of Japan that best captures that Hollywood movie feel -- and I feel that if you look at Lost Planet, Dead Rising, Resident Evil, and other major Capcom games in this generation, they really bring up the polish and manage to retain that. It's become a Capcom style, in a certain sense. What drives that, at Capcom?

Takeuchi: Well, I think that there are two reasons, mainly, why that is. First of all, we at Capcom, when we set out to make a game, we make it on a world-wide basis.

We make a game that people all over the world are going to buy. And I think that that way of thinking is one of the reasons for our successes.

Maybe at other developers, they first of all look at the Japanese market, and then say, "Oh, we can also sell this in the west."

They develop it first for the internal market, for the Japanese market; but we at Capcom, we look at it first of all as selling something for the whole world.

The second reason, I think, is that we in Capcom are based in Osaka, unlike most of the other Japanese developers, who are based largely in Tokyo.

And I think that gives us -- we have a lot of creative people, and the atmosphere and feeling in the workplace is a little bit different, and I think that gives us a little bit of originality, and allows us also to make something that's technically very high level.

Meanwhile, 1up’s Thierry Nguyen got face time with the RE5 team’s forebear Shinji Mikami and his new partner in EA crime, Suda 51. While they don’t get into too many specifics about their new “action horror title”, Suda and Mikami do shed even more light on the difference between Eastern and Western game development.

Nguyen: You've worked with other publishers to get your games to the West. Are there restrictions with those other publishers, and is there a sort of blank check "do what you want" feel with EA? How is EA different from other companies you've worked with?

Shinji Mikami: Both of us are the creators. In terms of being a creator, having people understand what I want to do, that's the biggest thing. Also, EA has strong marketing power. If Suda just keeps on doing what he wants to do, players might not understand what they're playing. But with EA's strong marketing power, they know what people want from a game, and we combine both their knowledge and his creativity to help create a better game.

Suda 51: I actually presented two ideas at the same time, and EA really liked one idea. They instantly said "we like that exact idea; we don't want the other one." Too many publishers say that they will think about it and let you know later, but EA was the one that said exactly how they felt the first time. The idea they liked was the game I really wanted to create the most, and they understood what I wanted to do, which helps.

Both are ripping good reads, so head over to Gamasutra and 1up to check ‘em out.

Related links:

The Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Soundtrack - An Inside Look
61FPS Q&A: David Lloyd and Larry Oji of OC ReMix on the Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix Soundtrack
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Overworld: Friday the 13th

John Constantine — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Overworld examines how one game or series establishes a unique sense of place.

Buzz for EA Redwood Shores’ Dead Space has gone from indifference to genuine excitement in the weeks since E3. Now that people have actually played the interactive paean to Cameron-Carpenter-styled horror, they’ve found that its forbidding atmosphere, sound, and HUD-free presentation are hype-worthy and legitimately scary. I haven’t gotten to try it out myself but I’m anxious to get my hands on it. Redwood Shores have taken the essential road to designing quality interactive horror; Dead Space is, at its core, a game about confinement, about being trapped in a hostile environment with limited means of survival. Videogames lend themselves to this method of creating tension and anxiety because their environments are, naturally, closed. System Shock’s dilapidated space station, Resident Evil’s mansion, and even the more expansive town of Silent Hill are perfectly closed spaces, places that simultaneously create dread and a functional goal: how do I get out?

It’s far rarer to see a game take the opposite route. After all, it isn’t easy to make a game that makes you feel lost. If a game forces you to lose yourself in its environment, by way of randomly generated environments or trick passages that lead to incongruous locations (as in Zelda’s Lost Woods), it risks frustrating the player – this is especially bad if the game’s intent is horror, since frustration can easily replace anxiety. It’s equally difficult to create a closed environment that is delicately constructed to confuse the player. The original Metroid and its Game Boy sequel are two of the only games that manage to successfully pull this off thanks to its series of identical hallways and dead ends. Another is Friday the 13th.

