A Brief And Very Late Review: Resident Evil Village

 

Long time followers of this blog know I have written a lot about the universe of Resident Evil games, books and movies in prior years. Like....enough that it may surprise you to know that it took me approximately 4 1/2 years from the date of its release to get around to playing (and finishing) Resident Evil Village....and I haven't even started Resident Evil 4 Remake yet, either. It took me a good year or two to get around to playing and finishing the RE 2 and 3 remakes as well. 

Part of the problem with writing about the RE 2 and 3 remakes is that, well, they were kind of decent and managed capture the feel and style of the originals in a more modern play experience without bringing over any of the wonky or janky bits. In fact they were both rather fun games to play, and as such the most I could say about them was "Thumbs up, would play again!" Also, these are stories that, even if modified a bit, are well known to me, having played the originals multiple times....so not quite as exciting as entirely new content. 

Resident Evil Village is a direct sequel to Resident Evil 7, which was the first in the series to break with a third person perspective, and also leaned into a lot of tropes that had become common in horror games around when it came out, including helpless protagonists (you eventually do get weapons and the game at some point begins to feel like a Resident Evil game, but not for a while), overwhelmingly villainous monsters who hold a clear power advantage, and for at least the majority of the game it is entirely unclear how it relates to the plot of the bigger Resident Evil universe. It eventually opens up with the (SPOILERS!) discovery of a beached Umbrella research ship, and the incredibly late game appearance of Chris Redfield, now working for a reborn Umbrella Corp, this time as an organization dedicated to cleaning up the mess of its predecessors, but until those moments the story is basically about a guy named Ethan Winters looking for his girlfriend who went back to see her weird family in the Louisiana Bayou, and they it turns out are all horrific mutant monsters that, you eventually learn, are being genetically modified by exposure to a mysterious mold that Umbrella was studying.

Cut to the sequel, in Resident Evil Village Ethan and his now wife Mia have had a child named Rose and moved to "Europe" (somewhere in or near Romania, it is presumed), where they seem to be living a normal and happy life, although Mia is acting a bit weird. Protip to young 'uns out there, its not really that weird, many moms act a bit off post-pregnancy, so if you ever find yourself there, trust me, she's just being herself, she is not secretly a Resident Evil monster. Almost immediately this is interrupted by Chris Redfield and his team of crack assassins murdering Mia and trying to spirit away baby Rose and Ethan without any explanation afforded; Chris Redfield is turning into a bit of a creepy black ops villain, it seems.

If you have seen any of this game's images, videos and discussions over the last years then you probably know this is the game with the big scary mommy-dommy vampiress, Lady Dimitrescu. As it turns out, this is only the game's first boss, as Lady Dimitrescu and her three "daughters," who are each creepy vampire-fly women are but the first stage of a much longer battle with the progeny/creations of Miranda, the actual real boss of the game and the actual reason this remote community in Romania is completely screwed up.

I played REV in the late-game DLC added third-person mode, so my sense of the game's creep factor was probably lowered by that fact a bit, but I really do love the over-the-shoulder third person perspective more than first person mode for horror games, its just the sweet spot I find most entertaining. That said, my son said he preferred the first person mode because it made the entire game creepier and more visceral, and he is not wrong; he plays all of these the day I buy them FYI, so just in case you think I'm buying a game and sitting on it four years....yeah I totally am, but the rest of the family (or those that care) have already played them to exhaustion immediately. 

The multiple bosses in the game that come after Lady Alcina Dimitrescu (as well as the vampire herself) are all transformative battles, which is a staple of Resident Evil games.....you meet the villain, who is usually normal-ish looking (or horribly mutated, but still in a "normal" way such as with Moreau) and then you eventually push them too far, they take some damage, and the familiar "Now I begin mutating Akira-style out of control into a beast ten times my size" event happens and you get to have a fun boss arena fight. This is only broken by one encounter, with the doll-maker Beneviento, a woman who can manipulate the mind through hallucinogens and uses the mutating effects of the mold's source to control her dolls. That entire sequence strips you of weapons and forces you to deal with her horrifying hallucinations without a means of defense until the very end, and its actually done incredibly well, leading to the creepiest mid-game moment where you still have agency. Many other encounters are creepy, but handled as cut scenes; the evil doll's sequence is masterfully done and is the one part of the game that most closely reminds me of the earlier RE7 game. Dimitrescu's Castle is also fairly close, as you can't really harm her or her minions without using the right environmental tactics, so much of the castle sequence is spent running and hiding, as well. But the Beneviento Doll maker? This is probably some of the best stuff I've seen in any Resident Evil title, right up there with the first Tyrant encounters in the original trilogy and the opening creepy house sequence in RE7.

