T w e n t y S i d e d
In this episode, the main characters finally corner the guy we’ve been chasing for most of the game. And instead of arresting him, or hitting him, or shooting him, or hurting his feelings, or doing anything else that might somehow advance his goals, Chris Redfield just glares at the guy while asking stupid questions. The bad guy is able to inject himself with stuff and turn into a huge monster and our alleged hero doesn’t do anything about it.
Have I mentioned that I hate Chris Redfield? He’s just THE WORST. He’s a no-nonsense musclebro badass tough guy… who is completely, hilariously passive and impotent in every cutscene.
Let’s take the zombies out of the equation. Let’s just imagine a cop that behaves the way Chris Redfield does…
A SHADY CHARACTER sits at a small table, not doing anything in particular. Suddenly the door SLAMS OPEN with great force and a musclebound cop comes charging in. He aims his firearm at the Shady Guy.
Martin:
Freeze! Who are you? What are you doing in this room? Have you committed any crimes?
Shady Guy:
(Sarcastic) Well, if it isn’t the great Martin Policegun!
Martin:
How do you know who I am?
(Shady ignores him and begins shoving tools and weapons into a bulging duffel bag.)
Martin:
Hey! What’s in the bag? Is it money? Is it stolen? Did you steal it? Hey, where are you going? Why are you opening the window? Why are you taking the bag with you?
Shady:
See ya later, loser! I got a boat to catch!
(Shady climbs out the window and drops down into an open dumpster. He hops out and hails a cab.)
Martin:
(Pokes his head out the window.) Hey! What’s your name? What crimes have you committed? Why are you flipping me off? (Now shouting to be heard.) Where are you going? Are you leaving? Are you going to the airport?
(As the taxi speeds away, Martin comes back inside, dejected. Suddenly the door slams open again. This time it’s Jennifer Roughhouse, wearing a sleeveless police uniform. She sees he’s feeling down.)
Jennifer:
What’s wrong, partner?
Martin:
(Heavy sigh.) He got away.
Jennifer:
(She clomps over to him in her thigh-high police boots and lifts his chin.) Hey Martin. It wasn’t your fault. You did everything you could.
Martin:
What else could I do? I was already pointing my gun at him as hard as I could.
Jennifer:
Let’s check the basement for clues.
Martin:
Basement? What do you mean?
Jennifer:
There’s like three miles of steam tunnels under this building. They’re filled with explosive traps, electrical hazards, and dangerous creatures.
Martin:
(He nods decisively, then racks the slide on his pistol, ejecting a live bullet.) No time to waste. Let’s go, partner!
Whenever I talk about how awful the gameplay feels, fans are quick to remind me that the controls are difficult and fiddly on purpose in order to make the game “more scary”. Everyone accepts this answer as true, but after watching these cutscenes I have a suggestion:
If your goal is to make a terrifying game. then rather than making our protagonist handle like a forklift, you could always try not making the story utterly fucking ridiculous, you know? Why not make the story scary, before you go and sabotage the gameplay?
Doubting the Benefit of the Doubt
“The controls are bad in order to make the game scary.”
“The designers are riffing on classic B-movie tropes.”
“The story is dumb on purpose because it’s actually a comedy.”
People say these things all the time. And maybe they’re true. But like… do we know these things are true? Did the designers ever say these things in an interview? Or are these things we’ve just assumed?
“Oh, the story is ludicrous, the dialog is wooden, and our protagonist is a handsome buffoon with no arc and no agency. I guess Capcom is doing a parody of western B-movies!”
I’ll admit it’s possible. But how much exposure does your average Japanese game designer have to American B-cinema?
Most people I know don’t have any real contact with B-cinema. That stuff doesn’t get screened in mainstream theaters, and if you want it you kind of have to go looking for it. It’s a pretty niche genre over here, and I have to assume it would be even more niche on the other side of the Pacific.
Sure, once in a while you’ll find the odd B-fan over there, the way you’ll find Anime fans over here. But Capcom isn’t an arthouse indie studio run by an eccentric creative. Are we supposed to believe that this entire game company just happens to be filled with fans of the esoteric world of American B-cinema?
I have a hard time picturing a group of Japanese game developers looking at the flood of high-budget American movies coming their way, and deciding to ignore that stuff in favor of obscure low-quality specialty imports. And then they decide to make a big-budget AAA game that riffs on these obscure movies?
I’ll admit it’s possible. I can’t prove anything. I don’t speak Japanese, I’ve never been to Japan, and I don’t understand the country any better than the next gaijin.
But here’s the thing: B-movies aren’t terrible on purpose. The director isn’t coaching the actors from just off-screen saying, “No! More wooden! And try to look into the camera once in a while.” He doesn’t chase the gaffer away when she shows up with 100k worth of lighting equipment, because shooting the scene with one naked bulb is part of his artistic vision. He doesn’t perform last-minute rewrites, tearing out crucial scenes of exposition because he wants the story to be badly paced and hard to follow.
B-movies are the result of someone trying to make something good, and failing. Either they lack the budget, or the talent, or (more commonly) both. I think this is one of the things that makes the genre so captivating.
