I just finished playing through Resident Evil 4 last night, and even though the game came out over two years ago, I’m going to post my thoughts here.  For those of you unfamiliar with the game, it is a survival/horror(/action?) game in which American agent Leon Kennedy (who is possibly homosexual?) must save the President’s daughter (Ashley), who is being held hostage in Europe (Spain I think?).  In his adventures he discovers that a mind-controlling parasite has infected all of the locals, causing them to attack him relentlessly.

I should preface this by saying that I have only played one Resident Evil game before, which I think was Resident Evil 3 on the Nintendo 64.  Whatever game it was, you start out in a burning building and I never really got past three rooms before getting too frustrated by it (I had only rented it).  If it werent for the extremely good reviews the game has received, I might have had the same experience with Resident Evil 4.  This game was just not very accessible to new players.  There is nothing resembling a training mission or in-game tutorial.

One of the things I didn’t like was the feeling of scarcity that you don’t typically have in video games.  For instance, you can actually run out of ammo if you’re not careful.  And you’ll play some parts of the game over and over again because you keep dying because health items are so rare.  And I usually had to play for about an hour between save points (counting the times I died and restarted).  I think as a survivor/horror game this was the intention, in order to put you in suspense.  According to the Wikipedia article, though, this game gave out many more health and ammo items than any of the previous Resident Evil games.  I didn’t find that to be the case until I was into the second disc.  Of course this could be because I had learned how to play the game well by that point, or because I had read the weapon upgrading FAQ on GameFAQs and figured out how to pick which weapons to buy/upgrade.

As for the graphics, which are often heralded as the best the GameCube has to offer, I wish they had used all of the screen.  The entire game is forced into letterboxed widescreen.  I guess this is because the GameCube only outputs 4:3 graphics and they wanted 16:9, but I wish they had included an option to render it as anamorphic widescreen (so that it would render the 16:9 view fullscreen, so that it would look correct when stretched to fill a 16:9 TV).  I mean, Eternal Darkness was able to do that four years earlier on the GameCube.  Letterboxing the display means they are just throwing away 25% of the pixels that the system can output.  And it means I need to zoom in on my widescreen TV, making the graphics look more pixelated.

When I finished the game it said I had played for 27 hours, but I don’t think that includes cutscenes.  If you include cutscenes, and all the times that I died and restarted, I probably played the game for twice that long.  So for twenty dollars I definitely got my money’s worth.  Don’t get me wrong, it’s really a great game, but in my opinion not as great as most of the reviews say it is, mainly due to a lot of frustration (especially at the beginning of the game).  I’d give it 8 or 8.5 out of 10.

mah fat baby loves tuh eat