Be Excellent To Each Other

My friend lent me this the other week when I mentioned I'd splurged on a WiiU and since I've absolutely finished with Super Mario 3D World I thought I'd give it a punt. All that fluffy cat suited Mario was excellent but I prefer my games to make me feel a bit miserable.

So on goes RE:R.

The first thing to note is that the WiiU gamepad sticks are fucking awful. They're too high and, probably cause they wanted to be different for different sakes the right stick is above the buttons. Not only is this entirely alien to how everyone else is doing it, it's completely different to how Nintendo has previously done it in the past. The N64 and GameCube's right sticks were in a similar position to how Playstation and Xbox have their own respective sticks. Not only does this make button presses fiddly but since they are below the stick the standard button-press button is the one on the right all of a sudden: so the O on a PS pad and the B button on the Xbox. I suppose it makes sense given where the right stick is positioned but frankly the right stick should be in a more comfortable position anyway. Anyway, since the sticks on the WiiU gamepad stick out so much that it makes aiming in RE:R incredibly difficult all of a sudden. Head shots are difficult and just generally tracking an enemy can be extremely frustrating as you press too far or not far enough. I've tried messing around with the options and the best option appears to be to dial the sensitivity down to "very slow" which makes the game a little more bearable.

Less bearable is the level of sexism and poor writing on display. Resi has never been War & Peace but this plums new depths. A couple of examples illustrate how ridiculously offensive RE:R is.

At one point Chris falls down a cliff and has to wait for his female companion to get to him. He's laid on the floor tending a sprained ankle whilst shooting packs of infected dogs from a static position. The set piece itself has been done to death and it's jarring to see a staple Resi enemy reduced to taking a couple of hits and being less than scary when they were introduced in the first Resi leaping through a window to scare the bejesus out of you. Anyway, whilst chris is waiting his companion is coming as fast as she can to which she cries " I'm bringing my sexy ass down now" or works to that effect. It's stupid, especially as the female character is supposed to be an elite sniper. She gets a sniff of a hunky man and suddenly she's a moron with a female hard-on.

Females have never been painted with particular care in the world of Resi despite having a few female player characters but this new one takes the biscuit. This elite sniper later engages in some banter with Chris who couldn't care less about her obvious swooning all over is ripped muscles. When Chris and this woman (Christ, she's that bad I can't even remember if they bothered to give her a name) are ordered to "The Mediterranean" like it's a place, like Luton or Birmingham she quips "I thought the Mediterranean was a big lake" and had a little chuckle. Chris, of course, doesn't react and tells her to stay focused because he's a man and she's a silly woman.

There are other moments and they are cringeworthy beyond belief. I'm flabbergasted that this is considered acceptable writing. It's offensive not only to females but also to gamers in general and games as a medium.

The offensive writing isn't the only problem. The gun play is universally terrible: guns do little farts and shotguns sound like making a pop noise with your mouth. None of the weapons have weight, and it doesn't matter anyway since the enemies and just sponges to be repeatedly shot until they flop away in a puddle of shit and disappear. One enemy frog has a terrible death animation where the arms and legs shrink into the body and the body just shrinks and disappears. Nonsense.

The AI is markedly more terrible than RE4 which was released years and years and years ago. The designers have learnt absolutely jack shit from that game and enemies will routinely rush you until they are right next to you only to find that they just arm their arm for a bit until they can be bothered to pretend to attack. They come in numbers (but generally no more than 2 or 3 normal enemies on screen which is disappointing) but are easily dispatch by firing straight into the midriff. If you miss and, say, some then repeatedly in the hand then they'll fall over dead anyway. I've not been able to do a satisfiying head shot on any opponent since a head shot appears to have no worth. No heads explode and I've not been able to make a single enemy character instantly die with a well aimed and timed shot to the squiffy bit that makes them think. This makes the gunplay very unsatisfying and significantly worse than a game in the same stable that was made years and years and years ago.