LJN’s Friday the 13th for the NES is, as the internet has noted on many occasions, a bad game. The film franchise itself isn’t good, best known twenty-five years after its inception for camp value (forgive the pun) than creating memorable chills. The game has cloying sound, poorly defined goals, terribly inaccurate controls, and inappropriate enemies (bats and endless waves of zombies were not common fixtures in the movies.) But the game’s world, Crystal Lake, and its surrounding caves, cabins, and forests, is remarkable at creating a sense of overwhelming fear through a mixture of mundane graphics and by leading the player off course.

The manmade structures in particular are sterile, empty, and eerie, even in daylight and the over-the-shoulder perspective and control in these environments cause constant disorientation. During outdoors sidescrolling, Friday the 13th is constantly altering your perception of the environment. If you follow a path down from one forest trail, you will not necessarily see the path leading up in the next. This might be bad design from a playability perspective but it manages to actually affect the feeling of being lost in the woods without directly using trick passages. Your map exacerbates the confusion, only giving a location on paths around the lake proper but not indicating the direction you’re actually moving in. Crystal Lake feels as confounding as any actual place you are only cursorily familiar with. You are being actively pursued by an unpredictable threat, and you are armed with a map you are forced to read on the run and often in the middle of the dark. Friday the 13th fails as a game but its world is a terrible, misleading success.

More Overworld:

Marble Madness

Related links:

For Love of the Game: Metroid II Remakes
Rebuttal - Say What About Metroid: Zero Mission?
Rebuttal Rebuttal – I Stand With Metroid

Games to Film to Games to Film: Resident Evil Degeneration

John Constantine — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 23:30:00 GMT

Capcom, come on buddy, you know I love you. You been so good to me, you treat me right, you take me dancing and bring me flowers everyday. But we need to talk about the new CGI Resident Evil movie you’ve got going. It’s not that I don’t want to see the continuing adventures of Claire Redfield and Leon Kennedy, you know I do. But you are terrible at writing dialogue, Capcom. You have always been terrible at writing dialogue. Why, just look at all the Resident Evil games! People are still making “master of unlocking” and “Jill pancake” jokes twelve years after the game came out! If you insist on making this Resident Evil movie, please hire another writer. Not Paul W.S. Anderson.

On a serious note, Resident Evil Degeneration looks alright. I just think it’s very peculiar that it exists. There have already been three atrocious, mildly successful live-action Resident Evil movies, so Capcom can’t be looking to capture that audience with a dense, game-continuity driven feature like Degeneration. Hell, the audience for continuity can’t even be that big. The Resident Evil games are hugely popular because people like shooting zombies, not because they’re involved in its narrative intrigues. I hope Capcom isn’t just making this because Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children was successful. That wasn’t successful because it was good. It was good because Final Fantasy VII makes people go crazy.

Editor's Note: Turns out I was mistaken. Jill Valentine was almost a "sandwhich" in Resident Evil, not a pancake. Let it be known across the land that it was FPSer Cole Stryker who spotted the mistake, thusly marking himself as the bigger nerd.

Related links:

Games to Film: Paul W.S. Anderson
Capcom to Date, By the Numbers
The Five Greatest Enhanced Remakes – And Five That Weren’t So Great

Revenge of the Port: Dead Rising Shuffles, Moans on Wii

John Constantine — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The true death of the arcade came at the beginning of this decade. It wasn’t when gamers started opting for the comfort and value of playing at home; it was when home consoles finally started equaling (and surpassing) the technological heft of the arcade cabinets themselves. Sega, one of the only surviving arcade giants, signed the death warrant themselves when developing the Dreamcast and its arcade-motherboard-twin, Naomi. Games at home and games in the arcade, identical for the first time. The move may have had the negative effect of killing off the already declining amusement center population across the Western world, but it also had a significant silver lining: the death of the shoddy arcade port. Approximations of more technologically demanding games have been a staple of gaming in the home since the 1970s, but, with the exception of stray PC-based ports, downgraded game experiences have largely disappeared since 2000. Today, in 2008, the fracturing of the console space seems to be bringing them back in force.