Around 75% of the way through REV I began to get a sense of tedium. I admittedly had been almost 100%ing the game, finding all of the special treasures and looting everything I could, but there came a point when I realizes I had depopulated the entire village and surroundings, and all that remained was to go after the semi-final boss Heisenberg and then Miranda herself. Ethan Winters had graduated from survivor to true monster hunter, and by this point in the plot it was clear he himself could very well also be a monster, just one that didn't appear to be ready to mutate. Around this point I have to say that I began to feel like the DNA of REV now felt like a blend of the high octane action of Resident Evil 5 and 6 more than RE7; the game had firmly established that it was most definitely in the Resident Evil universe. 

Right before the final boss Miranda we find her secret lab where there was an insane level of information dumping. Lots of clues existed in the rest of the game, but the final lab neatly tied up everything in a bow, including explaining the Umbrella Corp./Dr. Spencer connections to the mysterious region and its mystery mutating mold monsters. The exposition dump was appreciated, but I really wish there had been more clues and details to be found more gradually; the end-of-game exposition dump felt if not a tad contrived, it might have been nicer to have it slightly more spread out, at least.

Similar to the RE7 DLC, but now part of the core game experience, you get a chance to play as old grizzled veteran Chris Redfield who must be like in his late 40's at the time the game takes place. Redfield gets a fun sequence where you are effectively given all the ammunition you need to fight hordes....literal, vast hordes of every lycan and other beast that has been a serious threat to Ethan up to this point with the firepower necessary to make short work of them. Before you rejoin Ethan following more blatant exposition dumps (and a final, grand explanation for his inexplicable healing powers) Chris manages to collect the goods, rescue Mia and plant the bomb (a surprisingly small bomb, but it does the job of wiping out the entire vale) before we return for Ethan's final showdown to save Baby Rose from Miranda. Miranda's fight is...fine....but perhaps not the most inspired as boss fights go. Not great, but at least not frustrating. If you had been maxing out your weapons and hoarding ammo, you will find this fight to be fairly easy, or at least not difficult.

I haven't played the Rose DLC yet. My son missed that the DLC released and wants to watch me play it. It sounds like it will be typical RE bonus content that is okay but not great; we'll see. The main game was well worth it, but I was surprised at how much REV shed it's RE7 vibe for more conventional RE style horror....but with the concession that maybe that was inevitable, playing in the third person mode.

If you, like me, somehow never played this game, but enjoy good survival horror, then I would give it a thumbs up for you! If you haven't played RE7 you really ought to play that one first, though. Solid A- from me, mainly because I was, toward the end, feeling like the game could have ended at about the 70% mark and I would have been content.....but to its credit, there weren't too many areas that felt like a drawn out slog (maybe tiny bit with The Factory at the end, which was tense and interesting but also easy to get lost in). But all of the locations and bosses of the family were in general well realized and different enough that the game kept providing new and interesting stuff at every step, and it really was only in the late game when I began to feel like  Ethan was the Real Monster here that it felt like it was time for the story to end (but I still had to defeat Heisenberg and Miranda by that point!) 

Now to play Resident Evil 4 Remake before Resident Evil Requiem comes out! I have pre-ordered Requiem, and am determined to play it on day of release, none of this multi-year procrastination again!

What's left to say.....hmmmm....how about, "Hey Capcom, when's Resident Evil Code Veronica getting remade????"

One final thought: what was up with Duke? Your resident merchant is never explained, and chooses to be enigmatic right up to the end. I was expecting some sort of reveal that he was cousin to Dimitrescu or something. My son says there's a connection to the arms dealer in RE 4 but he also hangs out on fan-theory forums so its hard to parse out what is real and what is just redditors pulling nonsense out of thin air.

The Final Resident Evil 6 Review: The Ada Wong Campaign

It has at last come to this. After three other reviews, along with a re-evaluation of the original review of the Leon Kennedy campaign when Capcom graciously patched the game in with a "casual" mode (read: mode for guys over age 35 with nominal reflexes) I have at last gotten around to finishing the final campaign in Resident Evil 6: the unlockable Ada Wong campaign.

