Resident Evil Retrospective: Resident Evil 3 Nemesis (PSN)

Counting backwards, we continue with the Resident Evil Retrospective with the most fun, tightly coiled and enjoyable Resident Evil experience I've had so far. Providing an incredible amount of innovation to the "classic" Resident Evil formula, as well as one of the most terrifying and effective villains in the RE-verse, Resident Evil 3 is an action-horror masterpiece. But is it flawless?

Jill Valentine has had a pretty shit week. After being sent to investigate a mysterious mansion in the first game, she now finds herself trapped within a zombie-infested Raccoon City and desperately searching for a way out. To complicate matters, she's being relentlessly pursued by a seemingly invincible killing machine and racing the clock against an impending nuclear cleansing. Despite this incredible premise, the story falls on it's face right from the beginning. Jill is just an uninteresting character. Outside of generic badass chic, she really has nothing that resembles a personality. Joining her is Carlos Olivera, Mr. 2D Hot Latino Guy, and his team of "russian" mercs with secret motivations. Thankfully, the Nemesis is such an effective character and plot device that it stops things becoming boring. The incredible tension and horror this relentless machine creates is reminiscent of Resident Evil 2's "Mr X" (who I'll talk about him in my Resident Evil 2 Retrospective), but retains an originality all to his own. There's no real explanation for who or what he is, or why he is relentlessly pursuing any remaining STARS members, which only layers on the tension. Every other aspect of the story just doesn't work. The voice acting is as awful as ever, but now without an interesting script or at least well-written characters to counter it. The only real ingenuity in the story are these "live trigger" moments, where you can make a binary decision at key story points that supposedly affect the story, though after only one playthrough I can't really comment on how much this does affect things. Such a thing seems run-of-the-mill these days, but was innovative back then and still provides a fun distraction now.

On the gameplay front, Resident Evil 3 really shines. It feels like the perfection of the mechanics. The tank controls remain, but now there's a quick 180-turn (which would become a staple of the series from now on). Jill seems to move faster, too, and all the animations (doors opening, stairs climbing etc) play out much faster, keeping the pace way up. The real strength of the gameplay comes from a seemingly tiny thing - the dodge move. If you press the 'action' button at the right time while holding your weapon, Jill will perform a context sensitive dodge move. This one simple thing makes combat much more fun, especially against the faster, more vicious creature. No longer do you stand around uselessly shooting and then desperately try to rotate and run away from their attacks. This not only makes combat more interesting, but balances out the boss fights a lot better. Nemesis especially is relentless and powerful with his attacks, especially some of his later forms with tentacles and spikes and ranged attacks. The puzzles remain, but are way more streamlined and way less obtuse than any previous games in the series. The inventory management, health management and saving system remains exactly the same. There are only 8 inventory slots, so excess items must be stored in item boxes scattered around the place and traded in and out as necessary. Saving is limited by however many ink ribbons you have (although easy mode provides unlimited saves a la RE 4) and health is managed by a variety of different healing items. Nuts and bolts aside, it's damn fun, really balancing the feel between action and tension. I played through on easy mode, which has more of an action feel with more weapons, more ammo but hard mode still retains a very survival horror feel. Not to mention it is damn hard. You really have to nail the dodge move, as well as managing every single bullet, every single healing item and every single save.

Graphically, Nemesis could easily be mistaken for it's predecessor. Character models are blocky and aliased, their mouths don't move when they speak. Gun models are kind of blah as well. The backgrounds are well designed and all pre-rendered, but the textures are very muddied. This PS1 game after all, but it is disappointing that there's been no improvement since 2. The locations are bigger, though. You really get the opportunity to explore Raccoon City, and a lot of locations within it. The hospital and the clock-tower are especially creepy. CAPCOM is really great at telling the story through the scenery. The city is in ruins, and it's often fun looking around at the wreckage and trying to work out exactly what happened here. Locations change occasionally, too, on return to them. An extra dead body, or more junk, just little subtle things that can shake things up. The colour palette is a bit more varied, too, with some brighter primary colours. It all seems slightly less blurry and murky than the original.

The soundtrack remains strong, with a lot of recognisable themes returning, such as the save room, but also a lot of original work. The music blurs between industrial, electronic and classic B-grade horror cliches. Sound effects have improved slightly, but are still very low-quality. Weapons sound rather weak, especially. The voice acting ranges from bad to awful. The zombie and monster sound effects are very good, though, especially the Nemesis' creepy mantra of "STARS". It chills you every time you hear it, often just before he appears sprinting wildly at you, fists swinging.

