Jill Valentine's Day

"Did you notice... Barry. He sounded a little flaky."
"Now that you mention it... yeah."


"September 28th.
Daylight...
The monsters have
overtaken the city.
Somehow...
I'm still alive..."


"The end of Umbrella is just a question of time. But..."


"Get yourself together! Wake up! Jill Valentine!"

"Favour... returned." *Dies*

Continuing in the vein of previous on-rails shooter The Umbrella Chronicles, which related the downfall of Umbrella in re-imagined sequences from Resident Evils 0, 1 and 3, The Darkside Chonicles fills in the remaining gaps, covering the events of Resident Evil 2, RE: Code Veronica and leading up to RE4. Although, following on from The Umbrella Chronicles (henceforth just 'UC'), and what many people saw as the far superior Dead Space: Extraction (I wouldn't know, Extraction gave me motion sickness) it seems like DSC (that's Darkside Chronicles, let's keep with the acronyms) may well fall through the cracks. Which is a shame, because it's an altogether, slicker, tighter, classier affair than UC, featuring some of the series' most memorable major and minor characters and recounting its most character-driven stories. Where UC gave us Jill Valentine snapping a zombie's neck with her bare thighs, DSC shows us Annette Birkin shedding a single perfect tear for the neglect she's shown her daughter. Where UC is full of characters uttering weird non-sequiturs and humourless observations of the obvious, DSC has a dry sense of humour and some lively banter.

It's also, it must be said, a huge technical improvement over UC. It looks a lot better, properly portraying the atmospheric environs of RE2 and RECV, and lending the characters an appearance that's both slightly more realistic and a lot more stylish. The finicky headshots have been improved, becoming much easier to pull off on lower difficulty settings. And replaying the chapters to improve your score is made more palatable by their being shorter and more numerous, and with less protracted boss fights. It's also now possible to focus on improving your score in different areas at a time, so, for example, you don't have to try and juggle blasting huge numbers of enemies with lining up headshots. And the rewards and archives you get are more interesting as well, including character models, voice recordings, and bonus costumes.

But I'm always the first person to complain about the exaltation of the technical when it comes to video games. There's one reason I was so keen to get DSC, and that's my enormous love for Resident Evil 2, which, as you may remember me mentioning about a million times, is one of my all-time favourite games.

The transition to rail shooter naturally distorts the storyline and the atmosphere of the original - and destroys the sense of exploration and strategy. But it's also clear that this transition has been handled by people who genuinely care about the story, and who are interested in trying to draw out its strengths. So, although Leon and Ada now only spend just a little time with one another, their few scenes together are more touching, and their attraction is depicted in a more low-key, less melodramatic fashion. In the same way, without giving anything away, the original “Killed the boss! Fuck yeah!” ending is morphed into something more measured, almost understated (at least by Resident Evil standards), which focuses on the emotional fallout for Sherry Birkin.


I've noted before that RE2 has probably one of the best supporting casts in the RE franchise, and that's kind of acknowledged here by the way a lot of them seem to just turn up for a cameo death scene. Still, Chief Irons is suitably deranged, and Marvin Branagh's fate might potentially make you jump the first time you play through that chapter. And if these guys seem to get a bit of a short shrift, it's more than made up for by the skilful way the game handles the bigger players. Annette Birkin, in particular, is portrayed as less of a two-note maniac and more of a conflicted and tragic figure (even if her introductory monologue does meander into complete gibberish).

It's harder for me to gauge the Code Veronica chapters, because that's now the only mainline Resi game I've never played. Still, Claire is one of my favourite characters in the series, and these chapters are made a lot of fun by her alternately exasperated and flirtatious banter with irrepressible, wise-cracking Steve Burnside; by a delightfully ostentatious and playful villain; and by some truly engaging environments ranging from a ruined prison camp to an Antarctic base.

The weakest part of the game, for me, was the third set of chapters, relating Leon's first and last mission with Krauser (both of whom reappear, this time on opposing sides, in RE4). Although this part of the game at first seems kind of clever, given how it's actually presented as the framing narrative for the other two stories, it's also pretty light on storytelling and character, quite tedious at times, and seems to end rather abruptly - unceremoniously jumping from one boss fight straight to the climactic one. (I've also got to mention that I found the 'losing' ending that you can get for this sequence to be somewhat stronger than the 'winning' one, which makes me wonder why they included both.)