You know what it looks like when someone talented tries to make a B-movie? It looks like a Tarantino movie. Kill Bill has all the tropes, musical cues, dialog, and scene construction of old revenge B-movies, except it’s been executed by people who know what they’re doing. The inherent talent of the people involved is what elevates the material above its crass premise. It stops being a B-movie.
It’s notable that Resident Evil’s supposedly deliberate attempt to make a B-movie never re-creates any of the visual problems the genre is known for. Cutscenes don’t feature jarring cuts, bad camera placement, skips in the soundtrack, bad audio, or terrible lighting. In fact, the cutscenes are all incredibly polished and working hard to capture the style of big budget Hollywood films. Isn’t it at least a little bit suspicious that the problems are mostly to do with the script?
Isn’t it possible that the reason Capcom’s stories are absurd is the same reason that B-movies exist in the first place? Maybe Resident Evil is the product of talented people imitating bad art, but isn’t it more likely it’s just more bad art, and bad for the same reasons?
I don’t know. Maybe someone will shut me up by linking to a YouTube video where one of the writers looks at the interviewer and says, “My name is Yoshiaki Hirabayashi, and I spent months making the story as stupid as possible to show my love and appreciation for America’s tradition of B-movies.” But until then, I’m always going to suspect that this nonsense and camp is unintentional.
Revisiting a Dead Engine
I wanted to take the file format of a late 90s shooter and read it in modern-day Unity. This is the result.
Another PC Golden Age?
Is it real? Is PC gaming returning to its former glory? Sort of. It's complicated.
Starcraft: Bot Fight
Let's do some scripting to make the Starcraft AI fight itself, and see how smart it is. Or isn't.
Could Have Been Great
Here are four games that could have been much better with just a little more work.
This Scene Breaks a Character
Small changes to the animations can have a huge impact on how the audience interprets a scene.
Actually I think Resident Evil 5 is just an unironic anime, the shlocky kind where the plot is too convoluted and epic for its own good and there’s lots of over the top action and explosions and stuff.
That’s not necessarily true, I mean the Sharknado films are considered to be B-movies yet it’s pretty clear that they’re in on the joke. The term is very broad but I think to constitute as a “B-movie”, it just has to be low-budget and has some kind of weird goofy plot that makes it shlocky.
The first Sharknado is definitely not in on the joke. It plays itself painfully straight despite an atrocious script, terrible CGI and middling production values. It is first in Sharknado 2 that the crew realizes how inherently ludicrous the premise is an runs with being a cheesy horror/gore-comedy instead. The series leverages its low production values to good effect, but that only makes them competent B-movies and not the schlock that we usually think of when we say B-movies.
Dude, its entire premise is literally a tornado made of sharks. Of course it’s been on the joke since the start. All Asylum movies are. That’s their entire schtick.
Not sure how accurate it is since it’s Cracked, but a writer posted an article there back in 2015 that interviewed a screenwriter for Asylum that said they absolutely are not in on the joke.
https://www.cracked.com/personal-experiences-1698-5-ugly-realities-making-mockbusters-like-sharknado.html
Reading that article, it sounds like an incredibly dumb level of extra go-betweens. If the studio only makes movies that have been pre-paid for, great. But they do so not by taking requests from the buyers, but by trying to sell the things they’re willing to make to those buyers, which were themselves generated from scripts they get from outside their studio? They are essentially putting their extra layer of whim in-between the person who actually makes the decision and the person who actually writes the movie? Sounds like a great way to barely get anything done.
Aside: Is there a particular reason for the doubt in accuracy of Cracked articles, like they’ve been caught seriously bullshitting, or is it just generally being skeptical of the internet?
There’s no reason to think them particularly reliable or unreliable. They tended to pride themselves on higher quality and research, but the business model still involved taking user submissions. In my experience it’s not so much fabrications as not investigating urban legends enough, and taking a bit of a distorted view for humour.
Other interviews of Asylum staff basically confirm this attitude though.
“‘How many people are watching our movies because they like them, and how many because they are laughing at them?’ He doesn’t know, but he doesn’t think the latter would keep them in business. ”
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.gq.com/story/sharknado-atlantic-rim-pacific-rim-asylum-movie-spoof/amp
They know their films are bad because they’re working on the cheapest budgets. But they’re also trying to make the best film they can under those constraints.
Reading that article between lines, either that writer is bullshitting Cracked or he’s a complete and utter moron. His first two points are full of contradictions, and I didn’t read any further. Why would the Asylum owners would believe they were making good movies yet deliberately pick bad writers?
I think you maybe misread that bit. They aren’t seeking bad writers, they’re seeking cheap writers. They aren’t looking for writers who don’t know what they’re doing when it comes to writing, they’re looking for good writers who don’t yet know what they’re doing when it comes to valuing their work in the industry. They’re hoping that if they filter for “good, but green & unsavvy”, they can jerk them around, micromanage them, underpay them, etc., and the end product will still be a baseline of “good”.