Just recently, Koei announced they’d be bringing Dynasty Warriors 6 — built from the ground up for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3, they said — to Playstation 2, a move no doubt meant to make an actual profit on their development investment. Today, Capcom announced that they’d be porting Dead Rising, the Xbox 360 Dawn of the Dead-style zombie game, to Nintendo’s Wii. Dead Rising was one of the 360’s first great games, a weird mixture of Grand Theft Auto, Pokemon Snap, and Resident Evil, the game put the player in a mall overflowing with hundreds of zombies in a number of substantially-sized environments. It’s strange, then, that Capcom is making Dead Rising Wii a port instead of an actual sequel or side story. The Wii hardware simply cannot put that many moving, AI-controlled objects on screen at the same time. But more Japanese gamers, and very soon more North American and European gamers, own Wiis than Xbox 360s, so bringing a version to that system will surely bring Capcom even more coin from an already successful creation.

It’s one more facet of the diversifying platform space. As I mentioned just a couple of days ago, we’re not heading to a one console future, but a more diverse console selection. Game makers will always want more people to play their games and, so, the days of the port are returning. Hopefully we’ll see more Bionic-Commando-arcade-turned-into-Bionic-Commando-NES than Street-Fighter-2-turned-into-Street-Fighter-2-PC.

Games to Film: Paul W.S. Anderson’s Castlevania

John Constantine — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 18:00:00 GMT

For the life of me, I cannot figure out how Paul W.S. Anderson keeps getting paid to make movies, especially movies based on videogames. The man is a different sort of enigma than Uwe Boll. Boll, after all, manages to self-finance the majority of his filmic game adaptations through a labyrinth of German tax shelters and Satanic covenants. Paul W.S. Anderson, on the other hand, gets actual studio funding to make stinkers like AVP and Soldier. In all fairness, Anderson’s Resident Evil trilogy and his legitimately hilarious Mortal Kombat don’t actually lower a viewer’s IQ like Boll’s House of the Dead; Anderson makes trash, not garbage. But it doesn’t change the fact that his movies suck. Yes, even Event Horizon.

When it was announced in 2005 that Anderson had gotten his mitts on the Castlevania franchise, it was pretty disappointing. Castlevania is, conceptually, pretty trashy, but as far as videogame with potential to be excellent movies, it’s high on the list. Killing Dracula has been a proven film premise for decades, but the setting is the real hook for a Castlevania special-effects spectacle. An ever-transforming castle that’s the living embodiment of chaos and appears on earth once every century? Awesome. Anderson, however, doesn’t have a track record of delivering on a property’s potential. The guy actually made a Resident Evil movie that’s campier than the games. From the sound of CC2K’s script review of Anderson’s Castlevania, it sounds like business as usual. A handful of pages for the script leaked way back in January, but this is the first report from someone who’s gotten a look at the whole shebang. Belmont brothers who lead teams of knights? A grotesque plot amalgamation that lifts from Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Francis Coppola’s film adaptation instead of the Castlevania world? NO WHIPS?! What the hell kind of Castlevania is this?

Luckily, Anderson hasn’t been able to get the project off the ground. Dimension Films lost distribution rights to Rogue Pictures in 2006, Sylvain White (Stomp the Yard) took over as director in early ’07, and the entire movie got shelved during the WGA strike last winter. IMDB says the picture’s on-track for release in 2009. Let’s hope that day never comes.

Thanks to AICN for letting us know about the review.

Related links:

We Are Watching Many, Many Speedruns. Join Us in Some Castlevania!
Castlevania Fighting Game Elicits Anguished Moans From the Living
Chiptune Friday: Do the Monster Mash!
When Good Developers Go Bad: Koji Igarashi
New Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia Pics
Games to Film: Marky Mark is Max Payne
Films to Games: Ghostbusters Really is Ghostbusters 3!
Games to Film: Leo DiCaprio to Play Nolan Bushnell in Upcoming "Atari" Flick
Film to Games: Ghostbusters is the Beginning of a (Hopefully) Beautiful Friendship
Games to Film: Et Tu, Bioshock?