By focusing on the stories of Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield, Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles presents a tighter, more focused game than The Umbrella Chronicles, while also improving on many of that game's flaws. The standard of writing is relatively high, and I found the action to be fun and challenging while avoiding becoming repetitive or tedious (at least in the RE2 and RECV chapters). If you're a fan, I think you'll find this to be a classy, good-looking re-imagining of the originals. And if you just want to shoot zombies and monsters with your Wii-mote, there's that too.

2009: A Year of Stuff

As I do every year, here's a list of what I found and liked in the past year. This list is entirely subjective - not just in the sense of reflecting my own tastes, but also in terms of reflecting which things I first encountered in 2009.

---Of the movies I saw:


Waltz with Bashir
An evocative and moving animated documentary, exploring the lingering mental scars of warfare.


Coraline
Henry Selick brought us this beautifully realised and sinister fantasy film, proving that American animation can be more than just talking animals when it wants to be.


The Good, The Bad, The Weird
A good old-fashioned action-adventure, with explosions, chases and gun fights galore. Proof that director Kim Ji-woon can turn his hand to anything and succeed.

---Of the books I read:

The Modern World - Steph Swainston
My favourite fantasy author continues to explore the giddy heights of imagination and the gritty depths of her unromanticised, not-quite-medieval world.

The Host - Stephenie Meyer
By turns devastating and uplifting, this story of unexpected love between humans and body-snatchers is a great piece of science fiction drama.

The Stone Gods - Jeannette Winterston
Bad science fiction, certainly, but a fantastic piece of surreal literature. Affecting and difficult.

---Comics and manga:


Solanin - Inio Asano
A well realised slice-of-life comic with nicely drawn characters (in more ways than one).


The Umbrella Academy - Gerard Way, Gabriel Ba
A cut above the usual superhero comic, this blends a wildly imaginative menagerie of ideas into a cohesive and memorable whole.

---Of the TV shows I watched:

The Wire
More like a novel in terms of scope, but presented in a way only possible on television, this is a huge, believable cross-section of Baltimore life made by people who should know what they're talking about.

Ugly Betty
Once again, one of the few shows I watched live. Fantastic characters and a nice mixture of comedy and melodrama make for a very enjoyable hour of entertainment.

The Shield
The final season saw this show - with some of the best plotting and direction you'll see on the small screen - let loose to deliver a stonking great conclusion for all its simmering tensions.

---Of the games I played:


Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney
A combination of intricate plotting, compelling characterisation and delightful artwork make this probably the most memorable and engrossing game I played this year.


Resident Evil Archives
There were three Resi games that I played for the first time this year, and I liked all of them, but this is the one I've picked for my top three games. The remake of the first instalment in the series is quite unlike any of its sequels - with less bullets, more strategy and some quite subtle plot branching.


Batman: Arkham Asylum
In contrast to the usual license cash-in, this game has been made by people passionate for the Batman comics, with demanding fans in mind. Atmospheric environments, fluid gameplay and Paul Dini's writing combine to make this an unexpected classic.

Monster

I guess my cat's used to this sort of thing by now. He just sniffed Leon in a disinterested fashion and then went right back to sleep.

Paper thingies from here.

Moving on to the beginning...

So I bought the Resident Evil Remake as soon as it was re-released on the Wii (as 'Resident Evil Archives'), played Jill's game, liked it enough that I played it through a second time, and then moved on to Chris' game. That I only actually finished this weekend. Having managed to become quite skilled at traversing the mansion as Jill, it was a bit of a shock to play as Chris and suddenly lose two of my inventory slots, and find that all my favourite short cut doors now required a 'small key' in place of Jill's trademark lock pick. Coupled with the fact that I just found Chris to be a less interesting character than Jill (a straightforward action hero compared to Jill's more subtle and cunning heroine), I didn't get that far into his story before I stopped playing.