That’s not what they get, of course, because even if they get a good writer, they just end up micromanaging all the “good” out of their work.
Basically they’re the sort of crappy manager who doesn’t know how or why to delegate, crossed with the kind of crappy manager who thinks manipulation and exploitation is the only way to minmax productivity.
The bit about them only making movies they’ve already sold based on a title or one line pitch would be the key. This implies they’re a content farm who’s target market is TV networks and streaming services looking to pad their catalog. In that application, quality or watchability literally doesn’t matter, as it’s more about the client network/service being able to market themselves to investors and advertisers, rather than whether any viewers actually watch that stuff. This is a real thing. There’s an entire segment of small production studios that produce a crap ton of movies of all genres that no-one actually watches based on this business model.
If this is what The Asylum is doing, then it would explain why they’d be able to stay in business and turn a profit while also having management layers that are delusionally clueless about the quality of the movies they produce, or their own management style’s hand in making their movies bad. Everybody’s in on the internal company strategy, but only some of them are in on how that’s dictated by their sales strategy. So the ones who don’t know about the sales end just think “hey, we’re still in business and doin’ good, so this system clearly must be making movies people want!”.
I get the impression this criticism is coming my way. For the record, while I’ve said many times that the controls are bad on purpose, I never said that was a good thing, I’ve only mentioned it when people seem to think they’re bad because the developers don’t understand controls. And when we say the games are like B-movies we don’t mean the designers are applying these tropes on purpose. I mean…
You… you see what’s happening here, right? I’m not crazy, you have to be seeing it. You’re saying it yourself, even if you haven’t noticed it. This shit is entirely unintentional. This is why we say these games are like B-movies. This is why we like it. Not because it’s trying to be bad on purpose, but because it’s desperately trying to be good and failing spectacularly.
I’m going to link to the fake script I made for this game again. I know it’s long, but you don’t need to read the whole thing. In just the first few pages you can see that even as a fan I’m not defending this preposterous storytelling.
There are a few games in the series that are, if not great, at least good in their writing, and we like them too. There’s no rule against that. And granted, RE5 in particular takes the stupidity to insanely high levels. Though I maintain it’s still not as ridiculous as 6. 6 has freaking flesh transformers and literal mechanics whose entire purpose is to imitate action schlock gunplay.
The only entry that I could think of where the plot was somewhat airtight and relatively grounded to the point that the story was unironically solid was Biohazard.
I’d say Resident Evil 7 falls into this camp and specific moments from Resident Evil Village. But only specific moments. And depending on what you consider good writing, the Resident Evil 2 Remake certainly elevated the original, but that’s the thing: the dialogue of the characters and quality of the acting make the story seem better despite sharing the same general core. So is it better writing if the plot is generally the same?
Though with the first one, I’d argue it’s the story within the documentation that’s good, not the actual “cops in a mansion” plot, but I discussed that in the very stream linked above I think.
This post isn’t as targeted at you as you might think. I’ve had the “but no Shamus you just don’t get it” conversation many times over the years. Also, I need to draw a distinction between three different viewpoints:
1. The writing is terrible on purpose. That’s what makes it secretly brilliant.
2. The writing is terrible by accident, but I love it anyway.
3. The writing is good.
I think #1 is difficult to support, and #3 is provably false. But you seem to be coming from #2, and I can’t really argue against that. I mean, we all like what we like, you know?
Also I had no idea about the flesh transformer I’m so sorry.
There’s also 1.5 — The blend between #1 and #2.
Way back in grade 6 I had to do a school play. It was purposely stupid and intended to be funny. But ya can imagine… grade school quality. At one point there was an abrupt scene transition that had to happen without a curtain. By “abrupt” I mean similar to Luke Skywalker yelling “NOOooooo!!” then picking up his hand in silence and exiting stage left. We never thought about it in rehearsal. It was never funny. We just did it. That completely accidental comedy got the most laughs.
So something can be good acci-purposely in a #1.5 way. And I think games more often than not are good due to #1.5 than #1 or #2 or #3. It is kind of easier to see it in video game movies. So many of them try to be terrible on purpose in a #1 way, and generally they just end up being straight up terrible awful crap.
Perhaps the problem here is that defending a game and its story on the basis that it essentially IS a B-movie is not a defense of the game or its story, but is more a defense of the person liking it anyway despite it being bad (or a comment that it’s So Bad It’s Good). But given that the defense would have to start from a position of “I agree with you that it’s bad, but I still find it fun because …”, at which point there wouldn’t be much to argue over.
This is all complicated by the fact that there actually ARE works that deliberately try to ape the forms of B-movies in order to parody them, and so when someone makes a defense of something by talking about it having that form and that the person criticizing it doesn’t understand what the work is doing then it’s not an unreasonable interpretation to think that the defense is that they are trying to parody B-movies and opposed to actually being one. If they aren’t trying to parody B-movies, then someone finding it bad isn’t misunderstanding it, but is understanding it quite well and doesn’t like it as much as you do.
