{"id":53761,"date":"2022-02-01T06:00:05","date_gmt":"2022-02-01T11:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=53761"},"modified":"2022-03-06T07:18:04","modified_gmt":"2022-03-06T12:18:04","slug":"resident-evil-5-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=53761","title":{"rendered":"Resident Evil 5: Introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tonight, at 7pm<\/a> Chris and I are going to be playing Resident Evil 5 together on his Twitch channel<\/a>. The game was designed for Co-Op, building the combat around the two-person team of Chris Redfield and Sheva. If you play it single-player – which is how I played this back in 2009 – then Sheva is run by an AI. This will be my first time experiencing the game as it was intended to be played.<\/p>\n

Chris is the expert on this series, so I’ll let him put the whole thing in context…
\n<\/p>\n

The games industry was a weird place in 2008. The Microsoft Xbox had completely changed the console gaming landscape in no small part by making their system the easiest to develop for. This brought in Western developers that would never have crafted experiences for console before, as well as introducing genres to controller holders that held no equal at the time. Launching with Halo: Combat Evolved and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind was almost a mission statement, and being the only console to have Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 before the next-generation landed was a hallmark achievement. The birth of Xbox Live also introduced the console gaming world to online multiplayer, transforming not only what was being played, but by whom. As the Xbox 360 heralded the dawn of the seventh generation of consoles, it was no longer the Japanese games industry that was dominating the gaming couch.<\/p>\n

It is in this environment that Capcom, one of the giants of console games throughout the 90’s, would find themselves. With most of the original creative staff of the franchise either gone or working on other projects, it was up to Keiji Inafune and Jun Takeuchi to decide where to go. Resident Evil 4 was perceived as a success in part due to its departure from franchise norms, and so, rather than try and recreate the prior game, they chose to modify it with a new and popular trend: multiplayer.<\/p>\n

If you play Resident Evil 5 solo, it is a relentlessly frustrating experience whose A.I. partner seems dim-witted and even traitorous. Played with a friend, however, it’s… actually an enjoyable experience like no other. Which isn’t the high praise it sounds like! It’s more that you don’t really have a co-op game that does what Resident Evil 5 does, for good or ill. By deciding on “partnership” as the theme upon which the game would be built, Capcom would implement a series of set-pieces and puzzles that demanded two players work together and cooperate in ways only Hazelight Studio (developers of A Way Out and It Takes Two) has really approached. It is, perhaps, for this reason that I find the game to be a guilty pleasure.<\/p>\n

Nonetheless, I found it interesting that so many who voted for it did so in hopes of hearing Shamus scream. It’s easy to treat Resident Evil 5 as a punching bag, especially for its nonsensical story. While it has the advantage of looking somewhat more beautiful beside its rather homely looking sibling Resident Evil 6, it is still clear that the game never recovered from its reputation developed at launch. For my part, however, I want to go into this playthrough with the intention of finding what Resident Evil 5 does well, even if my finely honed cynicism and sarcasm will be urging me to point out the title’s every deficiency. This is especially true as I now also compare it to Resident Evil 4, a game whose strengths I’ve better begun to understand over the past year. Does Resident Evil 5 manage to fulfill those same strengths? Does it carve out its own new positives? Or, is it simply cursed to be a lesser version of Resident Evil 4, only this time with co-op?<\/p>\n

I’m excited to discuss these observations and bounce my thoughts off of Shamus to see what his perspective is, especially as he gets to experience it with a human companion rather than an A.I. Admittedly, I am also excited to occasionally laugh, mock, and groan with him at the sheer stupidity of the story. I look forward to seeing some of you join us on this journey through nonsense and violence.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I really hope you’ll join us tonight on Chris’ channel<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tonight, at 7pm Chris and I are going to be playing Resident Evil 5 together on his Twitch channel. The game was designed for Co-Op, building the combat around the two-person team of Chris Redfield and Sheva. If you play it single-player – which is how I played this back in 2009 – then Sheva […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-streaming"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53761","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=53761"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53970,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53761\/revisions\/53970"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=53761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=53761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=53761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}