But Chris is also the lead character in Resident Evil 5, where he's found both a more interesting outfit and a much stronger personality, so I kind of felt honour-bound to try and finish his origin story before completing RE5. Obviously, I failed, but I got there in the end. :-P

So I've now finally completed (special masochistic game modes aside) the original Resident Evil game (or at least, its prettier update). One thing that struck me throughout is just how much unlike its sequels it is. I don't just mean that this game really does force you to carefully conserve ammunition (there were times when I was dodging past zombies with only a couple of bullets in my gun), but there's also a lot less story in here. Most of the game really is just exploring this creepy mansion, unlocking doors and solving puzzles. When you encounter other characters, it's never really to advance the plot so much as to foster a sense of life (or un-life) in the mansion.

And as a game that's primarily about drawing you into this carefully realised environment, Resident Evil succeeds brilliantly. This remake was (appropriately) one of the last Resident Evil games to use the infamous static camera style, before RE4 introduced the influential over-the-shoulder perspective, and I think it demonstrates how well developer Capcom had honed the formula. The camera angles and controls do (unfairly, but deal with it) create a sense of fear about what may be just out of view, and playing into this is a sublime use of light, shadows and careful framing to create striking visuals - whether it's lightning throwing the shadow of a previously unseen zombie across the room, or the feet of a hanged corpse swaying steadily in the corner of your view.

I'm often saying that the things I care about most in games are the characters and the locations, and in both these respects I think you can say the Resident Evil remake is visually striking, over-the-top and memorable.

Master of Unlocking

Woooosh! THAKA-BOOM! R.I.P. grotesque final boss. Now we shall ride into the sunrise on our rescue helicopter.

I really want to write about the ending to Resident Evil 5, but I guess I shouldn't spoil anything for anyone. One of the things I liked about it and can share was that it did move the story forwards. After all the time the RE series spent stagnated in Raccoon City (the likes of Resident Evil Outbreak File 4: Zombie Zoo Escape) it's great to see that Capcom are now quite happy to keep things moving. A rather significant part of the story comes to an end here, and that ties in nicely with the broader "monsters are a part of life now" perspective the RE universe has reached.


At the same time, I suppose some might worry that there's a danger that cutting too many ties to the Umbrella/Raccoon City thread that started the series won't leave enough meat for subsequent developments. But the thing I liked best about RE5 - in fact, the whole reason I was so keen to buy the game, after finding out the spoilerific specifics of this - is the way it's firmly rooted in characters and relationships from previous games.

My absolute favourite part of the game involves a fun, action-packed boss fight, and then a protracted, gruelling ordeal of melee attacks and quick-time events that lasts precisely TOO LONG minutes. What are you doing in this bit? I'm not telling you. But the fact that I found it so difficult and it took me so long and the 'F' key on my keyboard is probably never going to be the same again, well it only made the emotional payoff of success all the sweeter. It's a great technique I think: torturing the player not because the game has arbitrarily decided to make you jump through cruel hoops, but as a way of conveying the lengths one character is prepared to go through for another.

In other news, completing the game unlocks the exclusive PC version costumes, including this number for Sheva:


It's like they saw me coming.

You Make Irving Look Bad

I'm seriously digging the supporting cast in Resident Evil 5. One of the reasons I love the second Resident Evil game so much is because of its varied and interesting minor characters, something which I don't think any subsequent RE game quite achieved again - until this one. So here - for example - is squeaky-voiced Ricardo Irving, an arms dealer who, following the events of the previous games, now sells the likes of giant, black-shelled crab monsters to despotic regimes and guerilla fighters.

Speaking of which, while RE4 seemed mostly concerned with taking the storyline somewhere completely different and finally moving on from Raccoon City, RE5 takes a broader perspective, looking backwards to tie events and relationships into the new bigger picture. By creating an alternate history where zombies and monsters have proliferated as weapons of mass destruction, far from seeming like it's been tenuously strung out, the Resident Evil series now feels like it's opened up a whole new range of possibilities for where it can take its characters.

Oh Right, THAT One

So I'm too much of a Resident Evil fanboy not to snap up Resident Evil 5 now that it's out on the PC. That doesn't mean that I don't still think the racial imagery deserves serious criticism. It's not just the depiction of Africans as gibbering, rabid savages. There's a prominent visual theme of light and dark, with you moving between the sun-bleached outdoors and black, underlit rooms, and this theme extends to the characters. Sure, the fair skinned characters are good guys and bad guys and in between, but the people with the darkest skin tones are all violent monsters.