The Five Greatest Enhanced Remakes - And Five That Weren't So Great, Part 3

Peter Smith — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:02:00 GMT

And now, the bad...

Metroid: Zero Mission (Game Boy Advance)

Is Metroid: Zero Mission a terrible game? By no means. On its own terms, it's rather good. But as a reconception of one of the greatest, most influential games ever made, it's a disaster, taking everything that made Metroid spooky and replacing it with a thick layer of corn. Metroid was heavily influenced by Alien. Remember the petrified extraterrestrial skeleton in Alien? What if that bastard had gotten up and started bombarding Sigourney Weaver with some hack's idea of ancient wisdom? Wouldn't that have pretty much thrown the movie's chilly austerity out the window? Like so many latter-day games, Zero Mission thinks comic-book jibber-jabber is cooler than eerie silence. This lack of subtlety is echoed in the gameplay itself, which, while it controls a lot better than Metroid, is chock-full of egregious hand-holding and advice-giving — pretty much the exact opposite of the original's sprawling openendedness. Metroid is practically Lovecraftian in the way it makes you feel tiny and alone in a vast and hostile universe. Don't look for that feeling in Zero Mission. Oh, and it also mangles the most immortal climax in videogame history — the truly unsettling slaughter of a shrieking brain in a jar, followed by a hair-raising escape sequence — by tacking on a (sigh) stealth section. — PS

Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros 3 (Game Boy Advance)

I can hear you, fanboy. The exasperated sigh, the cry of indignation. Super Mario Bros. 3 is the same great game it's always been on this GBA cart, sporting the snazzy 1993 Super Mario All-Stars graphics. But, first of all, I don't need to hear Mario yelping at me all the time. I know it's a-him. I'm perfectly fine entering a level without being told to a-go. The talking isn't the biggest problem, though. It's that Nintendo actually created a wealth of brand new levels for Super Mario Bros. 3, levels that brought over mechanics from both Super Mario Bros. 2 and Super Mario World, and left them off the cart. You had to buy the game, then buy an e-Reader, then buy packs of random cards from Wal-Mart and EBGames to play them. Oh yeah, and they changed the ending. What could've improved on a classic instead leaves me reaching for my NES. — JC

Ninja Gaiden Trilogy (SNES)

A scandalous missed opportunity, Ninja Gaiden Trilogy collects two of the greatest NES action games (and their mediocre third sibling) and gives them a graphical non-makeover, at points even downgrading. The gorgeous parallax in NG3's desert level is inexplicably MIA — dude, this is the SNES! Every level should have parallax that handsome, and you can't even keep it where it already was? The music is butchered too, despite the SNES's powerful sound chip — some of it is even missing. And some of the excised effects dumb down the gameplay, like the omission of the lightning in stage 3-1 of NG2. The whole point of that stage was that you had to operate in the dark; now, it's just like any other. Only one thing is really improved, and that's that the port of NG3 has the difficulty settings of the Japanese original, not its maddening U.S. counterpart. But the first rule of remaking is (or should be) "do no harm," which means Ninja Gaiden Trilogy flunks out of med school. — PS

Sega Ages Vol. 5 and Vol. 13: Golden Axe and Outrun (PlayStation 2)

The Sega Ages line, compilations and polygonal remakes of the publisher's classics, is certainly a noble effort. Letting players revisit games like Panzer Dragoon, Space Harrier, and Gunstar Heroes is just plain good, benevolent even. Making Outrun, one of early gaming's brightest visual achievements, into a washed-out, muddy looking budget title is the opposite of benevolent. You just don't make Outrun uglier than Cruis'n USA. It's wrong. Golden Axe, well, that was never much of a looker in the first place. But why would you make it more drab? Why would you add cutscenes? Why would you take out the opportunity to beat up gnomes for magic potions? It just doesn't make any sense! — JC

Mario Kart Wii (Wii)

A stretch, I know. But the inclusion of classic tracks from the original Super Mario Kart highlights how much gameplay depth has disappeared from Mario Kart's gameplay over the years. As an "enhanced remake," Kart Wii's version of Ghost Valley 2 is a bust. Don't try to make that awesome shortcut jump, cause the feather — an item that took actual skill to use — is long gone. In its place are a boatload of zany items that'll blast you from last place to first and back over the course of one lap. Yeah, it'd probably entertain your Amish cousins (or whatever other gaming-illiterate demographic Nintendo's targeting these days) for half an hour, but would my friends Mike Brownell and Mike Schlauch make it the centerpiece of a decade-long continuing struggle over who's the uncontested master of gaming/the universe? No — they'd both recognize it as far too spastic and random to function as a scale of justice. — PS

Click here for Part 1.
Click here for Part 2.

