Resident Evil: Director's Cut

The Good
In the early days of the Playstation, when few gamers had one, probably due to the hefty price tag. Resident Evil, known as Biohazard in Japan, hit the fledgling console. And for some reason helped sell the console. At least Westerners got the better title…Biohazard…gimme a break I could pull a better title out of my ass.

The game begins with strange occurrences by an old mansion, in the out skirts of a town poorly named Raccoon City.(This is no joke.) So finally the local police, which for some reason have an elite corps known as S.T.A.R.S., send a team to investigate, after they go missing a second team is sent in. So in other words the plot of this game is pure idiocy. More on that later.

Well the only good thing I can think of for the good section of this review is that it made the genre more popular, spawning more games like it, this is also a bad thing, but at least before RE, horror games were only made for the PC.

The Bad
Just about every thing else in this game is bad. The only scary thing about the RE series is that people actually like it. The plot is laughably bad. First off the old mansion thing is such a cliché, and was used in better horror games, I.e. Alone In The Dark, the true creator of horror games. Just because Capcom gave the genre a name does not mean that they created it. That’s like if I claimed I invented the T.V. because I call it a ViewScreen, who the hell do they think they are kidding?

Anyhow back to the plot, not only is it lame, but there are also to many inconsistencies. Firstly, my did the police send the less capable team in first? Second why send another team to there doom? Thirdly, why does a small town have an elite task force? I have live in small towns and cannot recall any of them having elite corps, it is just moronic.

You thought that was the end of the bad plot, ehh? Well it is not. Raccoon City? Are you serious? No city anywhere in the world would ever have such a stupid name. Should not a name in a horror game have an ominous name like, Silent Hill, or Innsmouth? Lastly the plot point that the zombies are being designed as military weapon is stupid as hell. Hmm, instead of trying to make better “super soldiers” instead Umbrella Corp. makes “not so super soldiers”. Zombies are slow, weak, and not very intelligent, so how would they be an advantage in battle? It just makes no sense. But what confuses me the most is that no one else seems to have noticed all of these plot holes. Maybe video games do make people dumber.

Enough about the plot now allow me to go over the gameplay, if it can even be called that. All you do in this game is fight, find keys, rinse repeat. Such great gameplay…not! Furthermore, this is a horror game, well then I have to know, where is the horror? This game is not scary, I have episodes of Sesame Street that were more scary. All the “scares” if they can be called that are predictable. Let me regale you with an example, Jill, enters a room, and the camera’s focus, is on the window, approach the window and a zombie breaks through, as if you did not see that coming.

Speaking of the camera angle, most such angles are not even camera angles, I may be wrong but I am pretty sure that camera angles are supposed to show you what is happening on screen, yet half the time in this game the view is so bad you cannot see what is happening. The controls are laughably bad, and tend to be relative to the camera angle, this is just confusing, and disorienting.

The Graphics are bad, even for the time, look at RE2 compared to this one and you will see what I mean. The polygonal characters are a pixelated mess, and lack detail. The static backdrops, all look washed out, and have not motion, despite the fact that motion is possible in pre-rendered graphics. None of the monsters are scary, not even, the endgames Tyrant.

The sound is quite possibly the most horrifying aspect of the game. No not because like Undying, the sound effects evoke terror, but because they are so lame. Any one that says a game has bad voice acting, has to hear this game, it is about ten times worse than the worse game you can think of. Not only are the voices bad, but the dialog is poorly written, I often found myself laughing instead of being scared, as was the games intent. Infamous lines such as “Don’t open that door!”, remind me of another infamous line “All your base are belong to us!” Did Capcom just pull it’s “actors” off the streets? There is very little music in RE, but what there is hardly stands out.

This game also spawned more crap RE games. As well as terrible games like Carrier, and Nightmare Creatures, so thus making horror games more popular also hurt the game market.

The Bottom Line
Overall, unless you want a good laugh avoid this game. There are so many better horror games, that would be a better use of your time. A drunk monkey could make a better horror game.