And my first bit of 'gameplay' was jumping through Microsoft's hoops. The game won't let you save until you log into Windows Live. Oh, but you have to create a gamertag first. Oh, and then you have to update Windows Games Live. Oh, and your firewall's blocking that? Guess you'll have to do it manually. I recently got the ten year old PC version of Resident Evil 2 working on my current computer. Will I be saying the same for RE5 in ten years time?


But aside from all that, I'm impressed by a lot of the things I've seen so far. I never understood why, in RE4, Leon never gave his simpering female sidekick a gun. This is the man who gave Claire Redfield a gun within two minutes of meeting her (and within five minutes of discovering that Raccoon City was infested with zombies). So the fact that Sheva is a capable combatant who you fight alongside and co-operate with is a vast improvement in my eyes, even if it's probably the main thing that tips the scales from horror to action. And given the ridiculous wardrobes sported by the heroines of RE3 and RE4, it's actually quite refreshing to see that the designers have done a great job of giving Sheva a pretty face.


I'm also loving how well this HD generation console port is working on my PC. I've had to crank the resolution way down, but the fancy effects are working happily. I mentioned the light/dark symbolism above, and it pleases me no end that my humble video card is handling the shadows perfectly. Moving from shade to sun - even just standing under a palm tree, it's all great to look at.

From the visuals to the audio: I'm very fond of the way RE4's music consists largely of drums and ambient noise, but from what I've heard so far of the music in RE5, it seems they've thrown some more orchestral stuff back into the mix, which suits the greater focus on action, I think. And while we're on the subject of sound, it's been a long time coming, but I'm glad to see that this is the first in the main series of Resident Evil games to include subtitles.

So positive first impressions so far. It's just a shame that, with stronger female characters and greater inclusiveness for the deaf and hard of hearing, Capcom had to go and shoot themselves in the foot with a take on the African continent that might have been pretty progressive in the Victorian Age.

Lesser-Known Curio

I recently found myself compelled to try installing the PC version of Dino Crisis 2 on my Vista PC, and was pleasantly surprised to find it working nicely (I had less luck with Crimson Skies). It feels strange to admit it, but I've realised that I have a real soft spot for this game.


Dino Crisis 2 is perhaps best remembered as an evolutionary link in Capcom's survival horror games. The first Dino Crisis was notoriously just Resident Evil with velociraptors instead of zombies, and sparsely detailed three-dimensional backdrops instead of rich two-dimensional ones.

With the second game, however, things changed substantially – with a much stronger emphasis on arcade-style action. Suddenly series heroine Regina is running around with a machine pistol in each hand, slaughtering dinosaurs by the dozen and racking up combo multipliers for points that can be spent on weapons, ammo and upgrades. It's clearly a step beyond the later Resident Evil 4, and a step beyond anything that could be considered true horror. A step, in fact, into the realms of unrestrained action and (dare I say it) fun.

And that's part of the reason I like it.


One of the things that quickly becomes apparent about Dino Crisis 2 is that a fair bit of it has been lost in translation. The scrap of information above is a perfect example. It's supposed to convey the simple fact that our heroes and their ill-fated rescue party have arrived much too late. They're hoping to save survivors from a city that was accidentally catapulted through time into a jungle full of dinosaurs, but when time-travelling millions of years, a little inaccuracy can amount to a long period in human terms. This long-dead doctor was living alongside dinosaurs for at least ten years before they finally ate him.

Even given a proper translation, though, I think the story here would probably still be confused. I can believe that there was some coherent thinking behind the final plot-twist and reveal, but the basic narrative that you follow is illogical, coincidental and confusing. And bear with me, but we're starting to get at what I like about this game so much.


The setting of Dino Crisis 2 is desolate in a really singular way. In some respects, it's actually full of life: nimble dinosaurs attack you constantly from every direction, giant insects glide overhead, triceratops lumber in the background, and you're relentlessly stalked by a one-eyed Tyrannosaurus Rex. And yet the humans are all long dead, their buildings are overgrown and decayed, the thin threads of hope that they cling to in their diaries and notes are now all broken. And on top of that, they're writing in the unintentionally poetic fashion of someone who can neither translate from Japanese nor write in English with any great skill.