The whole game is extremely ugly too. I've come across a hanging T-Shirt that was just a flat object; not even 3D and was so angular that it looked remarkably, and noticeably, amateurish. The same goes for the textures throughout and with the exception of the character models the world is ugly.

But on the WiiUthe gamepad will surely have a few tricks up its sleeve right? Guess what the second screen is used for. If you shouted MAP at your computer then you'll be exactly right. The map is more pointless than ever since you can only see the surrounding area you are on and if that area is more than a couple of rooms then the rest of the map may be off the screen. That wouldn't ordinarily be a problem but since you can't scroll the map on the WiiU then it's next to pointless. If you are hunting a particular door or object then unless you're standing right next to it you cannot use the map to find the door before you go and examine that area. To add insult to injury there is another menu that appears on your TV that ALSO has map. This one is rendered in 3D and has none of the nuance of the gamepad map and doesn't show rooms. It only gives a model of the ship where the action takes place and how each part connects: this big cube? That's the upper deck rooms. It's equally useless and only provides a very general idea of the layout of the boat. Again, if you're room hunting (and you often are) then neither plan will help you locate the area where you need to be.

Furthermore, the gamepad is used to select weapons on the fly but since they can also be swapped using the D-pad it's often much easier to use the D-Pad as you only carry 3 weapons anyway. The gamepad screen is, as you've guessed, utterly redundant. I don't expect that the versions of this game on the other consoles are any worse off for not having this second screen and those versions are probably better games for it as less development time would have been spunked on ancillary bits for the WiiU gamepad.

The episodic structure is useless too. The game came on a disc and I have sat down a played 3 chapters and after each chapter there was a lengthy recap of what I had just been doing. This might help gamers who have taken a break for a day or so but when playing the game straight through I can't help that the recap should have been turned off. The chapters just simply aren't long enough to even warrant a recap. The first chapter took 20 minutes then explained what had happened in that twenty minutes. The second and third chapters were around 35-45 minutes long. Not long enough to forget what I had just done; especially since any real story is contained as a "cliff hanger" at the end of the chapter so you watch the cliffhanger then you immediately watch a recap of it. It's stupid and there should have been an option to turn them off. It smacks of the worst American programmes that repeat everything after each break, again and again and again. I don't appreciate being spoken to like an idiot and the inclusion felt condescending.

Anyway, RE:R, I ain't finished it but I can't see it getting better. Only much much worse.

Surprisingly when Jill claims a ladder the camera doesn't go right up her badunkadunk.

Saturnalian is pretty much the most awesome person in the world. If you don't agree with that there's probably something deeply wrong with you.

Further disappointment abounds with the reduction of the overall moveset of the characters. The run button has gone although the movement speed has marginally increased. It's an astonishing oversight in a game that requires a substantial amount of backtracking.

The game is entirely linear too although this has been near constant since Resi 4 such that Resi 6 was nothing more than a 20 hour long corridor. Albeit a nice glossy one. The backtracking is an irritation however. Once the two comedy characters are introduced the continuation in the decline of the series continues full steam. The two male characters are supposed to provide some comedy relief from, presumably, all the survival horror. I haven't seen any survival horror however but presumably the developers are tittering at how scary zombie fish are. They aren't. The computer nerd, whose code name is "Jackass", is painted instantly as a 'stalker' after he divulges that he almost found out where this girl lives whom he likes during some early "bantz". A computer nerd who is an anti-social stalker? Yes, exactly. Anyway, an early irritation arises when you walk along a long corridor with a couple of doors only to reach the end and, d'oh, Jackass has tripped over and lost his screwdriver needed to open the door. The solution is to walk back through the long corridor and pick it up. Then walk back and open the door. This is the worst kind of filler that a game has to offer. There are no benefits to teaching the player the layout of this long corridor since it's fairly self-evident, this section has no enemies whatsoever so trudging back and forth is entirely pointless, and after the door is opened this section is discarded and you move on elsewhere. Irritatingly the game forces you to use your special camera to locate the screwdriver such that you cannot see the screwdriver on the floor until you scan it through the camera and, only then, will the screwdriver flash and you can pick it up. This special camera is introduced at the beginning of the game and has been a fairly central mechanic this far. You accumulate health tablets by scanning dead monsters (erm...yeah. Couldn't we bottle them up or something we don't even touch them) and a few puzzles along the way have taught us how to use the camera when needed. This backtracking trek appeared time to be a way of reintroducing the mechanic despite having used it to scan a bunch of monsters for the last 3 hours and as recently as ten minutes before this section. Confusingly this does even come at the beginning of a chapter either, since I suspected it was something to do with the episodic nature of the game when it was first released, but it actually comes in the third of 3 levels in the fifth chapter so I have no idea why the player needs to be forced to use the camera unnecessarily in this challenge free area. It's redundant and utterly pointless.