You mention Street Fighter: The Movie elsewhere, and I think that comparing it and the first Mortal Kombat movie work pretty well here. I enjoy Street Fighter, and tell people that to enjoy it they really need to avoid taking it seriously, but I wouldn’t defend it as being well-written. Mortal Kombat, on the other hand, is a movie that I would also tell people to not take seriously, but I think that movie is more self-aware on that score and so is more deliberately trying to not take these things seriously, and so would defend it against people who said that it had bad writing by saying that they didn’t really understand what it was after. I think Shamus thinks, to extend the analogy, that your argument would be more like what I would do to defend Mortal Kombat while here you’re saying that your argument is what I would do to defend Street Fighter.
Yeah, not every B-Movie is good, in whatever way – for every glorious entry like The Room, there’s dozens of other movies that are just dull and boring, or cynicaly-made tricks like your average Asylum film.
Also, it’s such an obvious point, but games have more to them than movies…I’ve always hated any ‘the controls are bad because X’ defense, because bad controls are just straight up Not Fun. The only game I can think of where I’ve enjoyed bad controls was Octodad, and that was pretty much the whole point of the game.
I would disagree that Street Fighter: The Movie was less self-aware than Mortal Kombat, a Paul W.S. Anderson film and therefore could legitimately have fooled people into thinking he was self-aware given his later works. Steven Desouza, screenwriter on Commanda, was the writer/director, after all. I think part of the issue was the film-making process was a nightmare, in part because Capcom kept wanting more and more of its game characters to be featured and therefore the process kept changing. I think it’s very clear through multiple scenes that they knew they were making a stinker and just went for it.
Which is honestly why I have a lot of fun with it. They sort of straddle the line because it’s not like Raul Julia, for example, stopped giving it his all. He’s not hamming it up in some poor imitation of a cheesy villain, he’s just hamming it up with all he’s got (and all the credit to him given how ill he was during the filming). The moment Raul Julia shouts “Game Over” isn’t funny because it’s a wink and a nod to game logic that no dictator would actually say, it’s funny because he says it with such serious power that you can’t help but laugh at the absurdity.
When I last watched Mortal Kombat, I was ….bored. Very bored. And the same happened when I last tried to watch the first Resident Evil movie. Paul W.S. Anderson is one of the worst film-makers I know because his typical output is just…. boring, and when you listen to commentaries or watch interviews, you get the feeling that he really thinks he’s making quality work. He’s not self-aware at all.
So I would heavily disagree on those two films.
Now the Mario Bros. movie, on the other hand… now that is a very special kind of mess.
I agree that Street Fighter did add some humour and some shots at those things, and that Raul Julia indeed really hammed it up. But overall I see it as less self-aware because pretty much everything else would align with a pretty standard action flick, even the jokes, and so it looks more like it’s trying to be that, especially with Van Damme’s performance. For Mortal Kombat, it seems to be more aware that this is all a bit ridiculous and is going with it, including lampshading it a lot more, at least to me. And I haven’t seen any of the guy’s other movies to be getting the impression for there. There might be some YMMV there, and those are both movies that I can watch and enjoy, although I like Mortal Kombat better (if for no other reason than that the soundtrack was a lot better).
My memory from the time when it came out, is that Mortal Kombat was a tech demo film. The CGI was cutting edge for its time–in fact even the term “CGI” was fairly new at the time–and the entire movie was set up to create spectacle and excuses for more CGI. Like, that’s how it was marketed even. It 100% knew what it was doing, but it wasn’t so much going for “camp” as much as it was going for “MOAR PRETTIES.”
Street Fighter is 100% meant to be schlocky. It has the “five gears–two forward three reverse!” gag in it FFS.
Zangief and M. Bison are definitely schlocky, but Guile, Chun-Li and Ken and Ryu have pretty serious plots, along with Dhalsim and Blanka. Even the more serious plots in Mortal Kombat aren’t that serious and aren’t taken all that seriously, and one is resolved pretty early — Sonya and Kano — and the other is the main plot of the movie, so it had to be taken somewhat seriously. All of the characters pretty much riff off of how ridiculous most of this stuff is, other than Sonya who is the straight person for the movie, while the others get some jokes — the banter between Ken and Ryu, for example — but again is just what you’d see in a standard action movie, which is why I tend to believe that’s what they were mostly after there.
To make it more clear, Zangief is standard comic relief, and M. Bison is a big ham. The others, though, are pretty standard action movie characters, which isn’t really true of the characters in Mortal Kombat (Raiden, for example, is a rather odd god-like mentor).
For a moment, I thought you said “Mortal Kombat, a Wes Anderson film”, and hoo boy wouldn’t that be a thing.
My understanding is that Raul Julia was hamming it up extra hard on purpose because he wanted to have fun making a movie his kid/nephew/grandkid could watch and enjoy, and he knew it would be his last. I don’t know if the rest of the cast had that same understanding, but I would say the movie is extremely cheesy, and nevertheless it’s fun to watch M.Bison chewing all the scenery.
Mortal Kombat was taken pretty seriously by cast and crew. Yeah they threw in little winks here and there but that was standard action movie stuff with a little fanservice for the video game fans.