What'd we miss? What'd we unfairly vilify, and what'd we overpraise? Tell us in the comments section.

Previous Top Tens:
The Ten Greatest Classic Mega Man Levels
The Ten Videogames That Should Have Been Controversial
The Ten Greatest Opening Levels in Gaming History
The Ten Most Adventurous Sequels
The Ten Greatest Fire Levels

The Five Greatest Enhanced Remakes - And Five That Weren't So Great, Part 2

Peter Smith — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:01:00 GMT

Final Fantasy (WonderSwan Color)

The first in a vast battalion of Final Fantasy rereleases, the Wonderswan remake actually gets it righter than any that were to come. Sure, the Playstation version has FMV intros (whoo-hoo?), the GBA version has some mostly extraneous new dungeons, and the PSP version has sharper graphics. But the Wonderswan version gave the NES original a beautiful visual makeover that later ports would simply poach, and more importantly, it corrected some of the original game's antiquated design quirks in a totally optional fashion. In the NES game, if two characters attack one enemy and the first one kills it, the second character's attack will be ineffective. This is annoying, but it also forces you to plan; it adds some strategy to the essentially one-dimensional battle system. You could really argue for or against the feature, and the Wonderswan port gives you a choice. The same goes for a number of other idiosyncracies we cranky old-timers like to keep in our enhanced remakes; subsequent rereleases dumbed the game down until you could grind through it with a rubber band around the A button. — PS

Mega Man: Powered Up (PlayStation Portable)

People are excited about Mega Man 9's back-to-basics approach for good reason. The Mega Man name has become synonymous with chatty drama-fests in the past decade and a half, less about hard-as-nails action than lame anime tropes. The 2006 remake of the first Mega Man, Powered Up, isn't short on talking heads. It's also not an especially good recreation of the original's gameplay and, as for its new bosses, the less said about the Jim-Crow-faced Oil Man, the better. But Powered Up is a great game, and if it changes the original's exact scale, feel, and pace, it perfectly maintains the original's principles, albeit in its own super-cute fashion. The wealth of options in Powered Up is staggering, letting you play through the game as almost every character you run into in addition to an intimidatingly deep level-creation feature. If you want to remember how Mega Man was back in the day, well, that's included. — JC

Castlevania: The Dracula X Chronicles (PlayStation Portable)

Koji Igarashi remade Rondo of Blood last year out of necessity more than a need to improve upon the first. The final proper Castlevania sidescroller has aged exceptionally well in the past fifteen years, but it's impossibly rare, was never released outside of Japan, and is difficult to properly emulate. But Igarashi's Castlevania team did far more than just put some spit-and-polish on Richter Belmont's adventure, creating Castlevania's first truly attractive polygonal outing. More importantly, none of the game's perilous jumps have been hurt by the shift in presentation, unlike in so many 2.5D games. The remixed soundtrack isn't quite as spectacular as the original's, but you can unlock that in the game. It's win-win! — JC

Click here for Part 1.
Click here for Part 3.

The Five Greatest Enhanced Remakes - And Five That Weren't So Great, Part 1

Peter Smith — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 21:00:00 GMT

Well, having burned through our annual pants-replacement fund on the announcement of Chrono Trigger DS, we here at 61FPS now find ourselves surprisingly ambivalent about this remake (or is it just a rerelease?) of the greatest game Square ever made. Sure, it could be handsome and polished. But it could be sloppy and buggy, too. It could add new gameplay elements, or it could dumb down those that were already there. Chrono Trigger's a delicate thing! Be careful with that priceless art item, you sausage-fingered renovators! And here to guide you on a righteous path are five enhanced remakes that got it right — and five that didn't. — Peter Smith

First up, the good...

