Resident Evil Six

So like me you forgot how disappointing 5 was and still have your hard on for 4 and you bought 6. To be honest with you I don't understand how this series still exists. 8 something average games, 5 worse movies all held up by partial Jovovich nudity and a game cube game that came out 7 years ago that featured a quick time jet ski event as the final level. Well its too late, you surrendered your money anyways and its time to be underwhelmed like you were at a metal festival, you're surrounded by mouth breathing zombies that look ghastly and you're out 60$(insert your gross currency conversion here) and it appears to be hours before you get to feel safe again. If you are tired of the formula of the last couple games well then you're in luck you didn't just purchase a typical Resident Evil game, which is great, because you get tired of doing the same repetitive things and you long for a new format or at least a twist on what you've been playing in the last couple games. So here it is Resident Evil....meets Gears of War. What? You didn't want that? No one was asking for that? Well too bad.

Actually I understand changing the game around and Gears of War and Call of Duty sell a lot of units so as disappointed as I am with the decision to become a ultra-linear piss based duck and cover, push up the line, rail shooter. Updated formula I guess, don't want to go stale right? I play these games trying to figure out who is the Fifth Element girl and it never happens so what the piss do I know. But the duck and cover fire around corner way of playing this game is just boring, also pointless considering many times you are dumped into a huge room with bad guys spread out. So if you velcro your back to a wall you are probably about to get your neck bitten by a pale Asian man with blood dripping from his mouth. Which would be alarming if there was no such thing as porn tube sites.

I really don't know the characters, Leon is from 4, Chris is from 5, and everyone else is just a blur. The funniest part about the game is its assumption you care enough to remember its mythology, my favorite thing about comic books is when it catches you up during the story in a seamless transition, if you missed Thor 22, Thor 23 will do a reasonably acceptable job of letting you in on whats going on. Resident Evil assumes you are its biggest fan and they are above explaining anything to you. Just kind of hit the ground running, more importantly though it doesn't really matter does it? Leon is paired with some girl named Helena who you never get attached to or love like you do Ashley from 4. Chris has Piers, lol Piers. Jake and Sherry.... no idea. And eventually you play as Ada, Ada has the batman grappling hook that you don't really get to use that much and for the first 3 campaigns she is pretty much just a cock.

Speaking of outdated, why not abandon the whole stupid herb system? I'm getting rockets fired at me by militia henchmen and a gas has turned men into indestructable flesh eating giant mutants with Cyberdine arms, why am I finding potted plants and eating them to feel better? Why do I have to equip the plant and then hit the button to use it? Why don't I just use it out of my inventory? Maybe I should just be happy the duck and cover health regen system isn't in use. Lets talk about the modernized additions to the game...

New additions:

HUD/NAV Point!!! Well one is a constant NAV point on my HUD telling me where to go, constant. At no point is it not on the screen for the first couple chapters, Even if there is one door in a room, it will remind you that to progress, one must go through it. The ammo is always on the screen shown by twinkly lights, and when you fire an automatic weapon its incredibly distracting. The health Bar is always on the screen and apparently a stamina bar, which is impossible to run out of especially when you exchange trinkets for upgrades, which no one would ever do, except me.

Sliding!!!! They added the ability to run and slide on your ass and be able to fire from the ground. This is a great addition because mobility is something you don't need when fighting a room full of zombies, neither is the ability to not be pig piled on by zombies that are behind you(you can't turn around quickly when you're on the ground) so basically they added a feature that is for the bored and adventurous who want to see why nobody has ever won a boxing match in the prone position.

Swimming!!! Was swimming the missing element? The bane of my existence is the swimming parts in video games, never could get past the swimming part in NES Ninja Turtles, no one goes back to the swimming levels in Mario 64 for a fun review of the water mechanics, games are involving enough I don't know why I have to deal with the responsibility of my players blasted breathing. Granted you swim for about 2 minutes total but as you can tell it was a rather taxing 2 minutes on me. But seriously you know why there has never been a action underwater game where you have really great advanced swim physics? Because swimming is like watching your loved ones die in front of you.

