I’ve been living under a rock called “graphic design”. It’s left me out-of-the-loop gamewise, and I’ve got a whole shitload of catching up to do. Remember all those games you played, beat, agreed with everybody on the internet that it was the best game ever, then went out and voted for Al Gore because it was like ten god damn years ago? I’m just getting to those now. I see this as an advantage though.

I like taking things out of context to see if there’s any sort of objective quality to them. I’m going to take a whack at playing and some interesting sounding games I missed out on over the years while distancing myself from any and all of the hype, drama, or critical reception surrounding the game upon it’s release. Essentially: a game review strictly about the game; no unmet expectations, no comparisons to competing releases, no bullshit.

I’ve never played a Resident Evil game before, and Resident Evil 4 for Wii seemed like a great place to start since it was the only Resident Evil game Kevin had and I don’t buy video games anymore because I’m broke. I knew very little about the game other than 1) you aim with the light gun and 2) the old Resident Evil games were about zombies but this one isn’t. Seems like a pretty blank slate to me, so let’s get started.

The story didn’t seem to take itself seriously, so I didn’t either. Here’s what I could put together: you start off as some guy with a pretty girly haircut named Leon. Were Leon a teenager, he wouldn’t be too out of place at an Attack! Attack! show wearing an extra-medium t-shirt and text messaging his girlfriend about how much he hates his dad and how he’s going to run off to LA to be a photographer for punk bands because the people are “realer” there even though he’s never picked up a camera that didn’t have a “FIREWORKS MODE” button on it. Leon works for the government and is on a mission to recover the president’s kidnapped daughter (how the fuck did that shit happen? She got kidnapped by these fucking backwater dirt farming goons that can’t figure out how to build a house out of something other than rotten wood and probably think that a camera flash is your soul getting sucked into the film?) Leon has a fucking sweet Venture Brothers wrist communicator watch that lets him talk to a porn star dressed like a secretary named Hunnigan pretending to be a special agent that essentially just works like a shitty version of Google Maps for the countryside of Spain. Get used to her, as she’s the only fucking normal person you’ll talk to for the entire game. Your other interactions solely consist of talking to the president’s dumber than a bag of bullshit daughter (who might also be a porn star special agent dressed like a school girl), Antonio Banderas playing an American pretending to be Spanish (and has never actually heard a Spanish person talk, but has just had it described to him once), and the guy from the beginning of the Sponge Bob Squarepants theme song who decided to quit singing songs for little kids and instead sell guns to them or anyone else that walks by.

You just sort of aimlessly run around the shitty parts of Spain that nobody ever talks about, killing farmers and having wrist-phone sex with Hunnigan while half-heartedly looking for the president’s daughter until HOLY SHIT YOU SHOOT A FARMER IN THE FUCKING HEAD AND A FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER COMES SHOOTING OUT OF THE DUDE’S TRACHEA AND STARTS WAILING ON YOU. I was simultaneously grossed, skeeved, and my mellow, unfortunately, was way, way harshed. What the fuck happened? Jesus christ dude, zombies I can take, but what happened to these people’s throats? Is this like some sort of weird throat cancer that only happens in places like Spain where God doesn’t really care? It just gets worse and worse, too. You start off fighting farmers with spaghetti monster necks and eventually ramp up to some WEIRD shit, except they’re all really just the monster from “The Thing” so I already knew how to deal with it. Dog with a bunch of tentacles flapping out of its back? Dude with a giant crab-claw thing coming out of it’s head? Yeah, sorry motherfucker, I’ve heard this song before, and it ends with a fucking DYNAMITE solo courtesy of a drunker-than-my-dad-on-my-eighth-birthday Kurt Russel.

Achivement Unlocked: Get Drunk on J&B Scotch and call your Chess Computer a "Cheatin' Bitch

You go on fighting these things while ramping up your search for the girl. The game follows four real steps:

1. Look for president’s daughter while fighting trachea monsters

2. Find president’s daughter and try to get her to a fucking boat or something while fighting trachea monsters

3. Lose president’s daughter because a man-sized praying mantis or an inanimate object somehow kidnaps her.

4. Repeat steps 1 – 3 until the end credits roll.

The gameplay is what shined for me. It was a uniquely annoying but rewarding experience. Combat was awesome. Enemies move in a slow, menacing, shambling fashion that George Romero would be proud of. To compensate for their pace, Leon has to stop walking every time he wants to shoot and aims so god damn slowly that his gun just seems too heavy for him to lift normally. His movement is also unbelievably awkward. Doing a 180 degree turn is so fucking confusing that I just elected to never ever backtrack in the game. I made a small motivational poster to commemorate the experience.