Tomb Raider Anniversary (PlayStation 2)

Most games simply do not need to be remade. As beautiful and ambitious as Square's impending Final Fantasy IV DS is, its voiced dialogue, new script, and three-dimensional overhaul are icing on a cake that was already delicious despite its simplicity. The original Tomb Raider, however, is a once-revolutionary title ravaged by the passage of time and the growth of technology. Forget how Lara's 1996 debut looks. Just think about trying to play a fully-3D game that requires precision platforming using only a d-pad. Crystal Dynamics' full remake of Tomb Raider put the engine from Lara's rebirth, the decent Tomb Raider: Legend, to great use, re-introducing the world to the game and, most importantly, preserving it in a way so people can actually play it in the years to come. Plus, grappling hooks are awesome. — John Constantine

Resident Evil (Gamecube)

If ever there was a lasting argument for using pre-rendered backgrounds in a game, it's the Gamecube remake of Resident Evil. The abstract, dollhouse creepiness of the Playstation/Saturn original was made nightmarishly real here, each room identically re-imagined as a dimly lit place of shadows, dust and blood. The visual overhaul would have been enough to earn RE a place on this list, but the gameplay additions were just as exciting. Zombies can't simply be dispatched with a hail of bullets any longer. You have to stab them in the head with disposable knives or set them on fire after you stop them from munching on your goodies. If you don't, they turn into fiery-red speed demons who will chase you through rooms. The only thing scarier is RE's new boss fight, which you should just go play instead of having me spoil it for you. — JC

Click here for Part 2.
Click here for Part 3.

Up All Night: Dark Sector

John Constantine — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 22:30:00 GMT

Dark Sector was one of the very first games for “next-gen” consoles ever seen by the public. When it was revealed in 2004, everyone was saying, “Oh, man. Look at those hot, hot graphics.” They were also saying, “What’s up with all the idiotic Guyver rejects hanging out in space?” Yes, despite its bleeding edge technology, Dark Sector was looking generic from the start. It’s cool though. Digital Extremes spent the next few years playing a ton of Resident Evil 4 and made some important changes to Dark Sector’s look and play before it came out this past March. First on the list of changes, dark-and-tortured protagonist Hayden only looks like the Guyver for half the game. Instead, he looks, controls, and moves exactly like Leon from Resident Evil 4 (he’s got darker hair and no leather jacket. Big differences!) Second, Dark Sector would no longer take place in space but in an evil future Russia overrun with some techno-plague that makes regular dudes into zombies (making it Easter Europe instead of Western Europe is hugely innovative. Hugely.) Finally, they added a smear of kill.switch’s duck and cover mechanics that are all the rage these days to compliment the Resident Evil controls. The final result of all these changes? Dark Sector came out as what it looked like: a silly generic mess of a game.

But what a silly generic mess it is! Sector’s big hook is that Hayden’s got himself a glaive, a giant triple-bladed boomerang that grows out of his arm (see the film Krull, an original Up All Night classic, for more on glaives.) He controls it with his mind and uses it to take off zombie and/or evil soldier limbs. Speaking of the evil soldiers, it’s not especially clear why they’re trying to kill Hayden. Of course, it’s not very clear why he’s in scary future Russia in the first place or why he’s trying to kill evil-fake-Jeff-Bridges. But who cares? Generic mess and messy aiming aside, Dark Sector’s fun. Next time it’s raining on Sunday morning, pop this baby in and let your brain take a nap.

Films to Games: Ghostbusters Really is Ghostbusters 3!