I've always thought that Dino Crisis 2 ends up conjuring a fantastically dream-like atmosphere (nightmarish, in some respects). The ordinary events might not make logical sense, but they feel right given the tone of the game - and the extraordinary events tie incoherently into our own oft-ignored fears about immense stretches of time and the fragility of all human existence.


Dino Crisis 2 made a really strong impressions on me with its surreal, bitter-sweet tone and bold, colourful backdrops. And it even manages to be great fun to play as well.

There's often a depressing unanimity of opinion and shortness of memory when it comes to video games. People's opinions tend towards the more recent and better known. So maybe I should start thinking of this game in the same terms as a lot of films I like. It may be a lesser-known curio, and it's probably not to everyone's taste, but it happens to be a personal favourite.

Hey Guys What's This

Are you still watching this space? Two things that were supposed to happen this weekend have been postponed, so try watching it in a week or so instead. In the meantime, I guess I'll have to post about other stuff.

Top of my list of cool things at the moment is the newly announced Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles for the Wii - an on-rails shooter in the vein of The Umbrella Chronicles, only this time covering the events of Resident Evil 2.

My feelings are kind of mixed about this. On the one hand, RE2 is one of my all-time favourite games, so, 'yay new re-telling of the story' etcetera. But on the other hand, RE2 is one of my all-time favourite games, so I don't want them to mess this up. Is the Capcom of today capable of the same strong characters (relatively speaking), strong atmosphere and colourful imagination? Especially now that they've lost Shinji Mikami, who both conceived the franchise and reinvented it with RE4?

Then again, what little we know about this game seems promising so far, in particular the stated return to a focus on horror. The things I remember most readily about RE2 are the different locations and their sinister atmospheres: standing on the roof of the police station hearing zombies moan across the city below; the deserted night-time ambience of the marshalling yard; the sterile whoosh of the doors in the underground lab. If they can get that much right, then even if they fail to convey what are - to me anyway - the franchise's most engaging characters, then I guess I'll be happy.

DVD Review: Resident Evil Degeneration

Well, this turned out pretty much as I expected it to. Resident Evil Degeneration is the canonical animated feature by Capcom, the makers of the Resident Evil video games themselves - an Advent Children style attempt to expand on the directorial skills that they've acquired while crafting cinematics for their games. Yep, Degeneration is basically a ninety minute Resident Evil cut-scene. I'm sure some of you have left the building already.

Rather bravely, Degeneration makes no bones about being completely for the fans. Those of us familiar with the series don't need to hear any exposition about the nature of the G and T viruses, and those unfamiliar are unlikely to particularly enjoy being subjected to it. Similarly, there's no attempt to rehash the background behind Leon and Claire's friendship, their experiences in Raccoon City during Resident Evil 2 (though there's a nice little flashback), or their adventures since. It's difficult to tell just how obscure this makes things for the uninitiated, but you can't fault the decision. The decision to still throw in a few cringe-worthy bits of emotional exposition from two new characters: tough girl Angela and Sherry Birkin substitute Rani, is a little more difficult to sympathise with.


If I ask myself what I like most about the Resident Evil games, it's their atmosphere: tense, desolate, eerie. But this atmosphere is cultivated primarily through participation - ruined environments that you explore yourself, spine-tingling vistas that you take in at your own pace, dark doorways that you enter only when you've plucked up enough courage. Necessarily, this aspect is drastically reduced in Degeneration, and instead we're left with all the other aspects of Resident Evil: the haphazard plotting, the impressive but slightly imperfect action sequences, the melodramatic moments of character.

Not that any of that is too disagreeable, or at all unexpected. If you're already engaged with this world, you'll be used to it, and consider it more than outweighed by the chance to see these strong yet paper-thin characters (who we've struggled alongside through such ordeals) battling against weird, inconsistent conspiracies once again. It's also nice that there's some attempt at creating stylish character designs beyond just making them look 'realistic' - in particular I liked the fat, rubbery senator and the nicely elfin depiction of Claire. The strangely flat-faced Leon and strong-jawed Angela, though, might be said to dip a toe or two into the uncanny valley.