Despite the strength of it's gameplay, Nemesis is ultimately let down by bad characters and a badly told story. Nemesis himself remains probably the most effective and terrifying RE villain, but none of the main characters are strong or interesting, especially Jill and Carlos. That said, the gameplay is tight, tense and incredibly fun and I can recommend this on it's gameplay alone. If you can look past the story and all it's flaws, there is a tonne of fun to have with Resident Evil 3: Nemesis.

Resident Evil Retrospective: Resident Evil 4 HD (PS3)

With Resident Evil coming out soon, I felt it was high time to go back and check out what it was about this series that incites such passion in the fan base. So I started at the one game I tend to hear the most about, the 4th entry in the series. Often hailed as the best, and credited with single-handedly revolutionising the survival horror genre (for better or worse), with it's recent HD re-release I figured it was finally time to see what all the fuss was about.

I'll briefly mention the pros and cons of the HD dressing here, as it's barely relevant to anything I want to say. If you've ever played any of the earlier releases, there's really no reason the buy this. The "HD" only means they upscaled the resolution, all the original graphics are left entirely untouched. Characters look alright, and the environmental designs are interesting, but the textures themselves are very blurry and stretched, and the whole aesthetic and colour palette is very washed out. Sound is an issue, too, with a lot of the audio and music coming across low quality and grainy. Outside of the upscale, the HD re-release bundles together all the post release content, including the Ada Wong side missions and the Mercenary mode, which I still haven't had much of an opportunity to check out.

Story wise, RE 4 plays out like a B-grade horror movie, filled with bad dialogue, over-the-top voice acting and ridiculous plot contrivances. Leon S. Kennedy, no longer the cocky, young cop who survived Raccoon City, has grown up and joined the Secret Service. His first job is to protect the president's daughter, who is conveniently kidnapped. And so Leon is sent to an unnamed European location, coming across as a weird blend between Transylvannia and South America. It turns out that the locals aren't to friendly here, and are in fact being controlled by a mysterious parasite called Las Plagas, providing faster, more intelligent "zombies" for Leon to fight. The plot jumps around from ridiculous, to terrible, to insane as character motivations are revealed, plot twists fly fast and furious and villains posture and pontificate all their wonderful plans for world domination. And with both Leon and Ashley, the president's daughter, both infected, it soon becomes a race against time to find the cure and escape. Leon delivers a suitably action-hero performance, rife with one liners and sardonic dialogue. Paul Mercier is a much more competent voice actor than the original Leon, providing some nuances to a basically one-note role. During story moments, Carolyn Lawrence manages to convey a sense of strength and sophistication, mixed with vulnerability to Ashley, but during gameplay her dialogue devolves to a series of shrieks and incessant squeaking of "Leon! Help me, Leon!". Potentially the most frightening part of the game. Ada Wong is a stand-out again, both character and voice-over wise. Her motivations are more clouded than ever, and the femme fatale relationship with Leon is well fleshed out. Outside of voice acting, the sound fx are decent. The guns have a decent weight to their shots, and the "zombie" dialogue, although low quality and repetitive, feels sufficiently alien and creepy. The music is horror cliche, but effective within the setting.


Gameplay, however, is where the game's strength lies. The camera locks over Leon's shoulder, and pulling your gun pull up a laser sight for precision aiming. Moving and shooting is non-existent, forcing you to dispatch enemies quickly, but precisely, before they close in on you and force you to move again. For the modern gamer, it can be a bit of an adjustment. The quick turn, pressing "X" while moving backwards, is the greatest tool in your arsenal. Once you learn to use this properly, the pace can actually be quite fast. Gameplay is constantly tense, with many different types of enemies often rushing at you from all directions. Some enemies carry melee weapons, while later ones carry ranged weapons from crossbows all the way up to rocket launchers. There's also mini-bosses, like the hulking El Gigante, or the creepy flying insect types. Thankfully, Leon is armed with an ever increasing, fully upgradable, arsenal. A lot of fun lies in choosing and perfecting your arsenal. A new game + mode allows you to carry all your inventory across, with bonus cash and items, allowing you to upgrade and perfect your arsenal to your heart's content. There's also boss fights, but these suffer with age. The often employ cheap tactics, and always devolve into avoidance and repetition. They're big, flashy, but unfortunately probably one of the worst parts of the game. There's some basic puzzle solving, too, but more of the push block, or fetch quest variety. Consider yourself warned, however, that the sections with Ashley are escort missions. There's not a lot of them, thankfully, but they can be very frustrating, You need to manage her health, protect her from enemies and basically do everything for her. See, enemies won't only just attack her, but also try to kidnap her as well, meaning you can never stray very far from her. Friendly fire is also a big problem, meaning you have to be even more careful with your shots and anything explosive is basically out. She won't move out of the way of explosions, but at least she ducks under shots. Mixed in is the mid 2000's quick-time events that Capcom loved so much. While normally a small annoyance, there are some that fly by crazy fast and are often instant failure, bumping you back to the last checkpoint, however far away that was.


