Look of shock circa 1996. Or, alternatively, BODYSNATCHER!
Hello and welcome to another Nostalgia World. This one is going up a day early because I love you guys so much, or because me and a friend spent today playing the original Resident Evil and I was too lazy to actually take the screencaps and whatnot home and type it up there. So I’m stealing a computer with an actual working screen, shock horror, in order to regale you with tales of Resident Evil. The original. Not the remake, not the dualshock edition, the very original.
I’m going to start off by describing the intro movie that we get. It explains how the STARS Bravo team were off finding the hideout of a gang of nutters, before going missing on their mission, leaving it up to the Alpha team to go bail them out. It’s badly animated in places, and the actual actors (something you don’t see in games nowadays), are so bad they go beyond being good and back into bad territory. Jill manages to look bored all the time, Chris has a sort of bored glare on his face, Wesker remains emotionless, and Barry looks surprised. Joseph is apparently five years old, as he jumps up and down in one spot, waving his hand aloft, before bending over to pick up a severed hand, which gets quite high in the air before Joe realises he is in fact, hi-fiving a corpse.
The team are then attacked by a single puppet dog, making raptor noises from Jurassic Park, which admittedly is bloody terrifying (you would be terrified too if you had a puppet dog making raptor noises running after you), before the team makes an amazing choice, to stand still and Redfield shouts “NO! DON’T GO!” at the disappearing drawing of a helicopter (STARS being apparently too poor to afford a real helicopter), before deciding to run again, with Barry in the lead. Why the fat, balding middle-aged man is ahead of the pack of lean, mean spec ops team, I don’t know.
Burton, being a man, and running in front of his teammates
The team then runs into a drawing of a mansion, which amazingly transfers from a video to CGI when they open the door, and the game begins after a quick scene featuring the player character and two of their teammates having a quick chat in the main hall of the mansion. I had forgotten how bad the graphics were, and yet, they were the pinnacle of technology at the time. As we played as Chris Redfield, I’ll be doing screenshots from his perspective. As we jogged off towards the first zombie, handling slightly better than, say, an over-turned lorry, we found the first zombie of the game chowing down on one of our buddies from Bravo Team.
HAI GUYZ, TASTY FLESH, OM NOM NOM?
One thing I had forgotten was just how bad the dialogue and script in general is for the game.
Great dialogue!
As we can see from the above screen cap, it is absolutely amazing. There are other gems out there, but mainly in Jill’s game, which I was too lazy to play. In addition to clunky dialogue, I can safely report that the controls are still as clunky as ever, with characters handling like they’re drunk tanks, with zombies seeming to move in roughly the same way as the characters do, which is somewhat worrying. You want your heroes to be fleet of foot and nimble, not shambling around like the undead villains themselves. Hmm. Speaking of the undead, due to the limited power, all the zombies tend to be one of two models. Both mdoels are male, and one wears green, as we can see from the first zombie above, and the other wears white. Both happen to be male, so apart from Rebecca and Jill, the game is a sausagefest, to say the least. There is also some hilarity to be had by outrunning zombies and then watching them run into walls, because they’re awesomely stupid like that.
Uh, guys? I'm over here?
I had forgotten how hard the game actually is. Zombies take a good few bullets to put down, and there aren’t many bullets around, and the knife is next to useless, as per usual Resident Evil guidelines. This forces the player to actually put more than a few seconds of thought in, as the zombies tend to be both predictable, in that they go towards you, and unpredictable, as in they may stop to hug the wall before reaching you. This allows you to trundle around them and hopefully avoid being grabbed by them, all the while preserving your ammo for boss fights and suchlike. This survival horror aspect hasn’t been recreated in any of the other games, with you falling over ammo and suchlike in every other game bar the first one. Which is a bit of a shame, as this gameplay isn’t done very often and I feel it should be. You know, force players to actually be strategic instead of leaping in, guns ablaze and then sitting around afterwards waiting for your health to regenerate afterwards.
Meaty chunks!
Finally, despite the horrific dialogue, the horrific handling and dodgy camera angles and the fact that Rebecca is in this, Resident Evil is a good game. Even if it got a bit samey in the mansion with every room looking like the other and apparently there only being two zombies who get around a hell of a lot, based on them keeping popping up in virtually every room, it is still decent, forcing players to analyse the situation, and at times, run away like a little girl instead of the spec ops member they claim to be.
I truly did not know zombies could write. This must be the zombie Shakespeare at work.
Author edit: As this crops in under a thousand words, and due to somewhat popular demand, i.e. a friend ringing me and going “that review was a bit short wasn’t it?”, I’m expanding it a bit more.
One thing I forgot to mention was my love for the idiocy of Umbrella Corporation. The company somehow stayed afloat from 1968 to 2004, and was only stopped by the US Government actively shutting it down. Yet before it was shut down, as we find out in the original Resident Evil, it’s been going strong for many years, and is apparently staffed by madmen. Madmen who trap the Arklay Mansions architect within its walls so he eventually dies. And somehow get away with it. Nobody questions where he’s gone, apparently everyone just shrugs and ignores it.
Their lunacy is not stopped at that point though. They experiment on Great White Sharks, which honestly leaves me scratching my head. Why the hell would you need zombie sharks? Are they not deadly enough as it is? And the wasps and BEEEEEEEEES? And plants? Who the hell wants zombie plants? That’s right folks, Umbrella do! So whilst you’ve got some sensible enemies, i.e. zombies, Hunters, Yawn the giant snake, you also get Plant 42, and Neptune, the sharks. Yeah.
I may have given off the impression I didn’t like the game. This is not true, it is absolutely awesome, if bat**** insane at times. The zombies provide a challenge, as do the Hunters and other enemies, the story is crazy enough to work, and it starts a great tradition of having naked zombies marking the end of the game. Also, gigantic hideous abominations of nature with exposed organs as bosses as well. What’s not to love?