Disclosure: This version is based on the PC edition, single player mode, with Casual on to make it a pleasant experience rather than a gruelling nightmare of hate and bile. There will be spoilers, too. This campaign is the one that ties the other three together, cleans up the plot holes and in fact makes the entire storyline make sense.

Ada Wong has been with the RE universe since Resident evil 2 when she was engaging in some industrial espionage, trying to steal the G virus. As it turns out, the whole reason for RE6's events boil down to two factors: a madman Mr. Simmons in charge of Homeland Defense who decides to manufacture bioweapons to keep his job viable, and one of those bioweapons turning on him: Carla, the C-Virus created clone of Ada Wong who, it turns out, spends much of the game sowing havoc and confusion for the other lead characters.

Ada Wong is brought into the fray when Simmons apparently decides to brag about what he's done, and perhaps get Ada to dispatch the rogue Carla for him. Ada begins piecing together the torrid puzzle of deceit, treachery and betrayal as she weaves through her own story bits as well as the portions of the other campaigns, interacting with all the major protagonists along the way. She's conveniently wearing a tight red and black suit, so if you play the other campaigns and notice that Ada shows up in either a purple blouse or a red blouse then you know which one (Carla-Ada-clone or real Ada) is onscreen at the moment.

Without giving too much away, Ada helps everyone out while tracking down her clone, then escapes her clone after Carla overdoses on C-Virus, then she helps put Simmons down and at last finds Carla's secret labs where she started the chaos and wipes it out. The journey (on easy mode) is actually quite fun. The most interesting part of the experience for me was seeing how Ada gets around when everyone else in the game is trudging along the hard way, one street or building infested with BOWs (bio-organic weapons) at a time. Ada uses the startlingly effective grappling hook to grab onto situationally specific key spots and keep her pace measured and overhead most of the time. She spends a lot of time up in the rafters snipe assisting Leon, or maybe in a helicopter (one of the few pleasant in-vehicle experiences in the game).

The campaign, despite revisiting many spots where she appeared in other tales of RE6 does not feel stale or rehashed; it's got its own pace and rhythm, and Ada's style carries through well. Ada actually gets to stop and deal with the occasional puzzle, something sorely missing from the other campaigns. The game does suffer a bit in that, like the rest of RE6, it's ultimately a structured linear corridor shooter heavily disguised to look like something else; you do have a few hub spots where you get some freedom of movement, but the game's linearity is still the underpinning of the design.

There are many other ways that RE6 could have been designed, and I hope that RE7 takes this into consideration. It is a fun game, and it does far better that Resident Evil 5 (imo) at evoking survival horror, but it also is a long way from the original premise and style of Resident Evil, something that is perfectly attainable in today's game design as demonstrated by Resident Evil: Revelations.

As a side note, I've played a fair amount of the multiplayer game options, and they are fun. Not "you have got to play this" sort of fun, but "I like RE and this scratched an odd little itch" kind of fun. If you have a choice of editions to play go for the PC Steam version, since it adds the Left4Dead 2 crew and monsters to the multiplayer.

It's been more than a year since RE6 was released, and I've played it in fits and spurts over that period. My initial foray into the game was excitement mixed with disappointment and irritation, but with the patches adding in casual mode, a way to pause, and cleaning up some odd bits, followed by the PC version (the superior version to play) it made the game worthwhile for RE fans. Given that you can find it for $20 or less now, it's hard not to recommend the game to those looking for something with a lot of cinematic action and a little homage to survival horror mixed in.

That said, I really think Capcom needs to think carefully about what the next iteration of the franchise is going to look like. There's a lot of competition out there, from Outlast to Slenderman and State of Decay, and Resident Evil can still pull off real Survival Horror in its own unique way without compromising its overall identity. RE6's greatest current competition is it's own sister title, RE: Revelations, and RE7 needs to be built with that in mind.

A-

After Action Report - Resident Evil: Revelations

I completed Resident Evil: Revelations unexpectedly last week. I don't know quite how that happened, I'm usually much better about pacing myself and dragging out games I enjoy for months, sometimes even years! Suddenly I'm done with RE:R, I'm almost done with the Ada campaign in RE6, and I'm slowly completing the DLC content in RE: Operation Raccoon City, at least when I can stomach the insane default difficulty level of the DLC. Yikes....I wonder when the next installment of the franchise will show up...probably around 2015-2016 on the next generation of consoles. Sigh.