John Constantine — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 20:20:00 GMT

So be good, for goodness’ sake! Wooooaaaaahhh ohhhhh. Somebody’s coming! Let me be the first to tell you that even watching the new Ghostbusters game leads to uncontrollable quoting. During 61FPS’ visit with Sierra last Wednesday, we got to wash the taste of 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand out of our mouth with a demonstration of the sequel that’s been twenty years coming. About a month back, I talked about the momentousness of Ghostbusters: The Game’s development as a collaboration between developers Terminal Reality and franchise creators Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis. From the brief look we got, I can say wholeheartedly that the collaboration is a success. Whether or not Ghostbusters turns out to be an excellent game start to finish, its look and tone are pitch perfect, in many ways a more recognizable follow-up to the original film than Ghostbusters 2 was. Of course, the Library of New York setting in this demo, and the appearance of its resident ghoul librarian, helped reinforce the association. The voiceovers here were final (Bill Murray’s Pete Venkman was conspicuously absent) and while the dialogue was largely comprised of incidental quips and instructions made during play, it gave the impression that Ackroyd and Ramis still have a keen sense of their characters. The gameplay itself is an interesting take on the over-the-shoulder 3D shooting that’s become the genre standard since Resident Evil 4. Small ghosts are destroyed by shots but bosses are lassoed and wrestled as they are in the films, recalling GameRepublic’s Folklore in action. While Derrick and Pete thought Ghostbusters visuals weren’t too hot at this point, I thought it looked great. Then again, as you might have been able to tell, I’m a little biased.

Related Links:

50 Cent: Get Rich or Banned By Parent Groups Trying
Film to Games: Ghostbusters is the Beginning of a (Hopefully) Beautiful Friendship

Captivating Discontent: Where's the Nintendo Love, Capcom?

John Constantine — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Written by Derrick Sanskrit

Like a lot of other gamers, I was rather perplexed by the announcements at the Capcom’s recent Captivate ‘08 event. Sure, Street Fighter IV is starting to look like a worthwhile return to the franchise and Bionic Commando just looks awesome - both got me wanting to pick up that Xbox gamepad again - but what the hell happened on the Nintendo side of things? Neopets Puzzle Adventure and Spyborgs?

Capcom doesn't really believe that ALL Nintendo gamers are eight years old, do they?

But as the media rolled in, I started to warm up to these new IPs. Despite whatever unpleasantness lies in my history with Neopets — a story for another day — the characters are still adorable, and Neopets Puzzle Adventure is being handled by the team responsible for the addictive Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords. As a character-driven puzzle RPG, it shows a good deal of potential, and with Capcom and Neopets attached to the project, you know its going to have much more retailer support than Puzzle Quest ever did.

As for Spyborgs, well, the trailer didn’t instill much hope. Tacky voiceover, characters that could have been lifted from the very worst saturday morning cartoons, and potty humor... in a minigame?! You guys let go of Clover, the studio responsible for Viewtiful Joe and Okami, for this? "FUCK YOU, CAPCOM!" was my first thought.

There's one true bright spot: Spyborgs is the first project by Bionic Games, a new studio whose members have worked on Ratchet and Clank, World of Warcraft, Resistance: Fall of Man, Tony Hawk: Pro Skater, The Sims, and Call of Duty. With a resume like that, you know these kids know how to make games that are well-designed and actually fun. Also, Capcom's Christian Svensson stated on the company's official message board:

Have faith. This is a game that is incredibly thoughtful in its design, incredibly varied in its mechanics and will be incredibly fun to play (both alone or with a buddy/son or daugther/father or mother) when it’s done. The initial reaction here I swear is the EXACT reaction so many of you posters had when we first revealed Zach & Wiki. Somehow, Z&W is now a poster child title for the Wii in your eyes. Mark my words: you will feel exactly the same way about the level of quality in Spyborgs when it is done. Again, this is a big, epic game. A far cry from typical Wii shovelware. You’ve heard my rants on that before, I won’t go through it again.

I know that at least two of us FPSers love Zack & Wiki (probably more of us, I haven't asked around), and it's excellent to see them acknowledge that most Wii games are crap. For now, I'm going to accept that Spyborgs is still extremely early in development and is a labor of love for designers with great track records.

I am skeptically looking forward to both Spyborgs and Neopets Puzzle Adventure. Wish we'd learned a bit more about Resident Evil 5, though.