Weapons!!!!!!! You store 20 different weapons in your back pocket. It becomes a little silly that by the end of the campaigns I have 4 assault rifles on me at all times, and never enough ammo. You can upgrade your weapons and skills as you go along by collecting trinkets that though barely having any value in reality but in a post apocalyptic time you can exchange them for the ability to kick harder and make bullets hurt more. The weapons gradually get bigger so the further you go into the game switching guns becomes more and more comedic and like a cartoon.

Gameplay:

Your partner is just a hindrance, much like in parts of 4 when you had to protect Ashley, and all of 5. They go down needing to be picked back up, they never can cover for you in battle the way you need. Why is the single player game sacrificed for the need of a co-op campaign mode? Why would a zombie based horror thrill action game assume anyone has friends? Also it feels exactly like Medal of Honor when you are reduced to playing push up the front line over and over against the.... pro-zombie mercenary/henchmen? Anyone care to explain how evil someone can be so as to accept a check in return for supporting a gentleman who's main goal seems to be the death of 5.97 billion men women children tits and dolphins? You people are somehow worse than Nazis.

The weapon use is all the same everything has a laser site but you have the option for a retical if you need one, and if you do I recommend having someone come over and beat the game for you and sleep with your girlfriend because you are a knob. One great thing about this game is that the melee system is the best combat method, way superior to firing shotguns into zombies chests, which makes me think a ball was dropped here, and kicked down a hallway into the silly room. Shouldn't melee be a last line of defense? Whoever spent the time on the melee mechanics and art development had some sway with the final product, because the best way to confront a body armor wearing zombie firing a m4 at you from across a rooftop is to charge at them while they go through cycled animations of them yelling and pointing at you, get close enough to them and hit the L button to kick them in the chest or break their neck. After you've done the same melee moves 10 times each you get kind of tired of them, which is funny because then you get to say the sentence that just proves the myopic nature of this combat system "I'll think I'll challenge myself and use the firearms instead".

This game glitchy, my partner gets stuck in all doors, every little door has a tiny none shall pass Gandhalf reference within. Your partner also will either run away from you or stand in your way, there is no middle ground. Zombies that get in close to you can not be hit by bullets, there is no aiming system with anything within 4 feet, you will just miss, center-mass non-headshots are like peeing on a 10 story inferno. In fact the best way to kill these zombies is the one feature the game lacks the most, a back pedal option. If you're far enough away from an enemy it doesn't know its on camera and will just sit there waiting for its cue. You can repeat skull snipe them for as many hits as it takes(multiple head shots from sniper rifles are necessary apparently) and they won't move, they'll just take repeat beatings and sit there like an Irish woman until they die.

Camera system just aims into walls when it wants, there is no control there is just anarchy, back up into a wall and its like the camera man fell over something behind him and next thing you know some upside down man scorpion has mounted you. The controls are funnier than Neurosis lyrics at times, especially when you're close and combative, when you need them the most. They'll just point at a wall or you will disappear and if you expect the AI of your partner to help you in those spots they'll just get stuck on a texture at that point and basically you're stuck in a tailspin until a zombie mercifully decides to hit you and you fall on your ass and the camera repositions, unless you fall on your ass right next to a wall, then you're in for a special kind of hell.

Visual:

The scale has gone way up but that's not an art, its just masturbation. its nothing but texture work like the quick time events to open doors become grinding out your time devoted to something that doesn't love you back. I have signed up to play a video game, why do you need to turn this into a job? The game is obviously visually stunning, the scale of bosses is remarkable, there are building collapses plane crashes, massive explosions, towers being toppled and it all is done really well. Visually this game is a 9 and I'm really only holding it back a point because I never played Skyrim and that's all anyone talked about. The levels seem huge but they're linear, cars locked doors and chairs... chairs block you from exploring which is kind of disappointing, I understand Resident Evil can't be a sand box game because that would be fun but does it have to feel like I'm being dragged behind a boat like I'm water skiing?