I found myself enjoying the game much more the second time around. As I got used to the controls, and started to understand conserving ammo and health, I finally started to uncover why everyone praises this game so much. The gameplay is addictive, and a lot of fun. The story, provided you don't take it too seriously, is a lot of fun. It's a shame the HD uplifting didn't extend past the upscale, but the game itself is still pretty good looking and at the end of the day, horror games shouldn't be all squeaky clean anyway. This is a game that appeals to both survival horror fans and third person shooter fans. It's only $20 on the PSN, it's really worth the download. I can whole-heartedly recommend this one.

Dragon's Dogma Review

It's pretty rare that I don't know what I think about something. My thoughts are rarely concise and entirely logical, but 9 times out of 10, I know what something means to me. Dragon's Dogma, however, has left me completely confounded. Even now, days after finishing the main quest and hanging up my adventurers hat, I'm still not entirely sure what just happened and how it makes me feel. So, I'm left with a lot to talk about, but maybe no final conclusion, which is kind of a cardinal sin when it comes to reviewing. Here I am, trying to offer you a clear and concise guide to what to expect for your money, and I can hardly even tell you if it was worth my money, a rare, almost extinct species. I'm hoping that by the end of this article, after finally getting all my thoughts on page, together we can reach a conclusion. It's quite serendipitous, in a way, as this feeling of journeying without really knowing where I'm going or how I'm going to get there, almost sums up the experience of Dragon's Dogma. But the quest is given and excepted, we need only follow the marker and hope what awaits us is an answer.

I'm not usually one to judge on first impressions, as I tend to make bad ones myself. This is fortunate for Dragon's Dogma, as it's first impressions are hardly, well, impressive. After a gorgeous, if confusing, cutscene of a mighty dragon being birthed form the sky admist a sea of harpies (of all things), we are then greeted by a small seaside village (yes, it's one of those stories) and the ugliest graphics engine I've seen in a long time. Now, I'm going to make this point fast and early, becomes I'm going to talk about graphics a lot and want to make my position clear. I am not a graphics whore, I often believe that graphics are not integral to the enjoyment of a game provided they don't interfere with the mechanics. I'm wholly unaffected by the turgid graphics of such games as Deus Ex, or Duke Nukem 3D as they have nothing to do with the overall enjoyment of the piece. However, in Dragon's Dogma, my problem is not with how awful the graphics are (and trust me, they're bad. This game would've looked awful running on the last generation of consoles), but with how often they interfere with not only the enjoyment of the game itself, but with the core gameplay mechanics. But more on that later. You step out of your brown and lifeless seaside village after getting your arse handed to you and your heart ripped out by the dragon, who then brings you back to life and challenges you to seek out and destroy him. You're guided on the first part of your journey by a pawn, introducing Capcom's attempt at a unique multiplayer, perhaps in an attempt to borrow some more from the Souls series. The pawns are a mercenary race, which exist outside time, within the Rift. The Arisen, that's you, has the power to summon them, as well as create your own, who shall follow you permanently. Your main pawn levels up with you, you control their skills and class, and you create them with the same amazingly detailed character creator as your main character (seriously, the character creator is awesome. i spent the majority of my time with the demo just messing around with it. Still, I did manage to make my poor Arisen look totally drugged out). The other two pawns are drawn from the rift, and provided you're online, are the main pawns of other characters. you select the ones that suit your playstyle and current quest best, and set out into the world, returning them once you've leveled up and picking some new ones. You can often trivialize combat by picking way over leveled pawns, but this is incredibly expensive and the currency required to do so is very rare. Once your pawns are chosen, you get your first taste of the next "unique" twist of Dragon's Dogma, the giant creature battles. Remember Shadow of the Colossus? It's basically that, but thankfully just as fun. Most of the time. Scaling these beasts are the most effective ways to fight them, and often the most fun. Specific creatures, like the stone golem, can often only be killed by reaching specific spots, either by scaling or with ranged attacks. These fights are easily the best within the game, but sadly there's very few of them, and the main hordes just can't quite match the excitement.