This all sounds terrible, but I swear, it was amazing to me. The gameplay felt so unique and deliberate. No running and gunning. No spraying and praying. Everything had to be a measured, calculated action. I believe every game has a voice, and this game’s voice says, “You will stand still. You will focus on one target. You will hit them square in the god damn head as many times as it takes to kill them or you will run out of ammo and die and have to do it again until you get it fucking right.” It also fit with my personal reaction, in a weird way. If I saw some crab claw tentacle shoot out of a dude’s neck, I wouldn’t be able to do backflips and jump off walls and sprint around while firing. I’d be frozen in my fucking tracks, staring with my mouth agape, probably pissing myself and crying while I nervously squeezed the trigger hoping it’d make the bad man and his weird neck go away. In other words: making my movements tense and awkward adds to the sense of dread and weakness I have. I am genuinely scared of the shit that is happening to me and I’m unable to react in a confident manner. I absolutely loved what this added to the game.

There are occasional puzzles, but they’re nothing special. The game is really about 90% combat aside from managing your inventory system, which I found to be pretty neat and unique. It’s one of the more realistic inventory management systems I’ve seen, with different objects taking up a different number of spaces in your bag (Well, it’s realistic for video games. I can still fit a fucking rocket launcher into a box which is apparently invisible and take it around with me everywhere without it affecting my walking speed). It was just another tiny hint of realism that went along nicely with the combat. Some of the items were pretty fucking unrealistic though, but that’s for another article to discuss.

I had a good time for most of the game, but there were certain times where the game just seemed to know things I didn’t. I didn’t know Leon knew fucking karate until a few hours in when a farmer got all up in my shit and all the sudden the game presents me with a quicktime event that lets me kick the guys skull clean off his neck (NOT HYPERBOLE). I didn’t realize I could rotate items in my bag until I accidentally hit the C button or whatever the hell it is on the nunchuck controller. I didn’t know Ada, Luis, Hunnigan, or really even Leon. While the game has a unique storyline that takes place outside of the events of the other games, it still seems very related to the stories of the previous game with little or no desire to be inclusive to new players. No “Codex”, no “Journal”, no in-game exposition. Just “here is Ada Wong. Be surprised that she is here.” It never really stopped my enjoyment of the game, it just hampered my sense of immersion. I never felt like I knew what Leon knew, or even what the game assumed I knew. I was just an invisible hand guiding the actions of someone I don’t know or understand.

One of the most annoying examples of the game making assumptions was about three hours from the end of the game. There’s a creepier-than-all-getout enemy that moves incredibly slowly. Unless you’re using the special thermal scope provided to you shortly after encountering them, you’ll have to empty clip upon clip into them, hoping you eventually hit one of their invisible weakspots that can only be unmasked via the thermal scope. Pretty cool, right? I thought so too until I realized that it could only be attached to the most unwieldy, useless weapon in the fucking game: the rifle. In close-quarters, or hell, in nearly any environment in this game, what would I be doing with a fucking sniper rifle? I never bought one of the damn things because it just seemed so impractical. I never upgraded it, either, so when the game decided that it would force me to use one or empty out every bullet in my bag, I was walking around with the zombie-slaying equivalent of a fucking Daisy air rifle.

Why is that okay to do? Why make me run back to Cap’n Hook the gun merchant, blow all my money on a gun I don’t want, and make me play in a way I haven’t played the entire god damn game so I can try to use a sniper rifle on an enemy that’s twenty feet in front of me? Was I supposed to have this rifle the entire time, and I just didn’t know it? If the game wanted me to use a sniper rifle regularly, maybe it shouldn’t have stuck every enemy right within pissing distance of me so by the time I’d look through a scope they’d be sucking out my fucking bone marrow. Remember that voice I mentioned earlier? The voice every game has? Just then, I heard it saying to me, “Oh, yeah. You TOTALLY need the rifle. You didn’t get that? Jesus, dude.”

I THINK this is what the Merchant looked like. Right?

My biggest complaint about RE4 is attached to my favorite part of the game: combat. Remember earlier when I said I loved how tense and deliberate the game felt? How it echoed the real life fear I’d be going through if I was placed in this situation and had to shoot neck monsters? This was the biggest sense of disconnect I had between character and player. During cutscenes, Leon did not stress over ANYTHING. He was acrobatic, agile, and fucking deadly. He handles every situation with the confidence of a cheezy action hero and is able to hand people their fucking ass in a knife fight (just ask that bitch Krauser). He has fought assloads of zombies and is a special agent capable of taking on an ENTIRE FUCKING COUNTRY. Meanwhile, in combat, he’s too slow-witted to backpedal and shoot at the same time.