The interface/menu/HUD/inventory are all really impressive, I mean they're gorgeous but just confusing to no end and they mean nothing to me in any way and the only way I figure anything out is to click everything multiple times and just really hope things work out.

Catacombs... there are an awful lot in these games don't you think? Couple that with underground bunkers medical labs and Eastern European castles, you have every setting you can guess you would end up at. Plus the metropolitan cityscape that look like every multiplayer level in Call of Duty.

The game is dark though, I hate to admit this but I am a coward so I had to turn the brightness up a couple levels just so I could see better, and it turned out I ended up playing the entire game in a dusk lighting mode that probably completely kept me from immersing myself into the game, which is stupid, and made the game exponentially easier. I didn't miss a crate or a hidden walkway at that point. The backgrounds are breath taking but its a Resident Evil game, to give out points for that is like giving points for spelling your name right on the SAT test.

Story:

To complain that a game is too short is one thing, 5 was short, 6 is not short, 6 is long, long because it is a movie that you control between cinematic events.
The dialogue between the characters while you're walking around in between battle stuff is supposed to tie the story along right? But really I just have to ignore it because of the constant quick time events that if you do not complete you die. I can't listen to my partner talk about the next objective or whoever Simmons is because I'm constantly afraid the floor is going to drop out and I will have to hit two buttons consecutively to the metronome or I'm going to die. The game developers have to know this right?

Different stories bring different environments and different enemies which is cool, but though individually different from story to story they do get repetitive. Leon and Helena(these names will eventually mean something to you) fight standard Zombies. Chris and Piers fight mercenaries and sword armed fiddler crab zombies, who are sometimes armed, which I'm sure was explained but, during the explanation I was probably waiting for a QTE and didn't hear it. Jake and Sherry fight henchmen with hilariously poor aim and have a constant chapter ending battle with another video game boss(more on this later).

In closing:

Every boss is the same as every mini boss really, its a big stupid bio-scorpion arachnid thing with independently glowing appendages that you shoot when told to, its the same from the last couple games. The final boss for Leon is a half giraffe half German Shepard and a non-playable character kills it while you hang off the edge of a building like a stupid Flying Wallenda before it turns into the Brundle Fly. Jake and Sherry fight a mother from Bioshock(not kidding) and Chris and Piers the constant homo-eroticism between them throughout their storyline. I hear there are a lot of really great gruesome death scenes in this game, but I didn't really see any, because I'm not a fucking rookie. 5.375 out of 10. Oh wait there are animated tits...5.2/10.

Horror Business 1! 2! redux

Ok i got side tracked last time lets give this another shot.

simple changes i would give to the horror genre in an attempt to salvage itself from the factory of shit it has become.


2 new ghoulies that are actually scary that the audience does not end up rooting for.


I have to say predator deserves some if not all of the blame here

I feel like I'm over stepping the horror genre by adding in movies like Predator but to be honest horror is a really really bad genre and the theory of a Predator is 100xs scarier than any ghost toddler. Ant-jawed space hunter who kills for sport with advanced technology with no room for reasoning or bargaining with. He's like a pit bull that can turn invisible and laser beam you or gut you via wrist sword. He probably has the shotgun/sword combo too that's like virtually unbeatable. Now compare that to some kid who died on a farm. Not as scary. In fact I feel like any kid ghost could easily defeated.

I'm also at the point now in my life where I don't find the new incarnate of ghosts scary. cold looking children with dethklok makeup in shitty hipstery clothes aren't scary and their recycled use at this point is just overkill. There's only so many times a movie about "evil experiments" before that jetski has run aground.