Resident Evil: Revelations was unarguably closer in design, feel and intent to the classic RE titles (1 through 3 plus Code Veronica), although it's engine is clearly a build from RE 4 and 5. The PC version added in high res graphics and decent model designs, but the mere fact that this started as a 3DS title impresses me. This alone says volumes about what the 3DS can handle, and I'd pick one up, except no one seems to make mature games for the handheld. Likewise, the fact that RE:R was designed for a handheld means that it had a smaller design budget and specific considerations about how it would play, and as a consequence of this it's PC port is actually really damn good.

Seriously...because the game had to consider players holding a handheld title for short play sessions, it made the game's structure built around a digestible series of episodes, each of which doesn't take too long to complete, has (mostly) decent auto save points, and starts off each episode and session with a fun recap on the plot up to that point. This structure of convenience aimed at the handheld market actually makes the game equally accessible and friendly to the desktop PC (and console) gamer who maybe just wants to play a game for thirty minutes and feel like he accomplished something.

There are some games (especially some MMOs) where I don't even bother to log in because I only have 30 minutes and don't want to spend it traveling, on inventory management, or just trying to remember where I left off and why. RE:R has none of those issues, and is incredibly friendly to short-burst gaming.

RE:R is also built around a more traditional design and structure, one familiar to fans of the original games. There's a lot of locations and art assets that get re-used, although what's really going on is you're having most of your adventures on a spooky cruise liner, a remote mountain installation, and occasionally in flashbacks to a man-made floating wonder city called Terragrigia shortly before its about to be destroyed. You'll grow quite familiar with the weaving maze of corridors in the haunted ghost ship which Jill and her BSAA partner Parker must explore, even as Chris and his femme fatale buddy Jessica crawl around in the snowy mountains looking for other clues.

The game introduces a bunch of new characters to the RE storyline, and most of them live to the end. In fact I have to say this game did a great job of adding new and interesting faces to the RE canon; we get more of that in RE6, of course, but for whatever reason the characters introduced here in RE:R get more story time, more attention, more fun and cheesy lines and are just plain old more interesting because of this. If there's a RE7 in the near future, I would really like to see Parker Luciani, Jessica Sherawat and Clive O'Brien show up again (although admittedly, some are more likely to return than others, based on RE:R's ending sequence, which is fairly comprehensive in establishing where everyone ends up).

There's really only one character that I didn't see enough of, and she's mostly there as a unique and very persistent foe: Rachel, or more accurately Rachel Ooze. Rachel is pretty much spoken of only posthumously, and her real legacy lies with the Raid Mode events, but her persistent resurrected form haunts your protagonists throughout the game, and it would have been nice to have learned a bit more about her prior to her death and rebirth.

Rachel before...

...and after. FYI she's available in Raid Mode as a DLC pack,
and is my second favorite Raid Mode character after Jill

Not only does RE:R offer up a twelve chapter tale in the classic RE:R vein, filled to the brim with things you can click on to learn more cool story bits, find keys and otherwise deal with various puzzles and mysteries, but it also provides a robust after-game solo and multiplayer co-op feature called Raid Mode. The Raid Mode lets you revisit the many areas of the game (it's broken up into roughly eighteen maps), bringing in an array of different characters and costume options (many of which require unlocking over time.). You equip them with tricked out weaponry and proceed to tackle each level in Raid Mode like a mini-adventure, complete with an end goal to reach and an array of threats between you and that goal. This mode was originally conceived in brief way back in the bonus hidden level for Resident Evil 2, where you could play the curiously named Umbrella agent Hunk as he blasted his way through Raccoon City, and over the years this got revisited in various forms including Mercenary Mode from RE5 (and other titles). Raid Mode is similar, but with an emphasis on solo and co-op play it allows you to essentially play through the levels and maps of the original game in an endless array of mini missions, which turns out to be strangely compelling, and a lot of fun. With level up mechanics, weapon upgrading and collecting, alternate skins and characters and a large number of escalating maps, it's a really cool way to extend the life of RE:R beyond the single player campaign. I'll be playing Raid Mode for a long time to come; it's actually more fun than the Mercenaries Modes in RE6 (though to be fair I quite enjoy those as well).

So, long story short, here's RE:R in a nutshell:

Single Player Campaign takes about 10-14 hours, is very fun and feels very much like original-style RE

Raid Mode is a fun extra feature that actually plays out like an endless array of cool mini missions, and allows co-op gaming

RE:R's budget design aimed at handhelds translates into a very easy-in and easy-out style of gaming that prompted it to make good use of its resources to tell a fun, sometimes camp, other times tense and exciting survival horror tale that treats the Resident Evil universe right. I want future titles in the franchise that are more like Resident Evil: Revelations.