And the bantz continues:

"You two are going to the artic to find out what happened." says the Boss.
"Awww I hate the snow" says Jackass
The other tit replies "The snow hates you"

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. I will cut the people who made this.

Hang on, the Elite Sniper woman is back. Let's see how she's come dressed today...

The game design baffles with modern videogame tropes of adding meaningless filler throughout the 6 hour campaign.

A couple of examples: You cannot enter this door as it requires a thumbprint. The machine to authorise you in the system is down the corridor. There are no threats that way and no collectibles either. The door to the room with the thumbprint machine is locked but the window is smashed so you hop in. After a tedious amount of waiting for the computer to finish talking to you about how your thumbprint has been verified you make your way back to the door, open it and continue. It is pointless, it adds nothing to the game and could easily have been removed from the game altogether. The thumbprint could have been replaced with a keycard (of which the player already has) or some other key (of which the player has already collected 3). There is nothing to be gained by making you walk down the hall and walk back again except to piss off the player.

One area is covered three times in an equally tedious fashion: You escape a sinking ship only to meet up with your rescuers at the front of the boat. You are then told that despite the ship sinking you need to get back in there to find a laboratory. You have already completed this lengthy section which is filled with water and contains underwater enemies that cannot be killed since you cannot use any weapons underwater. Plus, there is the obligatory pockets of air that you must find unless you drown making the section even longer. The controls are as good as you can hope for in a 3D third person game, which means that you are constantly battling the controls and smacking your head into scenery. When you finally reach your destination you are then made to repeat this same section for a third time with no changes to the layout, the enemies or, well anything. It's just the third time you have to repeat it. It's dull, boring and lazy game design.

The rationale for the boat not sinking despite you being up to your neck in sea water is easily explained by one of the male protagonists who exclaims: "I'm going to find something to stop this ship sinking so fast." Presumably this was a roaring success as the boat doesn't start to go down until a spy (*GASP*) triggers the self destruct mode on the boat. A boat which has a casino, promenade, rooms for guests etc etc as it has been described as nothing more than a cruise liner throughout the game. Yes the ship does house a small secret area where spooky tests and being carried out but that's in the middle of the ship and the detonation is triggered from the bridge up front by, another classic videogame trope, a big red button. It's just needlessly illogical and besides isn't the ship sinking anyway? No amount of intervention from the BSAA is going to stop that.

I thought that the game was going to end at Chapter 10 after defeating a giant monster similar to Resi 5's sea monster battle (but with an added chaingun from a helicopter second phase. Yes, the imagination is lacking throughout this game) but it continued on for another two chapters. I wish it hadn't.

Firstly, one of the main characters is killed when he falls into fire. The next chapter then has a flashback of this character 12 months before the events of the campaign. He helps an injured character by painfully slowly proceeding through an office block. You are given a handgun which is largely ineffective against the big frog creatures which attack you, but you have to make do. That would be all well and good but there is a second AI character who carried a P90 machine gun. Since the player is carrying a wounded character you would have expected the second AI to help out more. Wrong. You can run out of ammo and she still won't get stuck in. She is quite happy to let the player and the wounded character get mauled. She's probably a feminist or something, Resi developers, aye, hmmm?

