Imagine a dark house. You walk cautiously down the hall with shotgun in hand, nervously scanning from side to side for the enemy. There’s a faint creak as your feet tentatively weigh down the aging wood. Then, suddenly, zombies! Everywhere! Gradually stumbling down the hallway in your general direction! “Uhhh. Uhhh. Uhhh,” the leader says over and over. You try to run, but end up turning around in circles out of confusion! You try to shoot, but you’ve forgotten to hold down the shoulder button to draw the gun which is already in your hand!! The zombies are all over you now, biting, ripping and vibrating your controller! With a final pained scream, you fall down dead as the zombies continue to recycle animations at your lifeless body.

WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF SURVIVAL HORROR.

Survival Horror is one of the two or three ‘new’ genres invented in the past five years. It attempts to bridge the gap between the repetitive gameplay of action games, with the fetching of pointless items that endear RPG’s to people with too much free time. Capcom claims great pride in inventing it with their Resident Evil series. However, as early as Pac-Man, games have incorporated the elements of item-gathering and running from curiously invincible enemies. So what makes survival horror Survival Horror? In my somewhat extensive research, I’ve discovered the key elements.

• Dreary, muddled backgrounds. This is done not only to enhance mood and camouflage the monsters, but to make it really hard to find the important items. Remember, frustration over menial tasks is what sells the game!
• Appropriate voice acting. All Survival Horror characters must sound as though they jogged to the recording session in summer heat. They will then record the lines until exhausted at which they begin taping the zombie dialogue. “Uhhhh… Uhhhh….”
• Limited equipment. To enhance the realism of the (PURELY FICTIONAL WITH NO POSSIBILITY OF BECOMING REALITY) scenario, you will have an arsenal of incredibly weak guns with five bullets each. However, you can effortlessly carry six items at any given time regardless of size. You can store excess equipment like the trillion keycards, jewels, and houseplants inside Magic Boxes throughout the place. Magic Boxes are magic because if you put say, a Glock in the box in the basement, and decide you need it while upstairs, you’ll find the same Glock in the attic. These may be the same forces that created the zombies and monsters.
• Things will crash through the windows at some point. Whether it’s the dogs in Resident Evil, or the raptors in Dino Crisis, something will crash through some window at any given point in the game. This means that Chrono Trigger and TMNT: The Arcade Game have Survival Horror Elements and are therefore great by association! Or maybe that’s the other way around.

With the guidelines set down, let’s move on to highly opinionated, psuedo-in-depth coverage of individual titles.

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 restaurant Cyrus’s?”

“What’s that? Create a zombie virus? Are you insane?”

 

Following almost immediately on the mephitic rotting heels of Resident Evil came Dino Crisis, Capcom’s answer to Jurassic Park. Which in turn was Steven Spielberg’s answer to any number of Bert I. Gordon and Ed Wood films.

Join the slinky redhead Regina as she sneaks and capers about a hi-tech research facility in search of the source of the MYSTERIOUS PHENOMENA taking place on Isa Nubla- rr… I mean, the island which bears no similarity whatsoever to the island from Jurassic Park. I mean, the main hall to the visitors center- I mean, research facility, doesn’t look like the lobby of the building in Jurassic Park. Really. Not even if you strung up a huge banner reading “WHEN DINOSAURS RULED THE EARTH” and a couple T-Rex skeletons. Seriously.

Assisting her on her mission is a Jamaicany computer hacker and some uberwhiteguy. Who cares?

Gameplay itself is virtually identical to Resident Evil from what I played of DC. The backgrounds are3-D instead of pre-rendered, which is a nice touch. It also adds more ‘feel’ to the scenes where you’re being chased down a corridor by generally unhappy velociraptors. The dinosaurs either have good AI or the character handles like a river barge… I can’t be too certain of which. Manual aiming is tricky since pressing down on the stick makes Regina back up instead of aim up or down, so you rely on the auto-lock way too much.Being able to move with your weapon drawn is a plus, yes… but you’ll be wishing you could take head-shots through something other than outstanding coincidence. For you see, though you start the game with the pistol and shotgun (Survival Horror weapons ALWAYS include a pistol of some kind, usually a semi automatic, a shotgun, and a rocket launcher that can be fired almost effortlessly by a girl with no military training) the raptors take about a clip each to put down for good. So basically, you tranquilize. The tranq darts are powerful stuff and will put a raptor to sleep for about five seconds (which is impressive considering raptors are like the undead and don’t sleep.) Just make sure you don’t need to double back, ever, or you’ll die.

Oh, how you’ll die. The raptors get ahold of you and gnaw on you for a while, then they do something like toss you into a wall and tear into you again. It’s effectively the same deal as the one-life-one-hit Contra series, except instead of falling off the screen and getting it over with, it’s a graphic scene that plays out for about twenty minutes. I boiled water for some noodles while waiting for Regina to finally die in the demo disc.

The most disappointing part of Dino Crisis by far is the fact that there are only three kinds of dinosaurs. The raptors, the pteradactyls, and the freaking obvious T-Rex. Ya know what? Name me a dinosaur-based video game that doesn’t have a T-Rex or something similar to it in it. Excluding Yoshi. God only knows what he’s supposed to represent, maybe some kind of cuddly velociraptor in patent leather boots. With no teeth. That’s probably how his kind evolved the ability to eat anything lying around.

In the end, Dino Crisis isn’t a literally skin-meltingly awful game like Resident Evil. The 3-D backgrounds are great, with less of that annoying transparent wall syndrome than I’m used to. That’s not saying much considering I play 3-D games about as often as I eat breakfast. Sometimes it hits the spot but I usually get queasy on the bus. Take that, you stinking reptiles! This is for the blast damage I inflicted on myself in Heavy Gear thanks to an invisible boulder sitting right in front of my launcher! RAAAGE. That isn’t to say Dino Crisis isn’t a steamy pile in its own right; though it may not be as overtly dark and depressing (I think they wanted to go for ‘menacing’) as Resident Evil’s environment, they allocated those suck points into the enemies to make sure you CAN’T escape from them. A good example being in the demo disc, the scene where you must run from the T-Rex and dodge him while you wait for Regina’s rasta-man partner to unlock the flippin’ door. You have no room to maneuver, and the T-Rex is invincible (of course) so completing the mission is basically a mix of stalling it and pure luck.

Regina can carry more equipment than the guys from Resident Evil, but where, oh where does the hide it? Food for thought, anyway…

Originally posted Nov. 20th, 2005. Maybe.