A+++

A Quick Overview of the Recent Cornucopia of Survival Horror and Zombie Games

There have been a lot of fresh zombie and survival horror titles hitting the PC and consoles lately....the last few months have been a veritable banquet for the undead vs. hearty suvivors! We all know about Resident Evil 6, which was released for the PC a month or two back...and of course I'll be blogging more about it's final campaign (and multiplayer) soon enough. In the meantime, some others worth mentioning (or warning you about):

Resident Evil: Revelations

I'll be properly reviewing this, but RE: Revelations is a fantastic upgraded port of the same game from the Nintendo 3DS lineup. I almost bought a 3DS to play this title, but then I remembered that Nintendo only releases one "mature" themed title on each of it's consoles to sucker older gamers in; the rest of their offerings are aimed squarely at 13 year old girls and emo boys for as far as the eye can see.

Either way waiting paid off; this is an amazingly fun game and truer to the spirit and style of classic Resident Evil than any of the recent offerings; it's proof you can upgrade the controls, spiff up the gun mechanics, and take the same general engine from RE 4 and RE 5 and make something that looks, feels and plays like classic RE. The multiplayer raid mode is amazingly fun, too!

Dead Island: Riptide

This was clearly intended to be a second DLC expansion when someone at Deep Silver realized they could make it a bit bigger, package a new island to explore, and chuck it out as a full title in its own right. I've played it for a few hours, but if you (like me) found yourself more or less burned out on the Dead Island style by the end of the first game then this one has exactly nothing new to offer. It's not the proper expansion everyone was hoping for, instead just being an effort at milking this particular engine for a bit more cash. PCGamer's review says it all, I feel.

The Last of Us

This PS3 exclusive from Naughty Dog has been all over game site news so if you haven't heard of it you must not be a console gamer or you come to my blog by way of the paper and pencil side of the equation. The Last of Us, in the time I've had to play it, is an amazing game and it's intro/prologue chapter is actually one of the best gaming experiences of this sort I've ever played, hands down. It's a very compelling title, perhaps even a bit too much so; I've been playing lots of Resident Evil just to wait for a time to properly savor (and wrestle with) the stark what-if reality of the apocalyptic world and its incredibly likable survivors The Last of Us imposes on our psyche.

State of Decay

An Xbox 360 exclusivc, and only $20 to boot, is an amazing zombie apocalypse sandbox adventure in a very rich, deeply explorable package with tons of interesting options. I hope it doesn't remain an exclusive forever; it feels like a title that more properly deserves attention on the PC. The fact that no one until now has made a full-on zombie apocalypse sandbox experience in third-person mode is kind of amazing, really. "Grand Theft Zombie" is a fantastic concept, and State of Decay fills this space very well. Sure, there's DayZ for Arma....but here at least you can worry properly about the zombies and not griefers!

So, final consensus? Get RE: Revelations, State of Decay and The Last of Us if you happen to have the right hardware for each. Get Dead Island: Riptide if you find it on sale for cheap and wanted more of the same from the original game.

Thirty One Days of Horror: Dead Space

Day Twenty Five: Dead Space

Back to video game horror! I'm an unabashed fan of Dead Space, having played through it once on the Xbox 360 and twice on the PC. This is a rarity for me; I don't usually indulge in single player games more than once or twice, and very few titles have earned this honor, among them being Mass Effect, Fallout 3 and of course Dead Space.

If you don't know anything about Dead Space then I'll avoid spoiling it for you. The short synopsis is as follows: you play as Isaac Clark, an engineer onboard the USG Kellion, a deep space rescue and repair vessel that answers distress signals (shades of the earlier film Super Nova). In fact, it's just received one from the "planetcracker" mining vessel Ishimura, which has gone strangely silent after what must have been a massive systems failure. This particular ship is one of the first of its kind, a mining vessel that uses gravity tech to effectively gouge out chunks of planetoid and engage in an extremely high-efficiency refinement process to extract a variety of rare metals and other useful elements. It's a rough sort of job to work, and the ship environments in this game reflect an environment and standard of living that makes Alien's corporate-owned Nostromo look like a luxury liner.



Isaac and his cohorts quickly run into trouble and find their own ship disabled. Then they discover that something has gone horribly wrong onboard the Ishimura, which appears to have succumbed to some sort of invasion or assimilation by an alien presence: the necromorphs.