Combat is crafted by the team behind Devil May Cry and its wicked fast and meaty, and it also ties into the one thing the Dragon's Dogma really nails - the RPG systems. Skills are weapon-based, as apposed to class-based, meaning you pick your classes less on what skills are available, and more by what weapons they can use. The rogue classes focus on bows and daggers, while fighters and warriors focus on either sword and shield, or two hand combos. Once that skill is unlocked for that weapon, it's unlocked permanently, meaning any class that uses that weapon can also use that skill. Class-specific skills, referred to as augments, remain even if you switch class, so you can easily pinch some warrior augments to boost health and strength, then mix it with some magic damage reduction mage augments and some dexterity increase rogue augments, crafting your perfect character. Change vocation is cheap and easy, but not sticking with one vocation for too long means you'll never unlock the high level skills and augments. The leveling up feels incredibly rewarding and the RPG aspects are the deepest since the D&D based games. Status ailments and buffs are the name of the game, but far less confusing than they were in the D&D games. Each status ailment has an obvious visual clue, and they all have an item or two that can combat them. Pawns warn when they are ailed, or what ailments certain enemies provide or are weak to, so if you catch one and are unprepared its your own fault. The combat itself just feels so good. Each class feels different and satisfying. Each weapon type has its own moveset and feel. Daggers are fast and brutal, while sword strikes are powerful and deliberate. The ranger's massive longbow can send enemies flying, but can be outdone by the faster short bow. No one weapon beats any other. Two handed weapons may send you flying, but they leave the user incredibly open, and often weighed down to a slower speed. The weight of what you carry, plus whatever is in your inventory, is crucial. Body shape and size affects how much you can carry, as well as your speed. Tall, heavy characters might by able to carry more, but they move slower and recover stamina at a slower rate. Small characters are light and nimble, but can't carry much at all and are more susceptible to knockdown and knockback. All of this creates fast, yet strategic combat. When the pawn AI works, which is most of the time, they work strategically, too. My rogue based character traveled with a Sorcerer main pawn as a damage dealer, a Mage as a healer and controller and a Warrior as a tank. This strategy worked for me throughout the game. How well the pawns fight is mostly based on their knowledge of a beast. The first encounters, they will experiment a lot, calling out what works and what doesn't, but by the end, they work as a tight team., which makes things all the more frustrating when the AI fails and your left basically alone. Pawns can be revived upon death, but rarely, if ever, use any curatives provided, causing you to spend most of your fights with your pawns at half health, or less, meaning you have to spend too much time reviving them, and less fighting. But Dragon's Dogma has much bigger problems. Let's talk about them.