Naturally, this release is tied into the upcoming arrival of Resident Evil 5. On the one hand, I think this works quite well. At first glance you might think that the idea of Leon and Claire stumbling into yet another zombie outbreak seems a bit much, but this is our introduction to a world where the collapse of Umbrella has made monster-making viruses the weapon du jour for terrorists around the world. Having two of the franchise's most popular characters experience such an incident first hand provides a nice window into this alternate history.

But on the other hand, the film inevitably leads up to an 'it's not all over yet, folks!' ending that falls rather flat. Merely referencing something not obviously sinister that will appear in RE5 is no kind of teaser or cliffhanger, and anyone who's not yet seen the trailers for the new game will probably be completely baffled.


As a fan of the Resident Evil series of games, I'm glad to own this movie, and I'll probably wind up watching it more times than are healthy. But if I ask myself honestly why any non-fan would be interested in this, I can't come up with anything. While a new game has the space to flesh out backstory and character history at a leisurely pace, a ninety minute film can only avoid it altogether or try and cram it down your throat by the fistful. Degeneration makes the right choice in that regard, but it means that if you're not sure if this movie is for you, it probably isn't.

2008: A Bunch of Lists

So it's been a year since I last asked myself what cool stuff I found during the past year, and I guess I should set about doing it again. As before, this list is entirely personal - not just in being about what I personally liked this year, but also with regards to what qualifies as belonging to the relevant period. If I saw it, read it, or played it this year, it's eligible - regardless what year you might actually be inclined to attribute it to. Hey, they make a lot of cool stuff in a year, and it takes me a lot longer than that to find it all.

Okay, let's go.

---Of the movies I saw:

La Antena
A perfect evocation of everything great about the era of silent film, and a vibrant fantasy in its own right. I reviewed it here.

Paprika
Another animated masterpiece from Satoshi Kon, by turns fantastically whimsical and deeply disturbing.

The Dark Knight
Christopher Nolan returns to Gotham City for this sprawling comicbook epic, full of compelling, larger than life characters.

---Of the books I read:

Gods Behaving Badly - Marie Phillips
An understated and touching love story - at least until those pesky Greek Gods start meddling with mortal affairs. Since the rise of Christianity, the denizens of Mount Olympus have relocated to a run-down house in London, but they're no less keen on grand acts of selfish omnipotence.

Ubik - Philip K. Dick
A typical mind-fuck from the king of psychedelia. After narrowly escaping death, a group of superhuman psychics find that the world seems to be decaying at a terrifying rate - and one by one, each of them is turning into a dessicated husk.

Aces Falling - Peter Hart
An engrossing book about air warfare throughout 1918. Hart gives readers what they want, in the form of stories about the famous aces, but also sets them into the context of a new combined theatre of war where lone wolf hunters were being subsumed into a larger, more tactically-minded war machine.

---Of the comics and manga I read:

Death Note - Tsugumi Ohba, Takeshi Obata
Last year I lamented only having read the first volume. This year I read volumes 2-12, concluding the story. The combination of Obata's flawless artwork and Ohba's intense plotting results in something that should be read by anyone with an interest in fantasy or mystery comics - as a teenager who's resolved to rid the world of undesirables by writing their names in a death god's notebook is pursued by a legendary (and anonymous) detective.

Chiggers - Hope Larson
Although Larson's keenly observed tale of summer camp friendship and preternatural intrigue is aimed at teenage girls, it deserves to be (and probably has been) read by all and sundry. Undoubtedly one of the best western comic artist-writers you'll find.

Batman: Harley and Ivy - Paul Dini, Bruce Timm et al.
Cute beyond words, something about the bright artwork, colourful characters and psychotic cheerfulness of this book reminded me of watching Saturday morning cartoons as a kid and coming to the realisation that I wanted to tell stories as well as experience them.

---Of the TV shows I watched:

Batman: The Animated Series
Well, while we're on the subject, I've been rewatching a lot of this nineties cartoon show. Some of the episodes don't hold up too well now that I'm all grown up, but frequently the snappy dialogue and noir-ish art deco stylings produce quite striking pieces of television.