Plot complications begin to pile up quickly. Isaac has a bigger stake in things than normal, too. It turns out his girlfriend Nicole was on board the ship, and she was a convert to a cult of unitarianism that was prominent onboard the Ishimura's crew. The Ishimura stumbled across an ancient alien artifact, the Red Marker, the recovery of which sparked the entire debacle. The story spirals deeply into a troubled nexus of religion, alien transformation, government conspiracies and a desperate need to survive in the face of madness and death. Great stuff!

Dead Space as a game is actually much better to play on the PC than the Xbox in my experience. My original play through on the 360 was a bit frustrating, and there were spots where that frustration grew by leaps and bounds (there's an instance where you man a point defense canon to destroy asteroids threatening to breach the ship's hull, for example; on a mouse and keyboard this was a relatively simple task, but on the Xbox with a controller I almost quit and never returned....only dogged persistence saw me through).



The game was unique when it came out for employing "in game" queues and status interfaces that were effectively part of the actual environment. Isaac's engineering suit has gauges and a unique spinal tube of energy which fluctuates with the health of the character. When he talks to his associates who have hidden away and bark orders at him while staying as far from the action as they can, he relies on a projected holographic field that appears in front of him rather than on the screen. It was an innovate concept which helped greatly with the problem of immersion vs. UI issues other games had wrsetled with, and this innovative format continued into Dead Space 2.

Dead Space was the last genuinely true-to-spirit survival horror game I have played, discounting those moments in Resident Evil 5 or 6 where it touches upon the genre again (Before veering off into other action shooter formats). It embodied mood, a sense of distrurbing revelation slowly building over time, a desperate main character who's isolation and sanity are at odds with survival, and despite a wide arrange of firepower it manages to keep the main character in threat of danger and short on ammo. A first play through of Dead Space will always be hard; it can get easier and more efficient as you go through a second or third time, but even then there's the higher difficulty tempting you with incredibly difficult and deadly challenge.

If you haven't played Dead Space and have a tolerance for the sort of video games that require a third-person sense of spatial awareness, then this is one of the best and last true survival horror titles to come out in the last five years or so. Another one of Death Bat's A+ titles!



For extra Dead Space fun I recommend the novel Dead Space: Martyr written by B.K. Evenson, whose horror work I had run into before and quite enjoyed. Martyr takes place centuries earlier in the Dead Space universe, not long after man's expansion into space, and deals with the discovery of the first Marker, found on Earth, at the center of the Chiculub Crater off the Yucatan Coast. It's an extremely well done, creepy novel which adds a great deal to the Dead Space backstory and also helps to set up a decent explanation for the popularity and origin of the unitarian cult, as well as some of the mysteries of the Red Marker found in Dead Space. A great read, well worth checking out!

Saturday: Chernobyl Diaries and More

I figured it out: Dungeons & Dragons Next is making me want to play more Castles & Crusades. DDN, as I read it, is feeling to me to be on about the same level and focus as C&C, which is good....but unlike the DDN playtest doc I've got a complete rules set for C&C. Plus, I'm actually running it (started a new Saturday campaign as of last week, yay, hope my players show up again....)

Why does it say June 22nd? Hmmmm.

So I saw Chernobyl Diaries. In many ways I enjoyed it more than The Cabin in the Woods, if only because Chernobyl Diaries was an earnest effort at using horror scenery porn and mood to build slowly but effectively to a somewhat overdone but still entertaining finale...it was survival horror done right, but very simple in its execution and approach, no overarching plot, just some unfortunate people stupid enough to follow Yuri the tourist guide to visit the abandoned city of Pripyat on The Wrong Day.

Plus, if you watch this movie AFTER Cabin in the Woods, its fairly obvious that (spoiler alert!) Russia, at least, contained their Old One for one more season, heh....!

So anyway, Ten Cool Things about Chernobyl Diaries:

1. Awesome scenery porn. Bonus points if you really dig the whole "collapsed civilization/fallout/Chernobyl rotting away" look and want to see a movie set in such a place.

2. Excellent blend of a real world location with an already weird and distrurbing history with the terrifying horror-nightmare reimagining of the same.

3. Good old fashioned survival horror of the doom-iest kind.

4. Learn what would happen if a pack of feral ghouls were loose in Pripyat.

5. Russians are so fatalistic and pragmatic all at once.

6. Yuri the tour guide from your nightmares!

7. Although one would not want to march into Chernobyl's reactor #4 unprotected, this movie dials up the residual radioactivity to some new highs.

