Assignment: Ada is a funny thing to exist to Separate Ways of which it is sort of a prototype version of: A mini-campaign staring Ada that ramps up the pressure and difficulty to deliver a very condensed version of Resident Evil 4. It does have a few things going for it: Short and sweet and with Ada dressed in something less silly than her normal dress, I also like how rather than your inventory expanding as it progresses the samples you collect take up space that could be used for healing items and grenades, forcing you to rely less and less on them as get out of jail free cards and feels in some way like a welcome callback to the earlier games. The final boss being Krauser who appears out of nowhere running towards you in a short cutscene because they didn’t want to record new voice lines for this is also very funny and jarring and reminds me more than anything of watching my friend Ruby play through the main campaign with a randomiser and having Krauser repeatedly show up to replace various minibosses, including a dozen of him showing up in the garrador cage match room, though I did struggle with how much damage he takes to put down without having an upgraded revolver to blast him away with.

Separate Ways itself is a fun little condensed version of the game, but its attempts to tie itself into the main story are comical more than anything else. Having to do puzzles in reverse and place the items that Leon will later find is cute, but also calls attention into all the other ways in which Ada running through these areas and clearing them out immediately before Leon comes along to do so again. Sure, there was another gigante there that Ada killed before Leon arrived to fight one in the same place. Even worse is the areas where you can see or hear Leon in the next room fighting off hordes of ganados, while Leon and by extension the player were completely obvious to Ada doing the same thing. Her grenades apparently explode at a frequency that Kennedys cannot hear. Being a side story in a series that doesn’t tend to treat it female characters very well also means that beating the final boss of course results in getting captured anyway and your final moment is running to grab a rocket launcher to throw to Leon.

I appreciate there being a couple of new areas but the level design relies on Ada’s contextual-sensitive hookshot points for navigation that are not very clearly signposted. The battleship area in particular is a nightmare of being unclear where to go while being absolutely bombarded with bullets and bombs that make stopping to take in your surroundings quite difficult.

It’s amusing how Resident Evil 4 starts with a recap of the previous games when absolutely nothing that follows has anything to do with those plots at all other than the name Umbrella getting occasionally thrown around towards the end. The plot actually makes far less sense if you have played the previous games in the series (and, like me, not played any of the sequels). Why is Wesker not dead, why is Leon not reacting at all to Ada not being dead, and who the fuck is Krauser? If you’re coming in without prior knowledge you can assume these characters and their dynamics with Leon are well-established and not bafflingly out of place.

Coming straight from Resident Evil 2 had another problem: Run being on ⨉ and fire being on ◻ kept messing with my muscle memory and for a while when enemies were about to grab me my instinct reaction was to aim and slam the reload button, locking me in place while they were free to get me. Other than that the gameplay, while an obvious departure from the previous games, does, I think, have more commonality than is immediately obvious and that did not necessarily carry over to the general, still-ubiquitous third person action game formula that Resident Evil 4 established. There is still the tension of resource management and balancing supplies of ammunition and healing against current threats, picking off enemies with precise targetting and knife attacks and managing crowds with careful staggering and mêlée attacks, or just blowing crowds away with grenades and and shotgun blasts. It’s a more fluid and dynamic ebb and flow of tension, the game trying to keep you hungry but not starved with its random drops and dynamic difficulty, but trying to figure out how to handle the relentless pressure of hordes of ganados is not a completely alien calculus compared to trying to clear a hallway of zombies by baiting as many as possible close at once and them aiming up with a shotgun blast to try and decapitate as many as possible at once. And while the fixed camera is (mostly) gone the tight field of view still creates large blind spots that need to be accounted for and manage. It’s quite easy for enemies to sneak up on you if you’re not listening out for them. Keys no longer take up inventory space and don’t contribute to inventory management concerns, but keys and puzzles still play an important part in pacing and allowing movements of rest between big fights.

Even tonally the game isn’t as much as a departure as is often stated. As silly as Resident Evil 4 is the first game had mutant sharks, plenty of cheesy lines and a boulder to dodge right out of India Jones and the series had already been trending towards interminable conspiracy nonsense and too much character lore references. Early rereleases of Resident Evil 2 included teasers for Residents Evil 3, 0, and Code: Veronica and was already including intra-Umbrella espionage and double-crossings. Resident Evil 4 just has absolutely no grace about any of it.

Obviously it is still a very different game to its predecessors, but I think the ways in which it is inkeeping with them is what make it stand out from the action games that came in its wake and what makes it so enduring and the HD Project mod does an unbelievable job of giving a fresh lick of paint to the game while being true to the original game. The modders went so far as to track down the original sources of texture references in the game and take new photographs of them in order to recreate the original assets in a higher resolution. The bundled tweaks mod also fixes a lot of bugs and allows a few adjustments to me made for the game, including restoring the fixed camera perspective in the section of the game where Ashley is playable, something that was removed from every version after the original Japanese Gamecube release. It’s a cute little throwback but having just played Resident Evil 2 the controls here definitely don’t feel as good or work as well as the original games. I can see why they changed it in subsequent versions, but without the callback that section feels a bit more pointless.