The character I’m presented with in the story and the character I control are two ENTIRELY different people. On the one hand, we have the Jet Li motherfucker that’s swinging around knives and flirting with his watch-skank while killing half of Spain, and on the other hand, we have…well, me. The situation clearly does not phase him, nor does his enemy. He’s so calm and surprisingly comfortable with what he’s doing that it’s sort of annoying. I found myself thinking “BE SCARED GOD DAMNIT! I WANT TO BE SCARED AND I CAN’T BE SCARED UNLESS YOU’RE SCARED!”

The character I actually control, however, is pretty close to how I think I’d react. After the first time I shot a dude in the head and a fucking crab claw came squirting out of it’s larynx and started swatting at me, I wouldn’t be so god damn non-chalant. I’d be sprinting to a nice, quiet corner to puke my fucking guts out and then call Hunnigan or Hannigan or Bennigan’s on my fucking wrist watch and beg her to fly me and my now shit-filled underwear out of Spain and to just tell the president that his daughter defected to the Rhythm Nation or something. My character needs to take his time. He is not comfortable. He is not acrobatic. He is not confident. He is genuinely freaked the fuck out, and as a result, every action requires focus and courage that he just doesn’t have. This is what I loved about the game. I did not feel like a hero. I felt like an asshole that got dropped into the middle of a problem and is desperately trying to fight his way out of it. However, I’m not playing that character. I’m playing the hero.

It bothered me in a way that few things really can. I was striving to enjoy the game in a way that interested me, but then every ten minutes the game would come along and remind me “HAHAHA YOU’RE PLAYING AS JACKIE CHAN BUT WE DECIDED TO MAKE HIM CONTROL MORE LIKE JACKIE FUCKING GLEASON.” It just doesn’t fit. If my character is such a fucking military badass, why is he so slow and careful in combat? Why is using a gun or a knife such a careful process that I need to stop whatever it is I’m doing, slowly turn toward my foe, and aim an incredibly measured shot rather than just spinning aroun and fucking firing? It’s not that I think I shouldn’t have to do these things. I think that LEON shouldn’t have to do these things, and that maybe the game should have A) given me a character that fit the control scheme or B) just painted Leon to be a little less of a badass. I don’t care who you replace him with. Make him a cop or some type of soldier, or hell, even a real secret service agent. Somebody that knows their way around a gun, but is genuinely terrified by the grotesque shit going on in front of him. Just give me a regular guy that isn’t used to staring into the black, abyssal void of necromancy if he’s going to control like he’s shitting his pants every time he squeezes off a fucking round.

I’d like to end on a positive note, so let’s talk about the dialogue in the game. It utterly killed my ability to enjoy the story and often hurt the atmosphere, but it was just so funny that I decided not to care. The dialogue is MASTERFULLY shitty. Terrifically bad one-liners, titty jokes, and non-sensical comebacks from Leon all made the game feel very self-aware and tongue-in-cheek. This was another one of those scenarios where I wondered if I was missing something from the rest of the franchise that the game assumed I was aware of. Do Resident Evil games historically have comedically bad dialogue? Did just one of the games have bad dialogue and they decided to keep it in sort of as a running joke? In any case, there were just some cutscenes where I burst out laughing, and I’d like to share my favorite with you now.

About an hour away from the end of the game (I think?), you finally get that helicopter gunship support that Flannagan has been promising you. Out of nowhere, a helicopter flies into view, and is piloted by a seemingly bored, audibly overweight New Jersey-accented goon. (I want to say his name was Dave. Or Bill? Maybe it was even Joe, I don’t remember. Just some name that screamed “If it wasn’t for the army, I’d be working at a bowling alley!) You wait the entire fucking game for this clown to show up and kill everyone in rural Spain so you can do your god damn job without getting swatted at by some crab-claw-neck-monster, and when he finally does it’s for all of two minutes. You’ve never met the asshole before, but he sufficiently saves your ass enough that you joke about buying eachother a beer after all this is over. Tragicall/hysterically, he then gets shot down by a zombie-spaniard that learned how to use a rocket launcher because he enlisted in the zombie marines or something. As soon as his piece of shit helicopter goes sailing into a cliff, Leon lets out a pained, longing scream for this poor, immolated sap that he met literally seconds earlier. It’s the type of scream reserved for watching both of your parents die in a wine tasting accident or accidentally flushing your autographed POWERMAN 5000 t-shirt down the toilet. It was pure, over-the-top ridicule of cliche and convention that left me laughing aloud. Here, submitted for your approval, is the life and death of Helicopter Guy.