8. I love the slow, methodical build through the first two thirds of the movie. It saves the more conventional over-the-top horror elements for last, but really, the whole movie manages to make a threat out of normal physics, normal people and minimal CGI.

9. Excellent, absolutely marvelously terrifying use of real darkness and night to convey mood. No fake exterior lighting here (I'm looking at you, Cabin in the Woods).

10. This film manages to skirt the lines of supernatural, sci fi, hillbilly horror, chainsaw massacre and Nature Hates Us horror without actually being any of those. It also manages to keep from displaying full-frontal monstrosity; you'll never really get a good look at the antagonists.

I don't remember this shot from the movie. Hmmmm.

I only really had one gripe about this movie. I appreciate that it is common now in most genre films to have a bunch of young, handsome college-age twenty-somethings out for a bit of fun which goes disastrously wrong, and I appreciated that Cabin made fun of this trope, but really, seriously....I haven't seen a decent horror film in some time now that didn't start off this way. What the hell!

I see Feral Ghouls everywhere...

But Yuri, for as long as he made it, was a real hoot, lemme tell ya.

Now, excuse me, as I need to go load up S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl, I have an intense urge to playuthat game...

Raccoon City: A Great Vacation Spot

Not much to this post other than a brief follow-up to my earlier post a couple week back about Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City (RE:ORC). When I discussed it before I was sort of on the fence....the game looked like it had the potential to go either up or downhill, and I wasn't entirely sure how it would work out. Well, as luck would have it I've found I really am enjoying the game. It's not conventional Resident Evil as we all know the main series, and those decrying it for failing to be a proper part of the "numbered" portion of the series are missing the point (they might as well complain about the on-rails shooters in the RE series that propogate like gnats on the Wii, for point of example). But it is an amazingly fun Left 4 Dead style shooter flavored with some really awesome Resident Evil pepper sauce.

Anyway, the game managed to capture a real sense of survival and desperation, as well as still making zombies (even the staggering and slow RE zombies) both startling and dangerous to a gang of professional, well-armed killers. I have actually felt that special "magic" one occasionally gets when a game manages a keen synergy....that sweet spot where you are in the moment, and forget for a bit you're playing a game. I like that. So yes, I am endorsing RE:ORC and suggest everyone who didn't like its style can wait for Resident Evil 6 later this year. Me, I love them all (except for those rail shooters) so I get the best of both worlds.

Soul Not So Dark, and Raccoon City Under Siege Again, Film at 11

I gave up and traded Dark Souls in for Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City after one final, earnest effort to get somewhere without wanting to ragequit the game. After ragequitting (again) and then moving on, I feel as if I finally got out of an abusive relationship. On the downside, Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City is not the stellar game I (didn't really) expect it to be, although it is fun. It's key problem right now is that it is a bit of a genre break from the traditional Resident Evil format, and so far after only a short time playing through its clear that the game is influenced a bit more by the amoral badassery of Milla Jovovich's character in the movies and slightly less so by the more plodding, sense-of-dread and threat ambience of the classics. It's also clear that this game is trying damned hard to inject a little bit of the RE universe into the Left 4 Dead/Call of Duty/Gear of War multiplayer co-op mode. In fact, just about every move you can make in those aforementioned games is available here.

RE:ORC so far underwhelms for two reasons, though: so far its a linear cooridor slog, and although it's trussed up nicely the fact that I noticed this about 5-10 minutes in is a bad sign of linear cooridors to come. There's nothing wrong with linear game design, I feel, so long as the game's level design does a good enough job of fooling you into not noticing; this is not doing a good job of it. It seems like a lot of Japanese-developed games (for example FFXIII) have this problem.

Second, and more importantly, the game feels kind of by-the-numbers, like the lead developer had a list that marketing gave him after they played L4D, MW and GoW and other games, of each game feature or element they wanted represented here. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it may be the reason the game feels less like an original romp, and more like a "trace"  of  these other games.

Also, there's a lot of classic "hide behind conveniently scattered industrial boxes while capping enemies too dumb to crouch low enough not to have their noggin blown off" gameplay.