The wounded character soon starts to moan about his wounds so we have to drop him off whilst we go and fetch him some bandages. Where are these bandages you might ask? Right back where we started from. Yup, we have to backtrack once again through the entire level to reach the bandages and then go all the way back again to give him the bandages. Jesus. I was getting so frustrated by the level design at this stage I almost jacked it in even at the eleventh hour. Perhaps they had limited development time for the game but, if that was the case, why are all the levels so bland and the textures of a quality that they would look at home on an N64? Maybe they were working on the voice actin... no, that wouldn't be it. Maybe they were working on the story...no, that wouldn't be it either. Actually the cut scenes are all pre-rendered so perhaps they spunked all their money on that.

Moving on, we are treated to a final bit of meandering before the final boss which involves more swimming and the stupidest door opening animation that I have ever seen. If you fancy a look you can try this youtube video and skip forward to 5:25. This ship has been sunked for 12 months and all the doors are rusted shut. The only way to open it is to take a bunsen burner to the centre of the door and wave it up and down a bit. There's about 8 doors to open in this fashion and each time it becomes more ridiculous. After a short section where you discover the truth behind the B.O.Ws (I think we have Resident Evil 5 to thank for that acronym which has now become the staple word for baddies in the world of Resident Evil and sounds ridiculous) there is one last lengthy boss fight after someone uses the virus on themself. Yes, we've never seen that before in a Resident Evil game. Except all of them. The boss fight is as out of place as you can expect and actually requires pin point shooting to stop you getting killed rather quickly as you aim to hit a prominent area that only appears when the boss is about to do a big move. There is not a lot of time to shoot the hit box and the task is made more difficult by the unwieldy WiiU controller sticks and the slow turning mechanism that I had imposed upon myself so the unwieldy WiiU controller sticks weren't quite so unwieldy.

After the boss the game ends and 5 minutes of cut scenes play as the baddies get their comeuppance and the twist at the end is revealed even though it was blatantly obvious throughout. The bigger twist is that the character killed BY FIRE...is alive. Despite there being no rafts, the ship being in the middle of the ocean, the ship self destructing and a giant monster finishing what remained of it, and the only helicopter around saves the player... this guy has made it out with a sprained ankle. The post-credits FULLY EXPLAIN WHAT HAPPEN THOUGH "He was found adrift off the shore of Malta and rescued". Well that was pointless killing him off then. Killing him with a PIT OF FIRE, I might add.

And that's it for RE:R.

It's a terrible Resident Evil game and is indicative of Resident Evil games since, well, Resi 5 really. They are so caught up in their own backstory and nonsense that they think players want more of that. We don't. Well, I don't. I certainly don't want some of the worse BOWs in a Resi game. Not scary, not difficult, mainly frogs, looked stupid and uninspired, mostly grey, couldn't give a flying fuck about them. One enemy who is introduced briefly at the end and serves as a mini boss is fused with shark DNA. I was nursing an RPG at this stage and one RPG later he was dead. Oh, and the notes left around are just terrible. Remember some of the ones from Resi 1? Simple tales that foreshadowed later events. You won't find of that here, just a load of meaningless text about nothing. I stopped reading them after a while as they added nothing to the experience. They could have been cut from the game and you would not notice. They are mindless filler probably added as Resi games of the past have had them in.

I'm stunned and amazed that this was even released. It is universally terrible in all areas: graphics, sound (terrible music but I cannot be bothered with that), atmosphere, pew pew, story and of just being interesting. There is no need for this to exist. I imagine it was created to see whether gamers, sorry, someone in an office are probably calling us "consumers" now instead... start again: I imagine it was created on a small budget to see if consumers would pay for episodic content to milk the raw teats... sorry, to generate maximum profit. It must have been a success as they have released RE:R 2. So, if you are one of those people who paid for RE:R then you have probably contributed to the demise of this medium we love so much. y friend lent me this and when I see him I'll probably stab him in the eye for each and every one of us who cares about games.

This is breathtaking. Keep on keeping on dude.

I don't know what to play next. Ice got Dragons Age: Inquisition but the first hour has been goblins, magic and stats. Is there anything decent out at the minute?

GTA 5