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Shooting Zombies in the Face is Fun

Okay, this update is coming WAAAYY late, I know.  Better late than never right?  I ended up buying an Xbox 360.  I haven’t really been into console gaming since Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo – yeah, that long.  I owned an original Playstation and a Playstation 2 but never really played it much because I was into PC gaming by then and consoles seemed to limited.  I’m sure I missed a lot of great stuff along the way.

Resident Evil 5 is the first Resident Evil I played from start to finish, not because it’s the “best” one I played but because I never played the other ones really.  I seen the first couple back on the original PS in passing at friends houses or whatever but I never bought it/rented it or otherwise.  With no expectation other than shooting African zombies (I killed the white African zombies also, let’s not go there), I walked into Resident Evil 5 with a pretty open mind.

The game looks very nice.  I’ve been pretty impressed with the Xbox’s graphics, seeing as my last console experience was like playing with construction paper and dull Crayola compared to the stuff out now, most people probably already know it has good graphics so talking a lot about that is pretty pointless.

The game follows our protagonist, Chris Redfield, the whiniest zombie slayer I’ve ever witnessed whimper around the ghettos of African towns and villages slaying mutant zombies, mutant dogs, mutant tar monsters, mutant bats, mutant spiders, mutant praying mantis’, mutant sea horses – you get the idea.

Controls were strange to say the least.  Aiming with a analog stick on a controller was pretty hard for me to get used to after years of PC gaming.  At one point I would have compared it to jabbing a razor blade under my finger nail while submerged in salt water.   Once I got the hang of it though, the controls seemed reasonabily responsive and intuitive.  The knife was always sort of clunky to use other than breaking open stuff for herbs and ammo.

Speaking of herbs in Resident Evil, what the hell does gnawing on a tea leaf have to do with repairing half my brain being eaten by a rabid zombie?  The health sprays didn’t really make any sense either.  I get a spear thrown in my gut by a satan spawned tiki man and our hero’s solution is spray on a little Paul Mitchell?  Whatever.

The game was pretty short, but fun.  Not huge on quick time events being thrown in randomly but I guess that is pretty common nowadays on these games so it’s probably best I just suck it up and get used to it.

By far, the most annoying thing about the game was my stupid sidekick Sheva.  I wanted to kill her more than the zombies through most of the game and I’m pretty sure that’s not inteded.  Half the time I’m running away from her instead of the monsters so she doesn’t blow one of our Christmas colored “special” leaves on my 2% missing health that I just happened to get playing chicken with some thing that looked like a Starcraft Mutalisk.

Other than her, the inventory system is the remaining failure of the game.  Someone might want to apply some basic common sense.  500 rounds of ammunition taking up less space than a moldy egg?  Do the devs want to get anthrax mailed to them?  What the hell are they thinking?

Overall, I had a good time with the game and while I am not too keen on replaying it just to dress the characters up like clowns for alternate costumes it was at least worth 1 solid play through.

More fun Xbox 360 gaming is in my future I think.