Now, I won’t claim it’s an objectively good movie, but as a kid I loved that movie, whereas I didn’t particularly care for Street Fighter. However I HATED the second Mortal Kombat movie…
I don’t think Capcom demonstrated anything like the level of self-awareness needed to realize how absurd their plots were. However leaving aside the question:
It’s dreadfully dull.
This is a bad plot. It does not engage the audience, requires investment in characters who weren’t significant in the previous game, ignores any discussion of the significance of anything, and doesn’t present a clear or useful goal.
What are Chris and Sheva trying to accomplish? Stopping the outbreak? Stopping the villain? Treasure hunting? They really take no effectual steps towards much except ironically the last and most be told the blindingly obvious. But it’s not campy, just tediously following some overactor who, for no reason, just tells us some critical information because.
Resident Evils 4 through 6 have very “Japanese Third Person Action Game” level navigation and bad controls. By which I mean, it’s impossible to stop the camera from turning to follow the player, lots of things are contextual actions that don’t strictly need to be (climbing ladders, jumping off ledges, etc.) and of course the omnipresent “why can’t I just walk round the Shrine of Winter?” issue. It doesn’t feel great to play, but many contemporary Japanese games have the same issues, or worse (looking at you, Shenmue).
Fucking hell, I’m sorry, but I feel the need to reiterate it. There’s literally a goddamn flesh transformer boss in Resident Evil 6. For fuck’s sake. This is when I think the series jumped the shark. Because it felt they were for the first time deliberately trying to be ridiculous. It went from “Street Fighter: The Movie” to “Sharknado”, and it was no longer fun.
If you take the Resident Evil universe at face value then it’s basically a superhero comic book setting with an emphasis on body gore horror and the virus outbreaks are the equivalent to supervillain attacks/alien invasions. One has to wonder how society still functions considering zombie outbreaks are like the norm there.
I’m sorry, I can’t let this go. He even has a goddamn flesh gatling gun, that shoots bones instead of bullets. And there’s an enemy in the game that has a bone chainsaw… that even reproduces the sound of a real one. Fuck’s sake.
That…might be pretty funny, actually.
…in a different game. Like a Lollipop Chansaw, or a Bayonetta. I don’t think your average Resident Evil is silly enough in tone for that to work. Sounds a lot like someone Jumping The Shark.
(-NADO! hohohoho!)
But still, ration the passion, man. You might need some of that zeal for complaints about FFXIII, when the time comes ;)
It appears that the Rocketeer is rubbing off on Shamus.
Or… is the mask falling?
Has anyone ever seen the both of them in the same room at the same time?
> Why are you flipping me off?
This got me bad!
I personally love: “What else could I do? I was already pointing my gun at him as hard as I could.”
Tone perfect.
I went on a tirade about the whole B-movie thing and I forgot to talk about this. Sure, Chris is bad (in this game at least), but the worst? Let me tell you about a little game called Deponia.
Deponia is a point & click adventure game set in the eponymous world. First visual impressions bring back memories of the likes of The Curse of Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle. It’s a cartoonish, colorful setting with gorgeous backgrounds full to the brim with detail yet never cumbersome to look at, cute character art style and full with puzzles that are more varied than simply “pick up object and combine with other object in the same area”. There’s one thing holding this game and its sequels from goodness, and that thing is Rufus. Rufus is the protagonist, and he is THE. WORST.
Unlike Chris, Rufus is no musclebound or tough, but he’s a pretentious, stupid, gross, sexist. mean-spirited, arrogant, irritating, relentless prick. Every decision he makes is based on ego, cowardice, idiocy, lust, greed or outright malice. Other games have protagonists with one or two of those personal flaws but they still give those characters enough heart, humor and positive traits to compensate, or at the very least they make the characters interesting enough that you still want to know more about them. Rufus has none of those things; no redeeming features whatsoever. His idea of humor is mocking the less fortunate and insulting and attacking good people only because he feels like it. He only seeks to help others if there’s something in it for him, and even then only up until the moment where there’s risk involved, at which point he backpedals.
Sure, Guybrush Threepwood’s exploits occasionally involve him abusing others for his own benefit, but the game makes sure to portray his victims as bad people, have his antics be so over-the-top unrealistic that it becomes funny or have things come back to bite him, and in the end his goals are noble. None of this applies to Rufus.
I stopped playing these games after the first one because I outright refused to keep playing as him. I hate Rufus. I despise him with a passion. I don’t want to see him succeed. I don’t want him to eventually defeat the villain and win because, to me, he is the villain, but not one that’s good enough for me to go alongside him (let alone be forced to play as him). I know we all like what we like, but usually there’s a palpable reason for it that we can see, even if we don’t personally agree with it. I just cannot understand why anyone would like Rufus. I’m even told he doesn’t change one bit in later games. I mean, some have told me that they find him appealing because he’s “new”, “refreshing” and all that nonsensical jazz. I guess it’s a commentary on how samey game protagonists are that people have started to equate “different” with “good”. It’s the whole “it subverted my expectations” BS again.
