Resident Evil 4

[davidn]

We've started playing Resident Evil 4 now. I had never played an RE game before getting it, but pami_zee and thebluelight1 said it was good, so I was confident enough to buy it without any further knowledge of what it was like.

It stars an American agent called Leon, who looks only slightly like he's in Duran Duran. The story so far involves investigating a small village in Spain in connection with the kidnapping of the President's daughter, because the Europeans are up to no good as usual. On arrival with some police officers with outrageous accents, Leon wanders towards the village, goes into a hut and asks the inhabitant for directions. And gets a knife in the face. And seeing as this is Spain and not Glasgow, he realizes that something's not quite right.

This is where the issue of the controls arises. At first, they feel absolutely dreadful - to give you some idea of what it looks like at the start, Leon takes up a large proportion of the front left of the screen, making it feel a bit like a first person shooter with your own head blocking most of the view. He seems to run diagonally forwards meaning you have to aim a bit to the left of where you're expecting to go, and aiming your weapon is a matter of accidentally shooting the sky, then the ground, then eventually hitting where you were intending to shoot.

But after a couple of practice fights (and largely due to a side mission early on which involves finding and shooting some blue medallions scattered around the place) things suddenly and inexplicably seem to work. You get used to where you're pointing, what you can see, and how to aim without taking out a large portion of the floor and ceiling first. When you're not running around and shooting, there are brief set-piece sections that resemble rhythm action games, having to press buttons at the right times to dodge Indiana Jones-style boulders and harpoon an undead version of Moby Dick.

So far, most of the game feels rather like playing a Simon Pegg film. You spend your time getting Leon to commando-roll out of ridiculously high windows or perform superhuman leaps off towers, kicking zombies in the head until they explode or alternatively shotgunning them in the chest while they're carrying lit dynamite, causing them to fall over and then explode. Even though it's said to be "survival horror" I'm not finding it particularly frightening (unlike Silent Hill, which terrifies me to pieces). You've often got more than enough firepower to deal with the hordes of the undead coming your way, with the only exception so far being the man with the sack on his head like the scarecrows out of Doctor Who, who is intent on chainsawing your head off and refuses to die, or re-die, or whatever it is that Spanish zombies do.

Again unlike Silent Hill, the enemies you face drop useful items such as suspicious health-restoring herbs or extra ammunition. Quite a lot of the time, they leave behind little treasure chests, which doesn't make much sense unless they're zombie pirates. I had wondered at first what money would even be used for in a game like this, but that was answered at the beginning of the second stage where a dodgy man with an even dodgier accent turns up with a coatful of lethal weapons that you can buy from him. This eventually becomes central to the game, getting different upgrades and weapons by using your money rather than having a small fixed set of weapons like in Silent Hill, and trying to stuff them all in your attache case Tetris-style.

I should say, finally, that I don't like escort missions in games. In fact, no one in the world likes escort missions - they always involve trying to protect a particularly dim individual or vehicle that trundles along merrily ignoring all the obvious orc/alien/Soviet/chav/Greenpeace ambushes in its way, trying desperately to clear a path ahead of it and then looking back only to realize that it's been squashed by a falling snooker table in your absence. And after the first couple of sections to where we've played so far in RE4, the game seems to be one giant escort mission as you try and get the President's daughter out of the village. But she's intelligent enough to duck out of the way of your gunfire, doesn't go off on ridiculous failed-pathfinding routes around the other side of the map, and you can even tell her to stay behind for a moment while you busily exterminate the zombies and clear a path. Overall, even the escorting seems to work. And that's probably one of the highest compliments that you can give to a game.

Comments

[thebluelight1.livejournal.com]

4 is not at all frightening, they have taken away the fear but replaced it with full out action such as leaping through windows and dodging flaming arrows, trying to make it more movie-esque. So instead of survival horror it's just survival and it's not even difficult to survive since there's so much ammo so really it's just a mad action game...but the best mad action game I've ever played.

[graeme hamilton (from livejournal.com)]

I recently bought Resident Evil 4 for my Wii. You aim by pointing the remote, which I imagine is quite a bit easier than using an analogue stick. The best bit is the mapping of remote movement to knife control, so you generally end up killing zombies by flailing your arms around wildly. My favourite comedy moment so far is when Leon first enters the village and is about to get torn to shreds, before being saved by the ringing of the church bell. I can't remember his exact line, but it was something along the lines of:

Where are they all going? Bingo?

[davidn]

It did cross my mind that the reason for the weird controls came from its Wii origins! I can see that working rather a lot better. This is also the reason I can't play FPSes on consoles at all, as the dual analog controls mean that you can't aim with any degree of speed or accuracy.

[kjorteo]

Actually, it was first a GameCube game. Then it got ported to the PS2, then the PC, and now I guess finally the Wii? So the control scheme you're using is actually more than likely fairly close to the original vision for the game. Probably a slight improvement, as while the PS2 is far from the best controller ever or anything, good God do I hate the GameCube controller.

