My Thoughts On The Resident Evil 5 Demo

Ah RE5, weighed down by racist allegations and connotations, and not just from over-zealous sensationalist media outlets, but also by sensible and rational journalists.

The demo was released on Xbox Live in the UK today, so brimming with curiousity, I downloaded it and gave it a try.

Now, don't worry, the first-person narration will be kept to a minimum, I'm not entertaining some delusion that I'm the next Hunter S Thompson or anything, I just wanted to set the scene.

First impressions were good. Given the tiny file size, not even 500 Mb, the game looks great and there are two levels on offer, but this is Capcom and they seem to do demos pretty well. Right from the offset though, I got a sense that we were covering very familiar ground. The opening cutscene instantly made me think of RE4 and the gameplay is virtually copy/pasted in. I wasn't expecting much different, but I was surprised at how deep the similarities ran.

Once you delve further into the game, the whole thing starts to fall apart. My biggest complaint is that RE5 is a very clumsy game to control. Just like Resident Evil 4, you can't shoot or use your curiously ineffective machete unless you are stood completely still, which admittedly does increase the tension, but only by being immensely frustrating. There's a part of me that wonders if this is a ham-fisted effort on Capcom's part to evoke fear while playing, but I think that might be giving them too much credit. The camera colludes with the controls as, following behind you just a little too closely and making it hard to see when you're being surrounded. Games like Silent Hill could get away with ropey combat controls, because they enhance the atmosphere and the sense that you are a just a regular person against unspeakable horror, but the characters in RE5 are trained marksmen so you can't make that excuse, and to make an action game with bad combat controls is almost unforgivable.

There's a load of ancillary things, nitpicks really, that are causes for irritation as well. Your sidekick, while at least able to shoot this time, seems reluctant to use any weapon other than her pistol, despite being equipped with a rifle in one level and a sub-machine gun in the other. The levels themselves are nigh-labyrinthine warrens that leave you constantly open to being surrounded, which, when combined with the camera and control issues I mentioned before, means that you'll be restarting a lot. Even little things, like the bright sunlight making your laser sight difficult to see contribute to the overall feeling of frustration.

I couldn't comment on the game though, without at least touching on the accusations of racism. On paper, setting a Resident Evil game in Africa makes total sense, and while I don't think that the game is intentionally racist, as N'gai Croal rightly pointed out, the imagery has a history. A strapping white man goes into to the 'primitive' African village and starts killing? I'd be amazed how anyone could play and not feel a little uneasy about it. I think Capcom have tried to assuage people by varying how black your foes actually are, but if anything that makes it worse, turning the game into some weird ethnic shooting gallery.

Or course, some overly sensitive people(read: Capcom fanboys) will point out that the aforementioned strapping white man has an black, African sidekick, which is true, but if the demo is anything to go by, she's more of a liability than a help. I don't mean in terms of gameplay, where she's quite useful but in the 'Resident Evil 5 isn't racist' discussion, she's not much help. Firstly, she's about as white as you can be and still be considered black, as if the developers couldn't quite bring themselves to make her 'properly' black, she's only missing a red, yellow and green Africa-shaped necklace to complete her collection of sub-Saharan jewelry, and she has the most appalling psuedo-South African accent I've ever heard, which might have something to do with the fact she is voiced by a burlesque dancer from Brooklyn.

*sigh*

It's like Capcom knew that there were possible issues with racism, but in trying to fix them, hit all the wrong notes.

I Like Bethesda Even More Now

Criticism: #1: “Fallout 3″ is just mediocre when judged as a first person shooter

Howard: Agreed.

Patrick Klepek to Fallout 3 Executive Producer Todd Howard

I liked Bethesda before of course, I've never quite understood how poor voice acting made all the good points about Oblivion evaporate, but after they responded to fan criticism in such a candid fashion they've risen in my estimation significantly.

Perhaps it's a quintessentially British thing, that attitude of 'doesn't matter if you win or lose, it's how you play the game', but either way, it's so rare for a developer to hold their hands up and admit that their product has flaws that it's very refreshing

Bonus points to you Bethesda!

Some People Are Never Happy

Jonathan Blow, creator of indie darling Braid, is complaining that Microsoft are forcing him to charge people for the Braid theme.  I remember when Epic did the same thing with the map pack for the original Gears of War, and my reaction was exactly the same then, just another cynical developer trying to drum up publicity for himself.

I hate this kind of stuff, because it's so transparent.  Blow even twists the knife by saying, 

"But if you do buy it, you can be secure in the knowledge that you own one of the few Premium Themes that is not an advertisement, there is no text in the Braid theme anywhere."

Oh Jonathan, you're so indie, it's painful.

EDIT:  This is deeply immature, but I also think Jonathan Blow looks like a vampire.

Watch Me Backpedal Like A Pro!

In an earlier post (scroll down, there aren't that many posts yet) I criticised Suda51 and No More Heroes for being a failed attempt at satire.

I realise now that I was wrong.

Yesterday, I did what I should have done in the first place and read some articles written by people much better at this sort of thing than me about the symbolism of NMH and realised that I was way off the mark with my comments.

So I hereby officially change my opinion of No More Heroes.  It is a very successful satire, I just missed what it was Suda51 was trying to do.

With that said, I still don't like the game.  As successful as the jabs the game makes at gamers and games in general are, I still think the game fails.  I came across this article by Cruise Elroy in my search and he raised an interesting question while referencing Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw's Zero Punctuation review.

"I’ve been wrestling with that last claim ever since I watched Yahtzee’s video. Do video games need to be fun?"

It's something that I've pondered myself; after all, we try and assert that games are art, albeit commercial art, so should 'fun' really be the pinnacle of achievement for the medium?  After all, movies don't have to be 'fun' to be art, and in fact, fun movies are very rarely considered art.  The same stigma applies to most media, that fun and art are somehow mutually exclusive.

So, do video games need to be fun?

I would say no, they don't, in fact, as the medium matures, I think we'll see an increase of games that explore new areas, especially as ratings system relax as they inevitably will.  I think in many ways we are hampered by the word 'game', although a replacement term does not immediately spring to mind.

What I would say is that a game does need to be engaging in some way.  The incredibly irritating to type S.T.A.L.K.E.R is not really a fun experience, but it is engaging and from that you can derive enjoyment.  The same applies to survival horror games, especially the more restrained ones like the early Silent Hills or Project Zero where your arsenal consists of a camera and nothing else.

This, for me, is where No More Heroes fails.  There are a couple of reasons I can think of for this lack of engagement.  The first and most likely, is that because I simply didn't get the satire, I misinterpreted the story as being nonsensical rubbish.  The other likely candidate is that the repetitive gameplay was simply too off putting, although I have forgiven games in the past for poor gameplay if they interested me in other ways.  I also wonder if the fact I'm in the UK had something to do with it.  In the UK, the massive amounts of blood were edited out in favour of enemies simply turning to ash when dispatched.  I think that a lot of the potency of the game relied on it being hyper-violent, and let's face it, ash does not compare to copious amounts of arterial spray.

I'm half tempted to try and find a pre-owned copy of the game and give it another go, maybe, armed with all this new information, I'll be able to appreciate it better.