The only other major tweak I applied was disabling quick time events purely to get past the Krauser cutscene knife fight, which is a pain in the ass and I re-enabled them afterwards. I do actually quite like the reactive QTEs that are used for dodges in boss fights in this game, it’s only the cutscene and button-mashing ones that I have a real problem with.

Save Room: The Merchant adds extra systems on top of the inventory management puzzles of the first game, which unfortunately mostly serve as extra steps of busywork that don’t add anything particularly interesting. Each puzzle must in effect be solved twice: Once with a starting inventory of treasures which can then be sold for cash to buy the weapons one must then stack into the same shape. But each puzzle really only feels designed with one or the other in mind, with one inventory slot-sized gems or eggs filling out the rest of the space for the other half, and as it adds in cleaning treasures, buying partial treasures off of the merchant to complete and sell back and upgrading weapons more and more time is spent going in out of different menu screens in between being able to do the actual spacial arrangement. Also I would have enjoyed if the female merchant sounded a bit more like a fucked up bog pervert like the guy from the original game.

No one can do anything without the backup of the American government.

Perhaps the apex of Resident Evil’s post-9/11 degeneration into bizarre, international, political conspiracy, featuring a confused Ukraine standin called the Eastern Slav Republic, a former Soviet state that seems to be simultaneously an unrecognised polity that is not a member of the UN, struggling for independence from… presumably Russia?, but also has a US embassy and its own army separate from Russian forces. Within the Eastern Slav Republic’s border there is also a very ill-defined armed rebellion against “the oligarchs” fighting for independence from the republic itself, which has started using bioweapons in its fight against the state.

The confusion about what exactly is going on in this country may be because most of the film follows the perspective of Leon Scott Kennedy, an American anti-bioterrorism agent sent into the state to investigate whose understanding of the delicate political situation he finds himself in is such that he doesn’t know who the president of the ESR is. At the start of the film Leon is told that the US has cut diplomatic ties with the ESR and that he is meant to evacuate along with all of the embassy staff. Leon, being a cool guy who isn’t afraid to commit a few war crimes in order to do the right thing, decides to ignore his orders and fight a one-man anti-bioweapon war.

But the heart of the film is J.D., a rebel whose entire personality is that loves American action movies and wants to hang with his bros. He has fifty DVDs and none of them are pirated. He rules. He’s a complete dumbass and every time he is on screen he is doing something funny. I am obsessed with the little nod he gives Leon when he thinks that he’s outsmarted him and the the condescending little nod that Leon gives back. The emotional climax of the film is J.D. crying tears of blood as he dies to the bioweapon parasite that he helped unleash with the rebellion, confessing that he never cared at all about politics and just wanted to have fun with his mates.

The film continues on for a while after this with lots of action scenes of varying levels of quality and misogyny until at the climax everything that Leon and the rebels fought for in the end is rendered entirely pointless because the US and Russian military launch a joint invasion of the ESR and easily walk over all resistance, having already learnt that the ESR’s president was the one developing bioweapons and handing them over to the rebels as part of a plot to wipe them out and gain legitimacy. Leon gives a speech to a suicidal man about how once you’re a soldier you have a duty to live for the people who died alongside you and then shoots him in the spine.

J.D. is so right action movies rock.

This is such a cute little concept, taking the famous inventory Tetris of Resident Evil 4 and turning it into a series of puzzles. It wears its heart on its sleeve, not only trying to replicate the inventory screen itself, but pulling all of its items from the series, but setting the tone with its own version of save room ambience playing in the background.

And as it layers complexity and more forward planning into the game it continues to pull from the Resident Evil series for inspiration, using gunpowders to make ammunition like in Resident Evil 3, having to figure out the best way to combine and sequence healing items in order to use them as (in)efficiently as possible to free space and, of course, reloading your guns in inventory.

As charming as it is, the puzzles do swing from trivially easy to frustratingly fiddly to fit everything together, but it’s always satisfying to finally get the rocker launcher and submachine gun to finally fit together in a way that leaves room for the magnum.

Playing old pre-rendered games in a high resolution on a modern display looks wrong. The models rendered so much more crisply than the backgrounds stand out like an actor on a bad green screen. Instead of any PC port I played the Dual Shock version of Resident Evil 2 in Duckstation with a slightly convoluted rendering pipeline: Internally rendered at ×3 original resolution, downsampled back to the original resolution for some anti-aliasing on the models, then displayed at 2,880×2,160 with a CRT Royale shader to help smooth out the rough edges of the picture more and blend the characters and the world together. And the game still looks great, especially with this presentation. I love the messy, run-down, industrial backdrops of the game. Just enough clutter and noise on everything to give it a huge amount of texture while still being readable. There’s some great body horror done with the models as well. G’s transformations are wonderfully gory.