Firstly, the map. It only fills in as you visit areas. Promotes exploration, right? Well, yes, but without much of a fast travel system, only a single item that warps you to one spot and is stupidly rare and expensive, it makes exploration kind of sucky. As does the level locked areas. Nicking another page from the Souls series, Dragon's Dogma often points you int he right direction by dropping massively overpowered monsters on your head. Throw an almost non-existent autosave system and few replayed half hour long treks later, you'll have just about had it with exploration. Also, the paths to objectives are often long a convoluted, leaving you wandering helplessly lost more than once. If you're lucky your pawns know where to go and give general, and I do mean general, directions. There's also no indication of whether you're a high enough level to take on a quest, and a lot of quests have weird time-based fails, or fails that I can't even work out why they failed. The loading screens (of which there are far, far too many and often of the over-long variety) tell you to try other quests if you're stuck, but I've had four quests fail or be rendered un-continuable because I followed other quests to level up. So there's that. Also, I hate to beat a dead horse, but I need to rag on the graphics for a bit. Firstly, the draw distance ranges from awful, to non-existent. My pawn may tell me to survey the area from a high point, but when enemies often spawn literally right in front of your face, what's the point? Honest to god, I had an ogre spawn right on top of me in a cave once. This was after I ran into its invisible form and suffered an attack or two before it spawned in. It's honestly horrifying and destroys not only emotion, but tactics. Then there's the lip syncing, or more truthfully, what lip syncing? There's been no attempt at all to sync the lips. Hell, the faces barely even move, outside of a main character or two that may widen their eyes or smile or frown. if you're lucky. Hair is atrocious block textures that would have looked out of place 10 years ago. Hell, Mount and Blade's character design looked better than this, and that was made by an indie developer. At least the monster design is interesting, and the environments are about 2008/Oblivion level nice, if completely derivative and mostly uninteresting, barring a few atmospheric, creepy areas - which are basically pinched from the Souls series again. If this was someone's first game, an indie team even, I'd be more forgiving, but this is Capcom, for Christ's sake. What are they doing with all that money they've robbed from us with DLC? Graphics this awful (and I haven't even mentioned the awful framerate throughout, the unwieldy camera that often interferes with the climbing mechanic, or the general murk and bland colours) are completely unacceptable in this day and age, when even small companies can make gorgeous games. Actually, let me rag on the camera a bit. If I'm climbing someone, don't bind my movements to the camera if its just going to swing about wildly. Either lock it in like SotC, or make my movements independent. If I'm hanging on the front of an ogre, while the cameras looking at me from above and its flinging about, which way do I press the stick to climb up? The amount of times you'll end up uselessly stabbing a cyclops in the balls is ridiculous. Not to mention the inside fights when the camera insists on clipping through everything. Alright, I'm done. And I think I'm done with the bad, too. Oh wait, no there's more.

Voice acting: Ranges from barely tolerable to awful.
Soundtrack: Some cool J-Pop songs, but mostly derivative, distracting or non-existent.
Writing: I don't want to sound racists, but English is not your first language, don't even attempt to write something in faux Ye Olde English. Aught is not a word, stop fucking saying it every fucking sentence. Just say something. Also, 'tis is short for "it is", not "is". And just because its "olden times" doesn't mean grammar didn't exist. I honestly wanted to tear my ears off listening to some of this dialogue. It renders the majority of the story, and a lot of the quest instructions, completely nonsensical, which is a big no-no in a game with as little hand-holding as Dragon's Dogma.
Story: Actually had some potential. Mostly derivative, yes, but the relationship between the Arisen and Dragon is very interesting, and the character of the Dragon is very well written, but any impact the story has is lost thanks to terrible delivery, bad cutscenes (broken, even at times, I had an entire cutscene take place without any character except my own. A crucial cutscene, too, which instead consisted of various bad camera angles and no sound for a few minutes) and a complete lack of connection to any characters, which renders the late game choices meaningless as they have no strength within the world.

There's more that's wrong, a lot more, but I'm going to stop for a few reasons. Mainly, this is getting way too long, but also because you might start to think I didn't enjoy this game. But that's the thing that's left me confused. Despite everything that is wrong with this game, I enjoyed it. Even really enjoyed it at times. I was often enthralled beyond reason. Every time I thought I'd given up, I found myself back again, soldiering on. A lot of this has to do with the inherent depth within the game, even by the end I was still discovering more intricacies to the gameplay, or the economy, or the leveling up and combat. Its incredible challenging, sadly unfairly so at times, a lot of the horde human enemies you face are the same classes as you, but aren't governed by the same stamina rules and instead just spam their overpowered attacks, making some fights very unfair. But then you'll throw someone off a cliff, or bring down a mighty griffin, and you're captured again.

And so, here we are, at the end of our journey. And I now know what to say. Buy this game. Play it. Make it through the huge learning curve and make up your own mind. There's so much potential here, marred time and time again by inexperience and a lot of great ideas that just don't mesh. With Capcom announcing their intent to make this a franchise, I am filled with hope. Hope that the team can iron out the flaws, because Dogma has the potential to far surpass even the Souls series, if - and this is a massive if - it can focus on only what makes it so deep and innovative, and forget about all the external trappings and trying to make it like everything else on the market. If Capcom has the strength and bravery to follow through, then we may be witnessing the birth of the next great RPG franchise and I for one, am very excited. Now go, buy this game. That is all.