Uh-oh - looks like the situation has escalated.
Typically around this time each year we break down the gaming experiences which have been most meaningful, or at any rate the ones that we can actually remember. We used to do it by way of the "We're Right Awards," but somewhere along the way we decided that actually making comics might be a good idea for our Internet comic website.
I still like drudging up and subsequently rinsing off an entire year's worth of these cherished adventures, even if we don't devote our strip to the process. So, unless something bizarre emerges which we would refuse to discuss at our peril, we can spend the next few days remembering these things together.
For example, though it just edged its way in on the cube, Resident Evil 4 rightly belongs on any proper accounting of the year of our lord two-thousand and five. I suppose that's another reason this kind of enumeration - what Jeremy Parish might call a hagiography - has value. I crave novelty like anyone else, and I can be devoured by it, and relinquishing my will to the simulation - playing absolutely - is sort of what I do. There are times when something I've really enjoyed looks pretty mechanical and uninspired a few months out. I would not say that this applies to Resident Evil 4.
It could have been so bad.
Look at Final Fantasy now, the wheels are completely off the fucking franchise. They don't have any idea what they did to create it, and then they let people who didn't understand it to begin with interpret it poorly. Their teenaged fumblings have destroyed it.
I spoke with someone at PAX would would love to have the old Resident Evil return and sees this new mutation as not entirely unpleasant but still unseemly and even perhaps somewhat damp. I've still got a few REs of the old persuasion in me, if they choose to go that route - but I don't know that they could materially improve on Code Veronica, and I think they're aware of it. Indeed, I'm alsmost certain they are, having retreating into prequels and "reimaginings" immediately upon its completion.
The reality is that by five separate interpretations of Alone In The Dark, the evil had become perhaps too resident, a little set in its ways. They were good ways, I mean, shit. I liked those ways. But I don't find the new ways less legitimate, disrespectful, or what have you. They've simply taken the slider that represents the supplied ammo and turned it up, while at the same time amplifying the number of enemies to a tremendous degree and - this is why it works - emphasizing precision and trick shots. It is as though the game is in a different key. There's that music term again: transposition.
In any case, the game is a Goddamn sight more interactive while it hits those notes we find so delicious about survival horror. That it is also exquisitely beautiful, proving the claim of a console that never really got respect for its prowess, well, that never hurt none.
(CW)TB out.
chamomile, motherfucker
December 23, 2005