The fixed camera angles and pre-rendered don’t just look good and are not just solve a technological problem as a way of representing a three-dimensional environment in much higher fidelity than would otherwise have been possible on the hardware, they create a bold style that holds up strongly and allow for some wonderful dramatic framing allow important gameplay elements to be highlighted by the camera itself. Catching a glimpse of a licker for the first time crawling along the outside of a window, only to go into the next room and be met with a high-angle shot of the player character through another window from outside, as if being watched and stalked by something, is particularly memorable. There are some awkward angles and cheap out-of-frame ambushes, but it is more than worth it for the experience they bring and clear sound design and characters automatically looking towards points of interest usually gives one more than enough context for what is off screen.

The tank controls are great. I will not wrap this up in talking about them as “of their time” or a compromise. They are not awkward; they are a fluid means of navigation and with some practise weaving through zombies with them is a joy. Not that they are easy or that I have mastered them—they take concentration and dexterity and I still got bit plenty of times. Safe navigation is part of the challenge and part of the tense calculus of the game. Health, ammunition and inventory space are precious resources and every excursion must be balanced against this. You can save bullets by risking running through the horde, you can take health sprays to mitigate any damage you might suffer from a misstep or from getting corned by a mutant you weren’t expecting to encounter, or you can travel light to maximise the amount of resources you can gather in the field. At least one or two inventory slots given over to keys that are needed to progress, one for a weapon, another for bullets. That’s half of your carrying capacity taken up already before you even bring along any healing items and you will want to be able to bring back any extra resources you can scavenge.

I love how this unpacks as you go through the game. Pressing into the darkness, learning what threats might lurk around each corner, building your mental map of the world. Where are the sa[fv]e rooms? Your home bases, points of refuge with a save point, storage chest and calm, comforting piano against a dark, brooding backing. You learn the layout and safe routes, turning from timid exploration to guided, intentional missions with specific objectives. Zombie hordes are not something to be eliminated without thought, but carefully managed and culled to allow safe passage. The zombie-infested police headquarters slowly becomes familiar operating territory, though it also evolves as you do; zombies spilling into once empty hallways, while lickers crawl their way into once-empty rooms.

I was surprised, though, to be reminded of just how much the game immediately throws you in at the deep end. I played this game many times as a child, but this is my first time coming back to it in two decades with the REmake of the original being my more recent baseline of the fixed-camera Resident Evil games. Here you do not get a slow buildup to seeing your first zombie, you are simply thrown straight into a gauntlet and if you haven’t already played the first game then you must quickly learn to dodge past hordes of the undead before you can earn your first bit of respite.

After the police station the game turns more linear than I remembered. Even the Umbrella laboratories, while it has some back and fourth, do not have the interconnected layout of of the police station. There’s generally only a single route between any two points and some key items are simply left adjacent to where they are needed. This was somewhat disappointing and can feel like the game is running out of steam but it does play into the escalation of action that is taking place, which itself is already much heightened from the first game. Even outside of the opening gauntlet I was surprised by how many zombies this game throws at you from the get-go and the sheer tankiness some of them can have—the inconsistency in how many shots it can take to kill things and how often they play dead is also something one needs to take into account in one’s risk calculus.

I played Leon’s A-side campaign first followed by Claire’s B-side. Surprisingly the second campaign starts off much less stressfully. The path to the police station is a gentle stroll compared to the opening of the first scenario and the headquarters welcomes you in the back door like an old friend, opening its now-familiar corridors to you much more quickly than the first time around. Less time is spent juggling keys and the safe combination isn’t even changed; if you remember it you can grab some ammo and the map for free without even finding the corresponding memo again. As you’ve already peeled apart the station layer by layer the game throws a different challenge at you instead: Mr. X, the first of the Resident Evil series’ signature pursuer enemies, who scared the shit out of enough as a child that, although my memories of much of the game were vague, every time I reached a room where he was scripted to crash through a wall I would be filled with a deep, old dread and have to pause for a moment to gather myself. Playing as an adult he’s much less of a threat—another obstacle among many to duck past—but he’s still effective and intimidating.

Conversely to its surprisingly straightforwardness in the A-side, the later levels introduce extra twists and turns as the actions of the previous protagonist complicate the route to and through the Umbrella labs, a wrinkle that I had not remembered and quite appreciated. It’s still less exploration than the early game, but I appreciate that game continuing to throw surprises in what otherwise would be a retread of familiar ground.