OK, rant over, sorry. The whole point is, next to Rufus Chris is freaking Frodo. It doesn’t mean Chris is good, but by God there’s so, so much worse out there.
I don’t think Shamus means that Chris is bad in the sense of “morally bad”, but in the sense of a contradiction in terms of his character. He’s built to be the man-of-action stereotype, but in the cutscenes is absolutely not about any direct action whatsoever. It also seems like in the cutscenes he doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to be doing — although that’s probably a bit of an exaggeration — or what’s going on at all. So as a character he’s bad because the character is inconsistent. A character that is always action-first and has to, say, be stopped from shooting the bad guy to ask questions about what’s going on would work, as would a more intellectual character who is more interested in finding things out that taking action, even with the attendant problems of letting the villain escape because stopping to ask questions gives them time to put an escape plan in motion.
As for Rufus, I haven’t played the game myself but I DO think that some people will find playing with a hero that is absolutely and completely unheroic refreshing. At the same time, though, it would have to be conceded that for some people such a thing would be utterly uninteresting and that a number of people will react like you do and hate the entire concept.
Also, it was un-necessary for Chris in this game. He should have, say, barged on the Annoying Villain whose name I don’t recall, taken control of the situation, but then get surprised by the Mysterious Masked Woman. That would fit the story, emphasize that Chris is outmatched, but also show his tenacity and decisiveness. Instead he points his gun at people but doesn’t do anything to control events.
Neither did I. I was measuring the characters in an interesting/competent ratio. Also, I wouldn’t say Chris is inconsistent. He’s just as incompetent throughout the whole thing.
Well, I guess that makes him a good player avatar, because I don’t know what he’s supposed to be doing or what’s going on at all.
I feel like there’s a lot to work with here, and part of the problem is some of those defenses make more sense for other games in the series rather than all of them. So I’ll try to tackle them in my own way.
1. Controls
I used to use this excuse as well, but I no longer believe it true, especially after having read enough interviews about why the tank controls were chosen for the original series. The original Resident Evil wanted to control the camera in order to develop a sense of atmosphere that could imitate what horror films could do. I dunno about the original PlayStation game, but on the GameCube remake, this was incredibly effective. There are rooms where you step inside and can’t even see the room’s interior, but you can hear that something is in there with you… you just don’t know where, and therefore it makes one nervous to take a single step forward lest they give themselves away. The thing is, when the camera can change at any moment, the concept of “forward” can also change and therefore remain inconsistent. Having tried the “modernized” controls on the latest ports of Remake, it becomes disorienting during scene transitions. However, if “up” is always “forward” regardless of camera angle, then it becomes easier to adapt to and works best with the constantly rotating camera angles.
I think people that say the tank controls are terrible likely played for two minutes and gave up. That said, the controls are terrible for empowerment, but I’d have to go back to your own write-up on Prey and how that game felt regarding combat: it’s not the point. I think Resident Evil does a fine job in those early entries managing enemy A.I. and placement, as well as (in the Remake at least) providing a sort of snap-aim to the nearest foe that it all ends up working fine for what they’re going for. Sacrificing empowering combat controls is fine given that the controls were chosen to work with effective camera angles, and those are used to convey a more terrifying atmosphere. Resident Evil is never horror in the manner of Silent Hill, which has worse controls, I feel, but it was originally more effective.
Resident Evil 4 is where things changed, and it was a weird period where fans were upset that they were shifting to an over-the-shoulder perspective. Resident Evil 4 maintains the tank controls, but this time with a camera more in the player’s control. At the time it felt backwards, but they were trying to keep that “Resident Evil feeling” while evolving the series forward. Are the controls “bad”? Well… I struggle to say yes or no because, once again, the enemy A.I. and world is designed with this perspective and control scheme in mind. I’d say the worst part about RE4 is you have to use the menu to swap weapons, and it’s a game where you really want to swap weapons constantly (or, at least, I do). Does this prevent the game from being fun? Again, that depends. I’ve played it multiple times over several years on several platforms, so for me, it’s fun in part because it doesn’t control like other games. You gotta be resourceful, gotta stay on the move, take advantage of the A.I., and keep aware of your environment, and all in ways that you might not in another shooter. But to someone else, RE4 is always going to “control poorly” because you can’t move and shoot at the same time.
But were the adjustments made to “make the game scary?” Eh… the shaking laser sight was implemented because otherwise players were having too easy a time of it (see also: RE4 on the Wii, where the motion control made it so easy to dispatch foes that headshots deal less damage on it than any other version of the game). So it wasn’t necessarily about “bad controls to make the game scary” so much as “How do we increase the tension so that the player doesn’t feel super-powered?” …which is partially true because you can certainly feel super awesome in RE4, but usually once you know what you’re doing. They also have an adaptive difficulty mode, though, so there’s that.
Regardless, by Resident Evil 5, they were dealing with a number of changes in terms of the co-op emphasis, but most of all it was becoming more of an action game. Which means… the controls no longer feel optimal. I’d say they kept the controls mostly out of habit than anything else, and not for purposes of terror or horror. And RE6 was just… trying to implement so many Hollywood action controls with both shooting and fisticuffs, and in the end it just feels weird no matter what. I’ve seen what folks can do after learning the system, but it’s so counter-intuitive to learn it in the first place. The most I can say is that the game is certainly unique.
