I love the horror genre. I've been exposed to it pretty much all my life. I grew up watching scary movies, both old movies from the 1950s and movies from the 80s and 90s, which is when I was a kid. Stephen King is probably still one of my favorite authors of all time, but horror-wise, I have to add in Richard Harris, Dean Koontz and Mark Nykanen, who I don't think does horror exclusively, but he did write a particularly bone chilling book called The Bone Parade. More psychological than normal horror, but damned good all the same. Anyway, horror isn't just books and movies, there are some frightening video games out too. I wanted to talk about one of my favorite series and why it mystifies me that it is my favorite.
I'm a fan of the Resident Evil series of games. I've not played anywhere near all of them, but I've played all but one of the official numbered sequels. Well, I started Resident Evil: Director's Cut a few days ago; my PSX crapped out a few years ago, but I still have all my games and I can always use emulators, right? So here I am, emulator on, cd spinning in my drive, XBox controller plugged in, listening to the horrid voice acting calling up that feeling of nostalgia and I wondered to myself: Why in the hell do I like these games?
Nostalgia value aside, these games were awful. The plot was face punchingly stupid at the best of times, the voice acting was consistently horrid and I have next to no use for zombies at all, so why did I like these games? I blame RE: 2 which was the first game I played in the series and is probably still my favorite to this day.
Resident Evil 2 (Dual Shock Analog Version) was one of the first games I owned on the old PSX. Not only that, it was the first relatively scary game I ever played so of course I loved it. I was able to look past the poor control scheme, which still doesn't make any damn sense to me, and the hokey voice acting (not as bad as the first one, but still horrible) to see the gem that was there. After beating RE: 2, I played the first one, and to me it didn't hold a candle to the second. Neither did 3 or 5 for that matter, although I did enjoy 5. If you're wondering where 4 went, well I didn't play that one. It wasn't released on a system I owned except PC and the PC version bites the big one. To me, the series peaked with 2. The puzzles were fiendish, the creatures nasty and rather frightening, and the situation, while laughably implausible, was tense and nerve wracking. On top of that, it was essentially 2 games in one; there was the A game (for me A was almost always Leon) and B which followed the other character (Claire). While a lot of it was the same, there were enough differences between the two for me to feel like I was playing 2 games and hey, 2 games for the price of 1? Killer fuckin' deal, right?
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