There appears to be a consensus online that the Claire A-side campaign followed by the Leon B-side (the opposite order to how I played it) is the more “canon” order and I can also see how the story would fit together better thematically as well that way. Claire’s less-standard, more improvised-feeling arsenal feels appropriate to a first playthrough (as does the grenade launcher not requiring a separate inventory slot to hold its ammo supply) and a stronger focus on the G-virus mutants for Claire and Sherry’s story fits better. And where X feels redundant as a second giant monster chasing Sherry, he fits a bit better into Leon and Ada’s corporate espionage focus. I don’t intend to play through the game again right now, but if I get the urge to replay hopefully I’ll remember to do the other order.

An interesting game, though not the kind that I have the patience to stick with these days. Very clearly a game intended to be played over and over to learn its and try to get further and further in each time, trying to lose fewer party members to the traps and monsters.

But even trying to play it once is a slog. Grinding out random encounters while dealing with very limited healing while keeping track of inventory and stats across five characters would be straining enough without the archaic interface. I am usually the last person to say that games have aged poorly and need a mechanical refresh, but way this game handles gameplay complexity with the limited interface of the NES leaves a lot to be desired.

Like an old-school point-and-click adventure game one must select from a list of verbs to interact with things, despite only one action being relevant for a particular type of object. To talk to someone walk up to the, open the menu, and scroll down to the “talk” option. To look at something, walk up to it, open the menu, and scroll down to the “look” option. To pick up an item open the menu, scroll down to the item option, then select an empty slot (of the right kind, weapons can only go in the weapon slot, which is not marked as such in-game, only described in the manual), and select “move” to move the item in front of the current character into the empty slot. An RPG from any later generation would simply have these actions be contextual.

Party management is similarly fraught, with five characters who can be dynamically split into parties of up to three other characters. This could be interesting, but in practise one will want to keep everyone together most of the time, both for strength in numbers for fights and to carry items necessary for progression as each character only has two free inventory slots. As such swapping between at least two groups (more menuing) is needed.

I knew I wasn’t going to stick with the game and I took my first really disastrous combat encounter with an animated, severed torso as an excuse to call it quits and look at the rest of the game via a longplay.

I think there is an interesting tension here in trying to manage one’s resources, balance limited healing supplies and rescue items with keys and puzzle pieces, trying to make sure everyone is as well-equipped as possible but also ready to take new resources as needed that could be rescued from the excessively menu-based micro-manage, frustrating random encounters and a few other annoying mechanics and you would have a solid base for a tense, interesting game.

And of course, famously, Capcom did do that and it was called Resident Evil.

The haunted house plot is fairly generic, but what stands out are the special effects. Sometimes over the top to the point of comedic, often very effectively creepy, but generally great-looking either way.

Resident Evil 10 should be called REX: Dino Crisis

I previously posted lists I’ve made picking one game and one film per year since 1990. 1990 acted as a good arbitrary stopping point as it’s a nice round number, it’s the year I was born and the number of games I’ve played at all from before then is pretty small, and it would be be fairly difficult to pick out shows for each year before then for me too. I’ve made a dedicated page on the site for these picks, made a few substitutions, added a pick for each for 2025 and added one series of television per year as well. All put into one table with the ability to toggle off which media you want to see selections for as well as some dynamic rearrangement based on screenspace, all done with (a horrendous mess of) Cascading Style Sheets and no Javascript.

These are not necessarily my favourite from each year. I have tried to be deliberate to give a spread of different styles and series I like as well including some weirder picks. Especially with games I spent a lot of time weighing choices for particular years based on what series I wanted to include and some years are just packed with formative games for me. 2001 has Metal Gear Solid 2, Silent Hill 2, Commandos 2 and Halo (and Grand Theft Auto 3 and Advance Wars and Worms World Party…). I eventually gave the year to Metal Gear Solid 2 after weighing up that I could have Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill: Shattered Memories covering some bases for Silent Hill 2, Shadow Tactics was spiritually taking up a place for the Commandos series and there’s already plenty of shooters there to justify dropping Halo.

Similarly Prey is spiritually covering for System Shock so that I can have a childhood favourite Soleil for 1994 and Half-Life would probably beat out Resident Evil 2 in a head-to-head but there’s already two Half-Life games on there and I wanted it to carry the survival horror water for both the aforementioned Silent Hill 2 and for the REmake that got booted out from the previous iteration to make room for Robot Alchemic Drive. And yes after going on about carefully spreading out my choices I did give three picks to Sonic games, one to another Sonic Team-developed game and two more to Sonic-inspired indie games (and four different series of Doctor Who for the TV list). I will not be taking feedback on this.

Again the page is here and the lists are also on my Letterboxd, Serializd and Backloggd accounts as well as a second Letterboxd list covering the years 1970-1989.

Very upset that my title pitch got rejected.