{"id":54027,"date":"2022-03-15T06:00:21","date_gmt":"2022-03-15T10:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54027"},"modified":"2022-03-14T23:04:21","modified_gmt":"2022-03-15T03:04:21","slug":"resident-evil-5-6-this-is-borderline-experimental","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=54027","title":{"rendered":"Resident Evil 5 #6: This is Borderline Experimental!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>And so we come to the end of Resident Evil 5. Chris posted <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ramblepak64.com\/index.php\/article\/trying_to_love_resident_evil_5\">his final thoughts on the game<\/a> on his site. He puts Resident Evil 5 in historical context and talks about the trajectory of the Resident Evil franchise. This is obviously his wheelhouse more than mine, so give his post a look if you&#8217;d rather hear from someone who knows what they&#8217;re talking about.<\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.twitch.tv\/?video=1420231124&amp;parent=www.shamusyoung.com&amp;autoplay=false\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" frameborder=\"0\"scrolling=\"no\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p><!--more--><br \/>\n<img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"images\/sp210.jpg\" align=\"left\" width=\"350\" height=\"1662\" style=\"margin:5px\"\/>What a strange game. Obviously this sort of story makes me crazy on a fundamental level. I doesn&#8217;t matter if the stupidity is intentional or not, I spend the entire time arguing with the storyteller in my head. The entire premise of a story that is [attempting to be] both ridiculous and scary runs directly counter to my sensibilities. <\/p>\n<p>But let&#8217;s shove the story off to one side and look at the gameplay. I think this was an interesting entry in a very narrow sub-genre. There aren&#8217;t very many games built around two-player co-op like this. Most of the mechanics work pretty well. The game doesn&#8217;t just &#8220;allow&#8221; for co-op play, it&#8217;s built around it. It both encourages teamwork and rewards you for it. <\/p>\n<p>Arenas almost always have multiple points of attack, and it&#8217;s impressive how balanced it was. We didn&#8217;t end up competing for targets, getting in each other&#8217;s way, or confused about what the other person was doing. The various mechanics for opening a door \/ giving your buddy a boost \/ shoving a thing together were simple but fun. The rescue mechanic was a good way to encourage you to stick together while also giving you a little leeway to break up and explore. The players are encouraged to stick together without resorting to the strictness of (say) Left 4 Dead. <\/p>\n<p>But then there were a few baffling design decisions. The double-jeopardy of quicktime events where you both die if one of you fails is a bad twist on an already horrible mechanic. There was a bit in this week&#8217;s episode where one player gets trapped in a cage with nothing to do for several minutes, and I have no idea what the game designer was thinking when they came up with that. <\/p>\n<p>And then there&#8217;s the mechanic where breaking a box is more likely to give ammo for your partner than for the person who broke the box. That was deeply annoying, although I think the blame for that should go to the horrible inventory system. There&#8217;s nothing wrong with players collecting stuff for each other, but doing so in a game where you&#8217;re always starved for space is just a flow-breaking killjoy. Having your buddy hand you bullets just when you need them is great. Having your buddy say, &#8220;<em>Hang on. Do you have free inventory space? Stop what you&#8217;re doing and come over here. I need to pick up this object and I don&#8217;t have space and I need to trade with you and maybe we can consolidate some of these item stacks and also hurry up we need to pick up these bullets before they despawn<\/em>&#8221; is <strong>terrible<\/strong>. That&#8217;s the opposite of teamwork.<\/p>\n<p>The entire end sequence in the volcano was a showcase for all of the game&#8217;s failings. The story was taking center stage, the cutscenes reached peak absurdity, there were tons of very demanding quicktime events, and it was somewhat muddled what the players were supposed to be doing.<br \/>\n<br clear=\"all\"\/><br \/>\nI&#8217;m not sure what we&#8217;ll be playing next. We&#8217;re still hashing it out. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this goofy game from Capcom&#8217;s middle period. Thanks for watching. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>And so we come to the end of Resident Evil 5. Chris posted his final thoughts on the game on his site. He puts Resident Evil 5 in historical context and talks about the trajectory of the Resident Evil franchise. This is obviously his wheelhouse more than mine, so give his post a look if [&hellip;]<\/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-54027","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\/54027","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=54027"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54035,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54027\/revisions\/54035"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}