The Hall of Shame 10.30.08: A Shameful Tribute to Resident Evil

Posted by Vincent Chiucchi on 10.30.2008

In the theme of Halloween, the Hall of Shame pays tribute to the two worst games in the Resident Evil series.

Resident Evil was a benchmark series for the survival horror genre. Created by Shinji Mikami, it became one of the first big franchises for the Playstation system, and to this day is still one of the best series of games Capcom continues to make. The games packed many moments that freaked gamers out to the point that perhaps playing the game alone at night was not the best idea. Per usual of a successful franchise, throughout the years Resident Evil would have many spin-offs and side stories. However, most of these side games would range from average to mediocre quality, and in this week's Hall of Shame, we look at what were the two worst of the bunch: Survivor and Gaiden.

Resident Evil Survivor

Because nobody ever gets tired of AMNESIA~!

This would be one of the first spin-off titles in the series. Instead of the usual third-person tank controlled game, Survivor was a first-person shooter. How could you go wrong with an FPS game based on Resident Evil? Several ways.

First way of going wrong: Lame story. Instead of having the usual suspects in the usual city, instead you play as some friend of Leon who have to kill a bunch of zombies on an island with an Umbrella facility in it. Oh, and he suffers from AMNESIA~!, and he starts to wonder if he was the evil mastermind that created whatever project Umbrella was doing on that island. Turns out he wasn't, and eventually he rescues some kids on the island being used for the project and escapes, never to be seen again.

Second way of going wrong: Horrible graphics. This game came out in 2000 for the PlayStation, several months after the release of Resident Evil 3. However, the environments and enemies look so bland and jaggy, especially when you look them up close, that it closely resembles the first Resident Evil game.

Third way of going wrong: Fighting enemies. The biggest problem with this game is that when you enter a room, it's hard to tell where the enemies are coming from, so you'll be getting hit a lot by enemies you can't even see, and it doesn't help that your turning is slow. Not to mention that every time you get hit, the camera gets all wobbly for a second, which is likely to throw off your concentration on actually hitting the enemies you can see.

Fourth way of going wrong: No light gun. For some reason, Capcom decided to take out the light gun support for the game in the North American version. The light gun isn't really needed, but why take it out in the first place? Turns out that Capcom wanted to avoid controversy because of the Columbine School Shooting that took place. I think that was ridiculous of Capcom because that shooting took place over a year before the game was released, and if anybody was going to get offended by a game about shooting zombies with a toy gun, screw them.

Fifth way of going wrong: You can't save. Did Capcom remember that they were making an FPS game for the consoles and not an arcade rail shooter like House of the Dead? With no saves, you'll have to beat the entire game in one sitting, which leads to the other problem that it's too short. You can beat this game in less than three hours, and even though there are multiple paths you can take, they aren't that much different or interesting enough to try out over and over.

Sixth way of going wrong: There's no horror. These days Resident Evil is becoming more of the action adventure shooting genre then the survival horror one, but back then, Resident Evil was well known for being terrifying. So when a new Resident Evil game comes out and it will in no way scare you aside from how possibly bad it could be, that game is going to get an automatic "suck" rating.

This game was monotonous and received bad reviews by everybody. Despite that, Capcom would make more Gun Survivor games, although they were actually decent games. This one however is not worth checking out.

Resident Evil Gaiden

2D Resident Evil simply does not work.

Resident Evil for Game Boy Color? Would it really be possible to release such a game on a really scaled down system? As it turns out, it wasn't. Capcom began development of the original Resident Evil for the GBC, but it wound up getting canceled because it was not as good as Capcom was wanting it to be. So instead of a scaled down port of the original game, an action title by M4 took it's place.

The story is that a group was made of ex S.T.A.R.S. & Umbrella workers trying to take down Umbrella. Leon from RE2, part of this group, is sent to take out a Bio-Organic Weapon (BOW) created by Umbrella on a cruise ship, but disappears, so Barry from RE1 is sent to find him.

Most of the time...no, scratch that. All of the time in this game, you're just going around and shooting zombies. The way it works here is interesting yet annoying. When you come in contact with a zombie, you switch to an FPS view and a bar with a cursor going left and right. You have to press the button at the right time for the cursor to line up with the highlighted part of the bar representing the zombie in order to hit them. That there is how you fight all the enemies and bosses in the game, resulting in one horrifying case of boring monotony. The only changes that happen during the game is that eventually you find Lucia (a girl with some special power) and Leon, so in zombie fights you have three people fighting rather then one. There are also times when you have to kill a certain zombie in the room to find a key you need to progress further, but the problem is this game has trouble telling you which one it is. All you get is a signal that a zombie in the room has an item, but you can't tell what your fighting for. Instead of an important key, you might wind up with useless ammo.

So in a way, Resident Evil Gaiden is like an RPG, only very stripped down. Except Resident Evil isn't supposed to be some kind of stripped down RPG Adventure game. It's supposed to be a game that makes you jump out of your seat when an enemy suddenly bursts out of nowhere, putting you in a tight situation where you almost have no idea what to do.

Towards the end, you find out that the BOW is able to change itself to look like other people, and the only way to tell the difference of who's real and who isn't is by their blood, because the BOW bleed green. After the final boss fight (which is very lame), Leon calls for a helicopter to rescue the three heroes, but the camera zooms in to show that Leon is starting to bleed green. Was this Leon actually a fake one? Is the real Leon dead? Is it the real Leon only he's infected with something?

We would never know, since this story is seen as non-canon. Don't you hate it when a story ends in a cliffhanger you just know they're not going to resolve? Why they couldn't just have ended the story instead of making a cliffhanger that saw no resolution is beyond me. Perhaps Capcom was going to use this game's story as almost a set-up for Resident Evil 4, which saw several revisions before Capcom finally settled on how the game would play out. Eventually M4 went out of business and this game was largely forgotten.

And now, to end this frightening column, I shall leave you with a couple of moments that are truly the most horrifying scenes out of the Resident Evil series. Screw the dog jumping through the window. Screw the licker popping out of the two-way meter. Screw having to fight those Regenerators. Truly, the one thing that has scared Resident Evil players the most is...

THE HORRIBLE VOICE ACTING!