It's too early yet for me to say anything else, but if it gets better I'll talk about it more. I do like the character models....the Umbrella goons in your squad are all a bunch of fine, evil looking/acting/talking psychopaths. And Hunk, the unfortunately named side character from the bonus quest in Resident Evil 2 (or was it 3?) shows up right off as a truly malicious patron/insitgator (and ally, at least for now) from the get-go. That part is a lot of fun, and distinguishes this game from the rest of the RE series in a cool, interesting way.

And for the record, as new co-op multiplayer games go, this one has other recent efforts (like the unfortunate Payday: The Heist) beat hands down with better gameplay and even better AI so far. On the other hand, like many co-op games these days its missing a split-screen mode, which disappointed my wife greatly. Not gonna go out and buy a second copy (or second Xbox) anytime soon just to play with her. Hmmmm.....it would be a good excuse, though.....




It's kind of weird, really, it feels like the late 90's all over again with the old PS1. I have Silent Hill: Downpour, the Silent Hill HD Collection and now Resident Evil's latest game all sitting in my console collection waiting for Marcus to fall asleep so I can play. The more things change...

The Last of Us

It's definitely a survival game...likely even a survival horror game, but beyond that it's hard to say much more; that sure wasn't a zombie that shows up....at least, not the conventional kind! This trailer has captured my interest a lot; if this game ends up being worth it, I may finally cave and get a PS3....!

Get More: GameTrailers.com, The Last of Us - VGA 2011: Exclusive Debut Trailer HD, PC Games, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360

Some Seriously Good Horror Music - or, you got your Mythos in my Music!

I ran across Out of Orion (Ox3) entirely by accident while doing my bi-weekly Jamendo dig. They have a lot of stuff on Jamendo for private download....and it is all very, very good stuff, especially for backgound music while playing Call of Cthulhu, Conspiracy X or GURPS Horror in any flavor. Hell, it's just good for background music while reading...you name it. Here are a few samples of Ox3 for your perusal:

Royalty free music for professional licensing

Royalty free music for professional licensing

Royalty free music for professional licensing

....They have 34 albums up on Jamendo. It is all amazingly good darkambient, horror, sombient-like and, well....if you like this kind of stuff, its kind of like a goldmine of aural evil!

Cursed Mountain

I finished Curse Mountain a few weeks back, and it was an enjoyable and interesting experience. It's not a game for people who pride strong FPS-style gameplay. It's not a game for people who thought Silent Hill was dumb because you couldn't machine gun down the demon nurses. It's not a game for people who prize gameplay over atmosphere and story...etc. etc.

It is, however, an amazing and very much unknown Survival Horror tale about a man searching for his mad brother on a Himalayan Mountain that labors under a terrifying, ancient curse, is riddled with demons and hungry ghosts, and contains an eerie, slowly revealed mystery about why the protgaonist's brother journeyed to the mountain, the tragedy that was set in motion by his actions, and what you must do to find redemption for him.

I learned to Haaaaaate this jerk demon dude

Cursed Mountains was originally released for the Wii, and I lamented never getting a chance to play it until I discovered a PC port available over at Gamersgate, amazingly.

Cursed Mountain will appeal to you if you like Silent Hill and other similar games, where the psychological horror is as meaningful as the atmospherics, the loneliness, the horror of the slowly unfolding tale, and the frailty of your character. It's unique among survival horror games for picking a haunted mountain as its center-piece, and it manages to provide many hours of interesting gameplay with only few frustrating moments to it.

Take note that while Cursed Mountain has been noted for its mountain climbing elements as distinctly unique, they are not overly elaborate in terms of actual gameplay; things like oxygen and freezing to death are elements you will see dealt with, but when actually going up an icy cliff, the game is reaching more for "get the job done" and less of the "precise mountain climbing emulation." Not being a hardcore mountain climber, this did not bother me.

The game's key problem is both innovative and annoying all at once: when you encounter supernatural entities or objects you can defeat or overcome them by manifesting through mystical means the mandala which empowers or controls them. This is clearly a carry-over from the Wii-mote sensor, for you effectively draw the pattern of the mandala to activate it. The concept probably worked well on the Wii, but it translates into a mouse-drawn marginally annoying process here, which manages to allude to the interesting notion of the mandalas but in a fashion which can grow quite tiresome for some, especially since it consumes only time and offers no real challenge unless you are drunk or high.

The game is not the flashiest; if you have an older computer, you should be able to run this without issue. That said, it looks better than any Xbox original or PS2 era game of the same type, except perhaps for Resident Evil 4.

In any case, if you consider yourself a survival horror fan, I strongly reccommend Cursed Mountain.