Ring
Sarah michelle key movie
That movie with the farm house thing
Quarantined
The Others
Orphanage
the movie with Rogue in the darkness thing
Silent Hill
The movie with the kid in the basement and the dentist chair

I hate to give any credit to the shitty Rob Zombie movies but those two hunks of shit and The Strangers had a good concept of "some people are just fucked and evil" Now I say I hate to give Rob Zombie credit because his movies were at best Texas Chainsaw remakes with a awful hot topic twist that did away with tension and replaced it with batshit. But they knew their audience, they gave their audience (teens) the best reasoning for the homicidal rage that the audience experience every day are up against. None. No reason to act the way they do and no reason for them to have the grief put upon them is damaging to think about. Its different when people go into a cave or the woods or an abandoned camp or scenarios you know you'll never be a part of. But in that movie The Strangers it was just people in a house that were killed just because they were there. Now granted that movie sucked shit and there was no real suspense in it because everything was rushed to get to the climax and the climax itself was kind of chilling in a way but still lacked on a great finish. Or it didn't and I'm just a prick. I don't mean to knock the movie but the premise of bored teenagers just killing people because they were home and torturing them could really be terrifying if done well. Which it wasn't.where the fuck am i?

its amaaaaaaaazing.

Now the glaring problem with my comparison is that for anyone who wants a monster as scary as the Predator there is the fact that no one on this earth is anti-Predator.
In predator and especially Predator 2 the Predator couldn't kill enough humans. There literally is not enough death to dispense evenly around LA gangs, drug lords, cops with mustaches, people on trains no one was likable and all I wanted was blood. I don't care if my family was on screen I wanted tri-lasers to their faces and arm swords through their miserable carcasses. How dare my friends and family stand in the way of my mandible Christ.

So thats what needs to happen, I'm not helping much by saying this but, you need a new scary monster that gets people to root against him to win. By the time the new Jason and Freddy movies came around I was just going to see them kill people. If possible I would've liked to skip the story all together and just concentrate on the murders.

Horror Business 1! 2! 3!

Ok as I said like 2 weeks ago I'm going to start giving ideas as to how I would fix modern day horror movies. Just for the sake of this discussion we are going to go with the last 30 years of movies. Obviously the Hitchcock movies have a lot to teach us but those have been discussed at nausea. So 30 year cap. Starting. Now!

1 Suspense!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Actual suspense!!!! Not the Hollywood version of this in the 21st century. The void of happening. The consequence-free filler. Not having anything happen. Characters pressing pause on themselves and the story line is not suspense. Fuck modern horror movies for even selling that. You don't want the audience sitting around going "holy shit do something" when the whole point of a movie is to take the audience with you on a magic journey of wonderment. When you let a movie kind of just stop and sit there in the absence of anything of anything you've stopped watching a movie and you are now just watching flashing lights that oddly correspond to make images on a wall. To really address suspense you have to go to The Thing.


In The Thing you were hoping shit would stop happening. I actually wished for a quick fix and end the movie an hour sooner than needed. People would get infected spaceship unearthed and you're starting to beg for them to get on a helicopter and drop a nuke. I remember distinctly not even 30 minutes into the movie after already seeing it 3 times hoping they'd just quarantine the parasite successfully host seeker thing and go about maintaining the base for the remaining hour just to avoid my mind having to deal with the stimulation of my terror clit. A horror movie succeeds when you sit there wishing you rented a documentary about a dull military base in the south pole. Its like watching Dune and thinking, I hope there's enough spice for everyone to be happy. The very heat of conflict itself is enough to turn your stomach.

A perfect example of failure to build suspense was when I saw Jason in Space I got mad the title and opening credits took so long because that could've been more Jason killing stuff time. Jason in Space is an awful example of modern horror movies but when the first 20 minutes of a movie seem like a chore in order to get to the conflict you've achieved what I have deemed the Salt wormhole where you've time traveled to the future and you're bullshit the movie hasn't caught up to you.
especially when jason is swinging a girl in a sleeping bag into a tree


The Thing and the original Halloween did an exceptional job of building suspense and they didn't do it in the modern horror sense of just having nothing happen. Like in Final destination having a screw loosen itself slowly when things like that happen you're just building anticipation while you quietly hope someone will die then you realize "holy shit I'm watching a movie where literally nothing is happening." Other than me wanting characters that strive to survive through a horrible ordeal (the point of the movie) to fail and to die.