Ugly Betty
The only show I actually watched live and gave a damn about this year, Ugly Betty has the perfect mixture of melodrama and comedy, and an entire cast of memorable and lovable characters.

Mission: Impossible
Something else I revisited this year. Despite being about an all-American team of luminaries toppling dictatorships and preventing alliances with dirty communists, Mission: Impossible was for the most part a genial puzzle-box of a show, with a first-rate cast steadily unravelling devilish plans of deception each episode.

---Of the games I played:

Fallout 3
A huge, sprawling, engrossing game. The narrative and character interaction are over-simplistic, but I found the allure of exploring this impossibly detailed post-nuclear landscape and making a name for myself as a hero or monster to be quite irresistible.

Resident Evil 4 - Wii Edition
So it took me a few years to get around to it, but this atmospheric, grimly realised action horror game, with its memorably over-the-top characters, has easily become one of my all time favourite games (although I think I still prefer RE2, if only because Ada is more sensibly dressed). I've played it from start to finish three times this year, and got a good way into it for a fourth go on 'professional' difficulty (so far it is very hard).

Iji
Often indie games tread new ground, brave new forms of gameplay, tackle storylines that no mainstream studio would ever touch. Iji, a freeware game you can download from here, isn't like that. If you could give it a multi-million budget and the latest state-of-the-art graphics engine, you'd end up with a game that was a lot like the games already out there - only much, much better. Iji is a perfect demonstration of why gaming needs auteurs who want to tell stories and explore characters - rather than shareholders who want to play it safe and get a percentage. Melancholy, evocative, and uncompromising.

---Of the Happy New Years I wished you:

I've got to pick the one just coming up, now haven't I? I hope this new orbit brings you happiness and fulfilment, and your resolutions are both feasible and level-headed. In short: Happy New Year!

For the Fans!

The more I see of Resident Evil: Degeneration, the more convinced I become that:

1. This is not going to be a good movie.

2. I am going to love it.

Further Degeneration

Just in case you thought I'd taken a break from being a Resident Evil fanboy, let me point out that the upcoming CG animated movie Resident Evil: Degeneration now has an offical US website. There's nothing much there at the moment except for the teaser trailer and a promise that more is to come in a week's time...

"Take that! Ha!"

It perhaps indicates that I've reached that dreaded point in any gamer's life when you realise that it's taking you months to complete lengthy games, but I've devoted a lot of my Wii time to Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles this past month precisely because I know that it's easy to pick up and put down. This is a game divided into discrete, bite-size, but inter-related chapters - each of which, while often nicely challenging, can typically be completed in twenty or thirty minutes. Compared to the main line of Resident Evil games – exploration-based with an emphasis on the conservation of ammunition, full of tough boss fights and with save points moderately spaced – this all-guns blazing rail shooter is definitely Resident Evil: The Casual Game. Not that this is a bad thing.

As the title suggests, Umbrella Chronicles spans the events before Resident Evil 4, detailing the rise and fall of the Umbrella corporation from the first grisly events in the Raccoon City forests to its last desperate gambit. Along the way we retread, in rail shooter format, the events of Resident Evil 0, Resident Evil and Resident Evil 3, before unveiling the previously unrevealed swansong of Umbrella, deep in the frozen wastes of Siberia. Completing these chapters also unlocks a number of side-misions, filling in the stories of secondary characters, with an especial focus on unflappable, black-clad Albert Wesker.

Gameplay in Umbrella Chronicles is, on the face of it, very simple. The wii remote acts as a pointer for a set of crosshairs and pulling the trigger-like B button fires your character's gun. The screen takes a first person view, creeping carefully through claustrophobic corridors and devastated streets. Perhaps because this movement is largely out of your control, Umbrella Chronicles does a better job of creating a sense of POV than most first person shooters. At times the characters do seem to be a bit dense in terms of when they choose to look at obvious threats, but typically there's a nice pace to things, as the view sweeps around fearfully, with little clue as to when danger will strike.

