Now Playing: Resident Evil – Outbreak File #2 (2004)

Yeah. Just not feelin’ this one. It’s just too similar to the first one, which is to say it’s a barely tolerable version of Resident Evil with a lot of running around through empty rooms full of sticks and toilet brushes, unpleasant battles with dumbed-down, poorly animated versions of enemies you’ve fought a million times before, and constant fucking inventory management due to your insanely tiny carrying capacity and braindead AI companions. It’s not terrible enough to have stopped me from playing one of them, but when the second one is basically just the exact same thing all over again, nope, can’t do it again. Not going to waste any more time on this unpleasant game. The Outbreak games just don’t hold up well at all compared to the real older Resident Evil games. Resident Evil Outbreak can go back to being the forgotten bastard child of Resident Evil like it deserves.

Now Playing: Resident Evil – Outbreak (2003)

After getting a new (or at least one that’s in working order) Playstation 2, I’ve been dusting off the old pile of PS2 games and thought I’d give some of the older, more obscure Resident Evil games a try again. No one really talks about Outbreak much (though the 2nd one seems semi-popular). I had a hard time even finding a decent screenshot of it (and it’s still not very good).

Outbreak was the first attempt at an online multiplayer-based Resident Evil, long before awful games like Operation Raccoon City and Umbrella Corps came around. Like those games, it does have a single player mode, but wasn’t really made with single player in mind, so the experience is pretty flawed and uneven. I can see this being a lot more fun with real people and the difficulty turned up, but even then, it’s a bit of a mess. The extremely limited inventory size forces you to co-operate, even in single player. You have to use AI companions as a kind of living storage box, and really, that’s all they’re even good for. They sure as hell won’t fight or help you in any way. Left to their own devices they’ll blindly stumble around, literally filling their inventory up with sticks and other useless items or even stand right next to you and watch you die as you’re screaming at them for help sometimes.

On the surface it’s a pretty standard old-timey Resident Evil kind of game, with a lot of familiar monsters, inventory management, and a ton of weird puzzles and backtracking, but the more you dig into it, the more it feels like a cheap copy. There’s a random splattering of story cutscenes, but they’re near-incoherent and the 5 scenarios you can select to play don’t seem to have any real connection to each other. The enemies and bosses feel kind of like bargain bin versions of ones you’ve already seen before, with textures and animations that don’t seem quite finished.

It’s not ALL bad. There’s the level where this weird unkillable leech man keeps popping out of vents and doors and chasing you around and you can only throw blood packs to distract him until you find a way to kill him near the end of the level, and there’s the part where the “Tyrant”, or this game’s version of one, called Thanatos (who is now a big black dude in a speedo for some reason), is chasing you around a mansion. Those parts were actually pretty tense and fun. Overall though, it’s a pretty mediocre game. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone but the biggest Resident Evil fans who want to try everything (I think I would rather play Survivor again than this). Supposedly the sequel is a lot better. It’s been so long that I really don’t remember, but I guess we’ll see…

Now Playing: Resident Evil 7 (2017)

At last, the time has arrived. Resident Evil 7 is here…and it is everything I hoped it would be (Don’t watch any of these videos if you haven’t played this, cuz I’m going to spoil the shit out of everything).

Now Playing: Resident Evil 6 (2012)

Resident Evil 6 is kind of the ultimate culmination of all the games that came before it, packing in most of the major characters, several new ones, and various familiar and new types of monsters of all shapes and sizes, all in a lengthy, globe-spanning game made up of four inter-connecting campaigns. Eh, it’s got action in it though, so clearly IT SUCKS, BRO!

Now Playing: Resident Evil 5 (2009)

The countdown to Resident Evil 7 continues with Resident Evil 5. This one gets a lot of shit for being “too actiony”, and that’s fucking ridiculous.

Now Playing: Resident Evil 0 (2002)

Replaying a few classic Resident Evils lately since 7 is just around the corner now. First being the recent re-release of zerooooooooooooo.

Zero is much like any other pre-4 game in the series except for one little thing: the weird “co-op” system. You can’t actually play co-op, but instead play as both Rebecca and Billy and can switch between them at almost any time and set one or the other to defend you and stuff. This sounds like a good idea, but really doesn’t have much use outside of all the puzzles designed specifically for more than one character. In fact, they had to cut out the item box system just to accommodate for the new “co-op” bits, because both of you being able to grab anything you want out of the magical teleporting item boxes would break all the forced “co-op” puzzles and areas. Now instead of the item box you can just drop and pick things up anywhere you want, which seems nice until you progress a little and find out that you can only drop so many items in a room (and it’s a different, invisible number for each room), making organizing and keeping track of items harder than it has to be.

Then there’s that moment when you realize “oh shit. I’m going to have to run all the way back to that room (or rooms) in the previous building if I want any of the many weapons, ammo packs, health items, and other various items I left back there because two characters’ personal inventories are not even close to being able to handle the amount of stuff you need to pick up in this game.” You’ll have to keep repeating this process every time you go to a new area too. Even if you leave all the health items and other non-essentials behind, you’re still not going to have room for any extra guns and ammo unless you do a supply transplant run every time. It actually gets pretty damn tedious and annoying.

Still…it’s a pretty solid Resident Evil game anyway.

Also this latest re-release has apparently added “Wesker Mode”, where you can play through the game as Wesker and evil Rebecca and Wesker has special Wesker powers like a dash move and magic head-exploding eye beams. Sure, why not.

Now Playing: Resident Evil Revelations 2 (2015)

Resident Evil Revelations 2 is a game mostly about Claire and Barry who are caught up in some horribly convoluted scheme involving bio-weapons, because what the hell else would they be doing in a Resident Evil game? (Aside from partaking in standard RE dialogue like this….)

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Now Playing: Resident Evil (2015)

Oh Resident Evil. How many times have I bought (or, well…probably “obtained” in most past cases.) this same game already? Let’s see…twice for Playstation 1 (I believe I sold my original copy then got the Director’s Cut again later), then the remake for Gamecube, then there was the DS version, then the Wii re-release of the Gamecube version, aaaaand now the Xbox One remastered re-release of the Gamecube version. Sounds a little crazy when you say it out loud I suppose, but dammit I can’t get enough of these games! Or…can I?