Pros: True to the originals, new story, chaotic atmosphere
Cons: True to the original, crappy story, bad graphic translation, same ol' $#@%
The Bottom Line: Could'a, should'a, would'a......didn't. The DC hardly enhanced the game, and the series is really getting stale. Might be joining Tomb Raider in it's "has been" grave soon.
samadust's Full Review: Resident Evil 2 for Dreamcast
Back in the early days of Playstation when the flat grey boxes were making their way into all of over homes for the first time, the soon to be vast 32-bit Universe was just beginning to open. The Saturn had come out a little bit earlier but because of a lack of support, it wasn't producing the games we really wanted to see. Suddenly PS1 appears on the scene and not only promises great games on the horizon but it immediately hit us with some of the best, or at least visually dazzling, games we had ever seen like Battle Arena Toshinden, Tekken, Ridge Racer and a little later on Resident Evil.
I remember the long wait for the first installment of RE. It was one of those monolithic games in your consoles future that you would salivate over every day. Then one day it was here and I couldn't believe it. It lived up to it's hype also. Never before had a console game had such richly detailed and developed pre-rendered backgrounds. The character animation was smooth, easy and just as fun to watch as it was to play. Capcom moved video game fright into the realm of the movies. The first time you watched one of those slimey, decomposing zombies lumber toward you, you froze and took a second to react. Then, the satisfying squirts of red appeared when you collected yourself and slashed out with the knife.
Exploring that house for the first time was amazing. The sound effects were eerie and constant. The shoes changed their thud depending on which surface you were on and everything seemed to fall into place very well. Even the puzzles were fun back then. We didn't mind performing such ridiculous tasks as long as we got to interact with this great new world.
Well, by the time we get to part three, these puzzles are starting to get ridiculously boring and redundant. How many times do you have to run around trying to find new keys, just so you can get into a room with yet another door that needs to be opened. Then you need to find the crank, to get to the seal that opens the secret passageway to the other door that needs the lion heads key to get through to the crank for the seal to the crank, seal, key, crowbar, password, crank........ c'mon already!!
This gets boring really fast. Granted, a lot of the time your running around performing these ridiculous, very unrealistic tasks, your blowing the rotting gray matter out of some zombies putrefied skulls but still...after a while this even gets old. BLAMM! BLAMM! BLAMM!! Zombies falling, fires raging. Sounds really entertaining and it is for a little while but just like every other RE, the zombies become less and less and the game settles into it's "stupid, halfwit puzzle phase."
Of course events pop up. Just like in all the others there is a main enemy who seems to have it hard for you for some reason and he continues to show his deformed (I'm sorry, physically challenged) face every chance he gets. Just like in all the other games, he invokes great fear in the player because he is a bad @ss and can kill you will one fatal blow. But the added intensity of the situation is that he will follow you where ever you go. He doesn't stop when you go to another room as if he can't open the door, he comes through and continues chasing you until he loses you. I have to admit that it's scary as hell.
The opening scene of the game is one of the bloodiest I have ever seen in a video game. A phalanx of zombies advances on a special forces team who proceeds to chop them down with automatic weapons. Body parts are flying, blood is flying everywhere. Eventually the team is overwhelmed and the zombies have feast. It's gruesome. But this leads me to my other point. The translation of the graphics, some how, left the back grounds and cut-scenes looking very one dimensional. The characters are so obviously separated from the back-drop that at points it looks like they are walking in front of a painting. The environments look smudgy and, blurry and carelessly constructed.
A nice feature of the game is the fact that the Mercenary game is selectable from the beginning. Plus, from the beginning you have the option of using eight different out fits for Jill, the main character. Also, if you choose an "EASY" difficulty, you begin the game with all types of weapons including the handgun, the Magnum, a shotgun and a machine gun, all with plenty of ammo.
The game still retains it's scary qualities, decaying flesh, wild fires, surprise attacks, zombie dogs, main, nearly unstoppable enemy, eerie music....but it's all just the same ol' stuff. If you like this then, great...enjoy. But to me, this series needs a major overhaul in gameplay or just to be shut down and replaced by something else. There are so many different things that can be done with the computing power of today's generation of Video game hardware. Imagine if someone put the graphic and programing power of the RE series (especially Code Veronica) behind a games with concepts like Omikron, Shadowrun (NES, Genesis), Flashback or Out of this World. It would be amazing. But alas, they continue to reproduce so many of the same concepts.
I think this game could have been better. It definitely is entertaining at times but fails to do anything very different than the others. Fails to keep my attention, fails to invigorate the series, fails to take advantage of the DC's power. It's worth the $20 bucks though. If you liked the RE series at any point, it's worth shelling out the money for the experience, something to play in between "Skies of Arcadia" and Shenmue.
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