An additional layer of complexity is added in the form of special weapons with limited ammunition, and difficult-to-perform critical hits that can allow you to defeat dangerous or plentiful foes with your infinite ammo handgun. There's also a fair bit of button bashing and wii-mote waving to avoid attacks during boss fights and cut scenes; while quickly shaking the wii-mote after a zombie latches onto you will cause your character to pull off a stylish counter-attack. Some of the characters seem to just perform the same boring punch, but Rebecca uses a grenade, Jill tasers and kicks (while shouting "Take that! Ha!" a line I must have heard about a hundred times already), while Wesker and Hunk perform their trademark 'thrust punch' (think The Matrix) and 'neck snap' (a move as balletic as it is brutal) respectively. It's an interesting mechanic in that it shows how a player who is doing badly can both be leant a hand by a game (when it's been a bad day for aiming, I've counter-attacked my way through whole hoards of zombies) and even be given a conciliatory reward in the form of a neat little cut scene (and catchy exclamation - "Take that! Ha!").

As a digest of the story so far (RE4 and RE: Code Veronica notwithstanding), Umbrella Chronicles naturally seems like a good stepping-on point for those unfamiliar with the series, while by fleshing out some of the events taking place in the shadows, there's also plenty here for die-hard fans as well. Similarly, the system of ranks and rewards means that playing for fun, or playing to obsessively hone your skills, are both equally valid approaches to the game. Above all, though, owning Umbrella Chronicles means I can always spend twenty minutes killing zombies with some of my favourite video game characters. Simple, undemanding, engaging, and above all: fun.

Friday Franchise Blogging

The Resident Evil franchise.

(I am missing a few.)

Unsuitable Content

Well, I completed the main story of Resident Evil 4, still leaving a fistful of side stories and mini-games to master - and of course I want to play the whole thing a second time with my upgraded weapons. My completion time was 16 hours and 40 minutes (which probably corresponds pretty closely to the amount of free time I've had over the past week or so). I was expecting to get a poor rating, but, hey: no ratings! Which, personally, I think is great. It would be a shame to have such an intricate, expansive world and then encourage players to rush through it.

The, uh, 'not zombies' are fantastic. A heady mixture of 28 Days Later, The Thing and Deliverance - but also very original in their realisation. An intelligent enemy, driven by hatred and manipulated by religion, evoking the unwashed masses of unfamiliar lands, fond of chainsaws and pitchforks, eerily degenerated, prone to obscene transformation... Wish I'd come up with something like that myself.

I particularly love the way RE4 continues the Ada/Leon relationship from Resident Evil 2 (a game I've raved about before). And I liked all the 'good guys', even Princess Useless (or Ashley as she's also known) - although the bad guys were a bit too cookie-cutter for my liking - especially compared to previous Resi outings. Special mention to the two minor male characters: Luis Sera the 'mysterious Spaniard' and Mike the semi-anonymous helicopter pilot.

Like Half Life 2, RE4 also demonstrates once again that there is no excuse for games that repeat themselves (Halo, anyone?). One moment you're barricaded in a besieged house with Luis, the next you're riding a runaway mine cart, or trying to convince a huge monster to stand over the trap door to a molten-iron furnace. You get the impression that if Capcom excluded anything from their brainstorming sessions, they must have been the really out-of-this-world ideas.

The aesthetic is gorgeous - or horrible, rather, but in a good way. Muted palettes, leafless trees, ruin and piled garbage abound. Brilliant use, in places, of dark scenes lit primarily by lightning. The laboratory right at the end (there's always a laboratory at the end in Resident Evil) was nicely grimy, rusted and littered, like a former torture chamber that has since gone downhill.

The game's themes are interesting to boot, like you get the impression the Japanese developers were trying to recreate the neo-con versus Islamic fundamentalist conflict, without realising that neo-cons are mostly fundamentalist Christians themselves. Leon's quip that, "Faith and money will lead you nowhere!" is brilliant, but utterly unlike anything you'd expect to be coming from a clean-cut US agent (although Leon is arguably not so clean cut after his stay in Raccoon City).

Right at the end, though, the sequence after the credits... A game containing, as this does, decapitations, impalements, exploding heads, grotesque mutation and so on - that's all well and good. But right at the end, when Leon re-establishes contact with Hunnigan and tells her she looks cute without her glasses... Absolutely unconscionable. But the game's certainly good enough to overlook it.