{"id":26825,"date":"2015-05-21T15:45:50","date_gmt":"2015-05-21T20:45:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=26825"},"modified":"2015-05-21T15:45:50","modified_gmt":"2015-05-21T20:45:50","slug":"resident-evil-ep2-nice-doggy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=26825","title":{"rendered":"Resident Evil EP2: Nice Doggy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0Y7J7QgF3vk\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=0Y7J7QgF3vk'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>This game is sort of beyond our usual criticism. It&#8217;s ancient by the standards of videogames, and massively influential. It&#8217;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 <em>Forbidden Planet<\/em>, or the stage-style acting delivery of <em>Gone With The Wind<\/em>. That was just how we did things back then.<\/p>\n<p>It feels very strange to see these <a href=\"http:\/\/www.penny-arcade.com\/comic\/2003\/10\/13\">ridiculous puzzles<\/a> 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 <strong>bonkers<\/strong>. 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&#8217;t have the fake key<span class='snote' title='1'>I&#8217;d love it if there was a mop bucket nearby for dealing with occasions when people set off the trap.<\/span>. <\/p>\n<p>WHUT?<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->This is what drives me crazy about Resident Evil. I&#8217;m willing to humor a game that locks you in some madhouse of traps and zombies and asks you to fight and puzzle your way out without asking too many questions about the world. I could meet the game halfway, &#8220;I won&#8217;t bring it up if you don&#8217;t.&#8221; But no. Resident Evil has this preposterous comedy world of the Umbrella Corporation and Wesker and their haunted house of ridiculous contraptions. And every game adds to this great big pile of nonsense and shoves it in our face at every opportunity. And none of it can survive even a millisecond of scrutiny. This world would be so much more frightening if we didn&#8217;t know who built this house or designed these traps, or for what purpose. <\/p>\n<p>Alone in the Dark did it much better. The monsters were clearly Lovecraft-inspired supernatural monsters. Nobody said, &#8220;Let&#8217;s grow a massive man-eating tentacle monster here in the library.&#8221; That was just a thing that happened because unknowable horrors had gotten loose. But in Resident Evil it&#8217;s all supposedly the work of boring human beings. And not something wild, like the eccentric toymaker of <em>The 7th Guest<\/em> or the manipulative villain of <em>Amnesia: The Dark Descent<\/em>.  No, this silliness is supposedly the  work of a corporation. That not just ill-fitting, it&#8217;s lame and banal. The world makes Umbrella look stupid and Umbrella makes the world less scary.<\/p>\n<p>If the CEO of Wal-Mart put on some JC Denton cosplay and designed a house of convoluted contraptions, I&#8217;l not sure what sort of emotion I&#8217;d feel when I was chased inside the place by zombie dogs. But fear would be pretty far down the list. This is what has always put me off the series. The supposed survival horror tone does not mix with the Willy Wonka setting, and I go crazy trying to immerse myself in the world. I can&#8217;t ask why anything exists, who made it, or what it&#8217;s for. I can&#8217;t analyze the motivations of the characters, including my avatar. Everyone is a dumb idiot goof.<\/p>\n<p>Having said all that, I&#8217;ll say that I like the sensibilities of this first game more than Resident Evil 4 or 5. While RE4 is widely celebrated mechanically, I think this first one is a lot more tolerable in terms of premise. It&#8217;s light on the stuff about evil corporations and sort of presents the weirdness without (much) comment. It&#8217;s silly, but at least I&#8217;m not a boy-band zombie cop sent to rescue the President&#8217;s daughter from Midget Napoleon and the Umbrella Corporation&#8217;s medieval doomsday castle \/ apocalypse science lab. <\/p>\n<p>Looks like I was wrong. At the top I said this game was beyond my usual nitpicking, but there I went and did it anyway. Well, sue me. A zebra can&#8217;t change its stripes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Link (YouTube) This game is sort of beyond our usual criticism. It&#8217;s ancient by the standards of videogames, and massively influential. It&#8217;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 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[188],"tags":[160],"class_list":["post-26825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spoilerwarning","tag-resident-evil"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}