[davidn]

The PS2 controller is actually my favourite out of the lot of them - it has a decent weight without being massive (Dreamcast/XBox), you can use it without growing an extra hand out of your chest (N64/Jaguar), and has the right amount of triggers without being overwhelming. I know some people say that the left analog control and D-pad should be swapped, but I've still never really got used to using those sticks.

I don't think I've ever used a Gamecube controller for more than five minutes, but it looks... strange. It seems almost as if they went for a Mac-like "you should be able to use one button to do everything" approach - but renaming right-click and moving it to the Ctrl key where you can't get to it doesn't make an interface any easier.

[kjorteo]

The PS2 controller isn't bad for most things, but it's absolutely horrible for vs. fighting games (for example, Guilty Gear.) This is mostly due to the D-pad just being awful for the kind of rapid direction input required, and the thumbstick having a circular bed, thus making it hard to tell where one of the eight directions are. This makes it hard to, say, block low, seeing as that involves holding diagonal-down-back, and I always stray either too far down (so I'm crouching, but not actually blocking, and eat the low hit,) or too far back (so I'm blocking, but not actually crouching, and eat the low hit.)

[davidn]

I can sort of see where you're coming from there - the only fighting games I've played on the PS2 are Tekken Tag and the Soul Calibur series, and I didn't even get into the genre until the era of 3D fighters, with the exception of One Must Fall on the PC. (Ever tried doing half-circles-forward on a keyboard?) What's your controller preference for fighters?

[kjorteo]

"(Ever tried doing half-circles-forward on a keyboard?)"

Only for every old SNES fighting game I was into back in the day and am trying to emulate now. :(

"What's your preference for fighters?"

As Guilty Gear is the only fighting series I've seriously gotten into, the controllers I've actually tried for fighters are somewhat limited. I started out on the non-360 XBox (for #Reload) and ultimately came to some sort of compromise with the pad-vs-thumbstick war where I used the pad for all normal getting around and quarter-circle moves and stuff, then suddenly switch to the thumbstick just to do the 632146-motion super moves. Now that Accent Core for the PS2 is here, I tried that but found that the PS2 pad is an abomination unto the Lord, and have had to try to adapt to using the thumbstick exclusively. Of the two, I'd say the XBox has a much better pad, and both have horrible thumbsticks but the PS2 sucks slightly less.

The exciting news, though, is that Accent Core comes out on the Wii this week. I'm very much looking forward to that, because I actually believe the Wii Classic Controller will be good for Guilty Gear. It has a slightly better pad than the XBox and by far, by far the best thumbstick, completely obliterating the those of the XBox and PS2 combined. This is because it rests in an octagon-shaped bed instead of a perfectly smooth, circular one, which means I'll actually be able to hold the stick in a direction without having to take a complete wild guess. And let me tell you, the sooner I can actually start blocking low again, the sooner I'll be able to do something about Yiffy, who has to be the biggest trip whore I've ever seen.

[kytheraen.livejournal.com]

1. they're not zombies ;)
2. what platform? we played it to death on ps2 and now got it for wii. tis most excellent
3. whadduhya buyin'?

[davidn]

Now that you mention it, the game's never said what they are - the encounter with the man in the shed at the start said that he wasn't a zombie, but I defaulted to calling them that as most things aren't able to move around while missing their head. We have the PS2 version.

Heh heh heh! Thankkyaaah.

[kjorteo]

All is revealed about the zombies or whatever eventually. Please let me know when you learn the truth, because it's awesome.

[davidn]

We completed it yesterday and are going through Ada Wong's mission now, so we have a fair idea (I'll post about the rest of the game later on) - it's an interesting variation on the zombie theme.

[kjorteo]

I love it, myself, but then again, I would. Ahem.

But at the very least, it is a good legitimate excuse to suddenly make the zombies about six times faster and smart enough to manipulate and use ladders and employ basic strategies like splitting up and flanking you.

[kytheraen.livejournal.com]

after shooting someone's head off with a shotgun, the "deceased" charged towards me and tried to strangle me until i shook him off and kicked his ass to the ground.

[davidn]

That gave me a shock the first time it happened - as did the ones later on that grow spiky tentacles out of their necks and then refuse to die, ever.

[kjorteo]

http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=131

[jeremylinnell.livejournal.com]

I love Resident Evil 4, one of my top 10 games ever in fact. Also one of the few games I've ever PLAYED STREAIGHT THROUGH IN ONE SITTING. Well barring stuff like Star Fox, Sin and Punishment, Gunstar Heroes etc. And speedrunning. Anyhoo I think it's an excellent game and it's taking considerable will power to not buy it on the wii.

Also for all intents and purposes they ARE zombies, although possibly more in line with the religious sense (i.e. servants without soul.). What they are IS kinda cool in a...well I can't say what way without ruining it. But in line with the rest of the series it is both stupid and awesome at the same time.

Also God Of War II had a nice escort mission. Mainly because you slammed the bastards head on a concrete block until he died afterwards. I think they knew people don't like those bits.