Horror Business 1! 2!

To me the horror genre has kind of been in neutral for a while revving its engine that pale douche bags with the video game and message board depleted social skills of mr Bean insist is a 552 big block but really is a golf cart engine. Now its funny for me to call out fan boys when I collect comics and play fantasy sports and would rather watch Hong Kong action movies than have the burden of fucking a girl present itself. But I don't really fall into any fan boy columns, not that I'm an individual. I'm just too afraid of commitment. Art house movies are too pretentious, comic book movies are always letdowns, anime movies are for children who hate their genitals horror movies are all over-hyped piles of garbage. I'm shocked these movies still make money. If I wasn't already disgusted with the American public and teenagers I'd be really upset with this.

When it comes to horror I like the psychological ones like The Shining and The Thing. So right away I've pretty much just said "I like thrillers" but lets just say they're horror movies just to give horror a fighting chance(don't worry if this is a stretch for you later I'm gonna include Predator) The problem is those movies are almost 30 years old and aside from some intentionally campy movies I've pretty much thought horror as a genre is the biggest failure ever. I loved Shawn of the Dead like everyone else did, actually I've never even seen it. But I'm trying to say I have some appreciation for it I guess. But I really don't because I can't bring myself to watch it. So what am I even typing. "I like the idea of Shawn of the Dead"? I really liked the Evil Dead trilogy and in all honesty thats about as serious as i could take a horror movie thats been made since the early 1980s.


Its always a cheap to say "My favorite horror movies were the Evil Dead" but I do it for a different reason, I say it because I've liked maybe 5 non-Evil Dead horror movies in the last 30 years. No one cares about obscure movies from the 50s and 60s so go fucking call rob zombie and dig fucken ditches and burn through witches with him because no one gives a shit about Zombi with an I and if you do your so fucking full of shit and Bad Boys 2 is better than any of those obscure pieces of shit so go fuck yourself and listen to afi and cosplay with a fat girl.

I have a couple friends really into horror movies and they have to do one of several excuses for the movies before I see them. They always have the same arguments for the gigantic vast chasm of substance in the horror genre. "Japan still makes good horror movies". And right away you're already excusing and needing help from elsewhere to bail out the sinking ship. Its like buying a Toyota and still insisting American Cars deserve a chance. And this will sound like a shitty thing to say but to me at least suspense can't build when I'm reading dialogue at the bottom of a screen, maybe thats why the twist in Old Boy surprised me so much, because I was so disconnected with the plot that when it finally happened I was like "MY LIFE WAS A LIE!!!"

Also with the advent 3d I'm convinced I'll never like a horror movie again. I liked Piranha 3d obviously, but there was a reason. It was a comedy movie, I just don't think a movie with strong 3d ties can ever EVER be taken seriously. Its just impossible for me to suspend disbelief, invest myself in the characters and let the movie rest its delicious balls on my face nothing can take me out of it than ooooh look the shovel is coming at you!!! Its like going to see an opera and the singer mentioning the hometown team. If I saw Luciano Pavorati at the Boston opera house and he yells "GO SOX YANKEES SUCK" I'd be in my car before the next song starts. When a movie plays itself up for the sake of doing it in 3d its just as cheap and stupid and then I sit there thinking "these people are actors" and "this movie sucks dick".

Ok I have a couple plans to rebuild the genre, and it will be a rebuilding process. We have to blow the whole thing up, retire all old characters and ideas and grow together. Now who better to fix a failing franchise than someone who doesn't have the nostalgia problems and won't think "oh but the Saw franchise started out so promising" or "Eli Roth is so likable". So yeah next post will be my first idea out of 3 or 4 to save whats left of this shitfest.