T w e n t y S i d e d

I don’t watch a lot of horror movies, so I’ll crowdsource this question and see what we can find: Has there ever been a time in a movie / game where a male protagonist has backed slowly away from a threat, fell on his ass, and then stared helplessly as the threat overcame him, when all he needed to do was stand his stupid ass up and walk away from it? Because that happens a lot in movies, I only see it happen to women, and I think it has the opposite effect the writers intend.

It’s clearly supposed to heighten the tension. Get up! Run away! Hurry! It’s going to eat / dismember / suck the brains out of / stab you. And you know what? The first couple of times, it worked. But after a couple of decades of this I find it really annoying. Whenever I see someone sit of their ass instead of fighting for their survival, I kind of feel obligated to let Darwin have his way with her. No offense lady, but I don’t want your lack of intelligence and survival instinct to get spread around the gene pool.

Does this make me a horrible person? Probably. Although bear in mind we’re talking strictly about fictional women. I like to think I’d be more charitable to someone real.

I will say that Jill Valentine spends entirely too much time screaming for help and gawking at things trying to kill her. I give her a pass for her first encounter, but somewhere around zombie number ten its time she got with the program and stopped being so surprised. Particularly since she’s supposed to be a capable police officer or whatever she is.

So that’s Resident Evil. It’s an interesting specimen and even though I don’t care for the franchise, it’s the great-grandsire to a bunch of stuff I really love.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

This game is sort of beyond our usual criticism. It’s ancient by the standards of videogames, and massively influential. It’s pretty hard to tag any of its design choices in terms of right or wrong, since this is back when developers were still inventing and evolving new genres as a natural part of game development. To a certain extent, criticizing this game is like criticizing the flat lighting and lack of dynamic shots in Forbidden Planet, or the stage-style acting delivery of Gone With The Wind. That was just how we did things back then.

It feels very strange to see these ridiculous puzzles and goofball doorways realized in HD. The layers of abstraction kind of took the edge off of some of the more outrageous puzzles. Having said that, this dog collar puzzle is bonkers. You kill a dog and take its collar and in the collar is a retractable FAKE key that can be swapped for a REAL key of the same dimensions, so that you can deactivate the elaborate trap with moving walls and an animated knight with a blade designed to grind up people who don’t have the fake keyI’d love it if there was a mop bucket nearby for dealing with occasions when people set off the trap..

WHUT?

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Resident Evil EP2: Nice Doggy”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Here is the original intro to Resident Evil that we discuss in this episode.

To be clear: When I described the old rendering techniques, I was talking specifically about the original Alone in the Dark. In that game, it would render the room once, making both a fixed image and some sort of depth mapSo your character could walk behind elements in the image.. Then it would take that single fixed view and render the dynamic stuff on top of it: The player, moveable items, monsters, etc. This was well before the age of graphics acceleration, so every single processor cycle was precious.

All of this is based on my observations from playing the game. I don’t know for sure how it actually worked. It’s certainly how I’d tackle the problem on those old machines.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.