2. B-Level Camp and Intentional Comedy
It is quite possible they were aiming for B-Level Camp in 4, though as time has progressed I’m not so sure that’s true (especially now that Shinji Mikami has stated he hopes a remake of 4 can “make the story even better”, suggesting the silliness is coincidental). However, Leon being a less serious dork trying to crack jokes certainly makes the game far more charming. The problem with RE5 and 6 is that everyone suddenly becomes gravely serious, including Leon. If there was any similarity to B-Level Camp in the earlier games, it’s from influence of George Romero (which is a pretty commonly cited inspiration. Dead Rising, for example, is explicitly taking inspiration from Dawn of the Dead, and not the Zack Snyder remake).
But part of the issue is that most of us writing here aren’t familiar with Japan’s own live-action cinema, save maybe Godzilla and Gamera flicks, Japanese horror remade into an American horror like Ringu or Ju-on, or Akira Kurosawa. Japan has its own level of B-movie shlock going on, and it can either be completely indulgent in the most ridiculous, hilarious, and/or gross-out ways (I’m looking at you, Machine Girl), or it can be a really bad attempt at being good and serious. As a result, games like Resident Evil 4 make a bit more sense. I’d say RE4 is a far more Japanese game than either RE5 or RE6, but that’s also because I feel like RE5 and RE6 are trying harder to be more like American Cinema or the other big-budget action games of the West (I mean, compare RE4 with Halo or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, or Gears of War. Our games are outright stoic compared to something like RE4, which would explain why suddenly everyone is being so serious in RE5 and RE6). At least, that’s my impression.
But if someone thinks these games are being intentionally dumb, they’ve never read a single developer interview or post-mortem. These games are largely taken seriously by the staff, even if they have comments like “Where’s everyone going? Bingo?” or “Your right hand comes off?” They don’t want the stories to be taken as a joke, which means what you’re left with is an inability to convey a serious story. Perhaps some of it is a clash of cultures, but I think part of it is also just resources and degree of talent of who is writing it. Capcom has a far better International team for handling writing and acting, so you have games like Resident Evil 7, Village, 2 Remake, and 3 Remake, as well as Devil May Cry 5, being built and written with the American actors in mind. This alone has had a major impact on the tone of the games, with Resident Evil 7 probably managing to deliver its emotional themes and narrative the most effectively and with the least amount of camp.
…which is why Village is, in some ways, so disappointing, but I guess so much more accurate to what the franchise is on a whole.
I suppose I’ll end on that for a final note, though: the Chris Redfield in Village is certainly a lot more proactive. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure you’d still come away exclaiming how much of an imbecile he is.
Having started with RE2 on the PS1 and only having played the pre-4 entries…yes, it worked back then too. In fact this was actually a bit of an exploit; if you saw a pile of zombies on the floor and weren’t sure if they were all dead, you could use the snap-aim and see if your character changes direction.
And I agree with all of your comments on the controls as they apply to those specific games.
This certainly seems like the most rational interpretation, especially for the controls issue.
As for the writing: Bad writing is still common in games, it was more common then than now, and Asia does not have a leg up on writing quality at all. Just look at Lost Ark which came out this month in the West, and has been out in Korea for 2-3 years. The writing is absolutely god-awful, making WoW’s stories look like brilliant masterpieces. The first subplot is so terrible that mashing through the dialogue will improve your overall experience.
My problem with the original RE’s tank controls isn’t the lack of empowerment. It’s the disconnect between my self and the character I’m playing. The second I get ambushed by a monster that my avatar was clearly able to see but I was not able to see I get immediately and violently ejected out of the secondary world of the game. I understand that the disempowerment is the point, but doing it in this way just never worked for me.
It’s difficult to talk about the writing in these games because we’re not operating with like, the clearest genre boundaries. Resident Evil has had a variety of writers. I’m not super familiar with all the games, but as far as I’m concerned, RE4 is succesfully exciting and funny and fun. I know you don’t “get” it, but there’s a tongue in cheek to that game that games like 5 and 6 lack. Even when they get ridiculous, still operating on super sentai logic, they’re sort of ponderous and self-serious too much of the time.
To make a silly game that you can still care about, I think you need to take them somewhat seriously, but it’s a bit of a tight balance. Resident Evil 8(and 7, I believe) are written my some American writer, and I think in that case it works closer to what 4 did. It’s a bit too gross for my tastes at times, but it’s closer to what I liked about 4 than what 5 and 6. Having said that, I dunno if it’ll register as something different on the shamus radar.
The Chris sketch is really funny btw
How did this post about Metal Gear end up in this category?
I haven’t had the courage to take a swing at Kojima yet. His fans are legion, and they do not tire easily.
Take the swing! Take it! Please?
Well, with regards to intentionality, it should be taken into account that the American translators and voice actors may have had different opinions to the Japanese writers on the story’s seriousness and quality.
