Resident Evil: A gaggle of bad actors dressed as B-movie 'government officials' get chased into a SPOOKY OLD HOUSE by some huge slobbering dog-beast. Play as either the incredibly unqualified Chris Redfield or the largely more competent lock-pick Jill Valentine. There's also a crewcut, jocular, and transparently treacherous Wesker, huge, lovable Barry, and a few other S.T.A.R.S. members you'll identify mainly by what sort of equipment is left behind on their body. Join them as they wander around the hell-house,gathering clues, shooting dead people, and playing the piano to open a secret door. Can you guess who the villain is?

Like the other Capcom-spawned SH titles, Resident Evil features a revolutionary, character-relative control scheme. This means if you are new to the game, you'll try to walk UP the stairs and end up walking straight in some other random direction. This wouldn't a bad control scheme in the first person. But as things stand it feels like you're trying to guide a station wagon through the haunted house.

Periodically the whole screen will go letterbox as they play out an FMV sequence using the exact same models as in-game, completely defeating the point of making them an FMV letterbox sequence. In this clip, Barry the big lug gives Jill a lock-picking kit. Later on she gets herself caught in a room with a descending ceiling which leads to one of the most hilarious non-intentional comments ever.

Resident Evil games have a tradition of making the game about three times as hard for men as women. Note that among the zombies, this seems to hold true. Whereas Jill can carry an extra two items around with her and begins with a (Chris's) gun; Chris has precisely a knife and a slightly slower running speed going for him. So needless to say, any progress I made in the game at all was with Jill. In case you couldn't deduce from the audio clips, Jill also has the advantage of Barry following her all over the place to save her little behind after she gets caught in a wicker chair or gets bitten by the gigantic snake in the attic.

Resident Evil 2: Taking place in the immensely put-upon Raccoon City, a young cop by the name of Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield, incidentally the sister of Chris from the first game, battle those incredibly strange creatures who stopped living and became mixed up zombies. Most of the action takes place in an abandoned police station or something, there's blood and gore and schoolgirls and mutants, and I can't honestly say I've ever gotten past the first street as Leon.

Apparently taking anywhere between thirty minutes and several months after the first game, RE2 joins biker chick Claire whose affinity for the color pink makes it hard for her to join a gang for extended amounts of time. It's really an interesting outfit: almost like pink hot pants and a vest over a wetsuit with a knife stuck to the shoulder at an odd angle. She pulls into town and the camera sort of loses interest, cutting to a badly-dubbed trucker shoving a zombie out of his truck and gurgling about how crazy he was. Jump cut back to a seamy cafe, where Claire finds the owner making a meal of a customer. The irony wasted on her, she apologizes in an overly formal fashion and stumbles into a group of zombies.

At this point I'd like to digress and ask what would be a good term for a group of zombies. "Mob" could work as they (are/were) human, possibly 'tribe' if not for the fact they lack any structure at all except for walking in straight lines and using crude pathfinding. Perhaps a "pod" would be appropriate to zombies who were once deep-sea fishermen, of course most zombies seem to have spent their former lives as bikers, drunks, and police officers.

Resident Evil 3: Nemesis: With less clothing than ever, Jill capers and cavorts about town while a suspicious man/thing in a trenchcoat threatens to do horrible, tentacle-related things to her. Features an endearingly insane fat man who locks himself in a box, presumably to keep himself fresh for the Nemesis. Some guy from the first game (I think?) meets you at the police station, only to be messily impaled by said tentacle. The Nemesis crashes through a window with a rocket launcher and kind of chases you around. The puzzles within beg the question: Why would a police station, of all places, have some sort of hidden clock-passageway? I could buy that excuse in the mansion...

In the movies, ancient temples and tombs are always booby trapped, leading me to believe that's exactly why the ancient people aren't around anymore. They had to have had instances of someone waking up, wanting a drink of water and stumbling stupidly onto the panel that shoots arrows out of the walls. I smash my shoulder against the doorframe and scrape the walls in the hallway with great frequency in broad daylight. What I'm trying to say is a police station doesn't really need to make it so their meter ladies have to find secret keycards to open lockers to find multicolored gems to put in the grandfather clock just so they can get a new book of tickets. Believe you me, when the entire populous has been ambling around in a decayed and feral state, it's safe to assume they don't watch their meters.

Resident Evil: Code Veronica: Girl meets zombies. Zombies try to get girl. Jurassic Park goes up in flames?

Resident Evil: Survivor: It's a first-person shooter.

Resident Evil: The Movie: That girl from The Fifth Element wears a slinky dress and kicks dogs around in Matrix-esque fight sequences. I'm not much of a judge of horror, but surviving this movie may be the most difficult struggle yet! Zing!!

The underlying theme throughout all of Resident Evil is that the not-too-intimidating Umbrella corporation is conducting biological weapons tests in Raccoon City, and is apparently sending its own people in to investigate themselves. The conspiracy is deep and long-reaching to the point you're better off ignoring it. Every week, they develop a new strain of zombie juice and slap a random letter on it (T-Virus, U-Virus, F-Virus, etc) for some presumably valid reason. I mean, even though biological weapons are banned in the vast majority of the (civilized) world, and the only people who would buy them are probably madmen out to kill everyone including their suppliers, I'm sure there was a perfectly sane explanation for all of it. Maybe it was a bad cell phone connection.

"How would you rate the restraunt Cyrus's?"

"What's that? Create a zombie virus? Are you insane?"

Next: Dino Crisis