Sorry, but that theory doesn’t take into account what actually happens in the cut-scenes. No amount of voice acting was needed to make the character actions nonsense, though it’s possible good dialogue may have been able to remedy it somewhat.
“Hang on, where’s the trigger on this thing?”
I didn’t say it did. I suggested that the Japanese writers wrote what they thought was a serious story and then the translators and voice actors played it for camp.
I can’t say if Capcom was directly inspired by western B-movies, but I do know that a lot of Japanese media creators are, with interviews confirming that they watched international cinema. It’s not something the man on the street does, necessarily, but creating art (even bad art) means you’re more likely to be seeing how other people handle things.
For a blatant example, there’s a schlocky B-movie action manga that finished in 2020, Chainsaw Man, that actually has a chapter titled “Sharknado”.
That said, Chainsaw Man is good, and it shows the same things as Tarantino. That is, the tropes of B-movie schlock are used for narrative purpose, while Resident Evil’s use of that shorthand, even if it’s intentional, just makes for dumb scenes. Two people can draw from the same influences with one making Empire Strikes Back, while the other makes Battle Beyond the Stars.
I dunno specifically about the Resident Evil team, but the reason games like Final Fight looked like what they do I know from interviews is because some lead gave the team a bunch of American movies, told the team to be inspired by them, and they took it to mean they should rip it off lol.
You forgot to mention the 5 inch heels on the thigh-high police boots. Those come standard as part of the women’s uniform in any self-respecting police squad.
We joke about it now but it was an actual thing in RE3.
This is about the part in the game where it began losing me. I think it was, because one of my favourite parts of the game was the story in the documents you discover throughout the levels. However, in this temple area I don’t remember seeing any of those documents. This was exacerbated by the fact that I didn’t really like the puzzles in here. So it all gradually started being way too goofy for me. I don’t remember what area came after this, but I do remember not being too crazy about it :D
Just watched the VOD, and I immediately remembered why I didn’t like the levels after this point. My God, that conveyor section still gives me nightmares!
Seriously, before this Let’s Play, there were three things I remembered from RE5 – the really fun first levels, the equally fun part in the river village (especially the boat in the first level), and those goddamn conveyor belts!
But I had forgotten about the bosses. My God, those bosses. The moment I saw that big spider thing, I got flashbacks to absolutely hating it.
And the minute I saw the cutscene of that last boss in the lab, I immediately began feeling angry. At first, I was taken aback – “Where is this fury coming from?” I wondered. I didn’t remember that part of the game, and before that I was having fun listening to your chill banter.
But as the boss fight started, I started to remember. Like a devious sickness oozing into my every pore, it was slowly starting to come back to me. Not knowing what to do, because I was wrongfully applying what the game had been teaching me up to that point (i.e. JUST SHOOT THE GLOWY BITS, AND YOU’LL BE FINE!). Wasting all of my ammo just to realise that I’m actually not doing it right. Having to restart, because I just realised I don’t have the ammo to shoot at the correct glowy bits. Cursing this game, anyone who ever worked on it, and my very existence in this cruel, cruel world…
Now I see why my brain deleted those memories. It was trying to protect me. But now, thanks to your stream the scars have resurfaced. I never asked for this…..
Anyway, can’t wait for next week’s stream! Also, get well soon, Chris!
The “Partners” talk reminded me of a character in Trails of Cold Steel, whose post-battle quips were about the power of friendship overcoming any enemy. It was really funny when the enemy being overcome was, like, two rabbits and a piece of grass.
I’ve been revisiting the game, prompted by these streams.
Out of curiosity I tried out the PC controls and yeah jeepers creepers this feels wrong. You aim excellently but then there’s all the changing for what the mouse does:
– When standing still, moving the mouse turns your camera blazingly fast
– When walking, moving moving the mouse turns your camera agonizingly slow
– When running, moving the mouse does nothing. Use A and D to turn.
PC controls still get a pretty good deal with the dedicated knife button and ability to quickly select all 9 slots without opening the inventory (in the keyboard option you want to set item priority to numeric so weapons are generally assigned 1-3 by the way), but they still could’ve put a little more elbow grease into giving the controls that native PC gaming feel. After some experimentation, I went with control type B where WASD are always tank controls and the mouse is used to control a reticle on the screen like you’re playing Time Crisis.
I also ended up macroing two buttons: One for mashing A D F V rapidly and one for alternating A and D. You can hold the first one during cutscenes and the second when you’re cranking wheels or whatever. Resident Evil 6 letting you just turn this stuff off was maybe the best thing Resident Evil 6 did.
I actually played this game around the same time you did, on stream, not realizing you were also doing it. I actually really liked this game when it came out. When I played it again? It was the most frustrating thing ever. I was angry a lot of the time at just how bad everything was. I couldn’t follow the story to save my life either. The controls aren’t great, they weren’t great in RE4. But I was willing to meet RE4 halfway because a lot of other things about that game are really well done so I can tolerate some of the old control oddities. This game though? Awful. I don’t think I ever want to pick this game up ever again.