TEH. BEST. GAMES. EVAR.
By Andr'e Swartley

Issue #9
Resident Evil 5
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Platform: PC, Playstation 3, Xbox 360
Rating: M for Mature

My first year in college I lived across the hall from an unusual cat from New York City. He ate giant olives from a can and owned his own barbershop. He had a Sony Playstation, which was still something of a novelty in the US at the time. One night while I was industriously avoiding my homework, I wandered across the hall to find him playing a game called Resident Evil. Fifteen minutes later, his room was crammed with a group of guys who couldn't look away from the television. We'd never seen anything like Resident Evil before.

The game's atmosphere was hauntingly dark and gritty. Real life actors (if you could call them "actors") played the roles of the main characters. Zombie Dobermans burst through windows and attacked you as you crept through the halls of an enormous, creepy mansion. Occasionally zombie people would emerge from closets or previously locked doors and chew on your head for awhile. Most suspenseful of all, every hallway and room would end in a doorway that creaked open onto blackness before revealing the fresh horror that lay beyond.

Gamers nowadays look back on the original Resident Evil as quaint. Silly, even. It's certainly not the hypnotizing fright-fest it was for that group of guys stuffed in a Hesston College dorm room thirteen years ago. However, we weren't the only ones caught up in the zombie-strewn Spencer Mansion.

In 2010, Resident Evil (or Biohazard, as the series is called in Japan) is a juggernaut franchise that has appeared on a dozen different gaming platforms and spawned sequels and spinoffs that number in the double-digits. But a release of a numbered RE game is still a big deal, and the hype train for Resident Evil 5 rolled into the station in March, 2009. What's more, in a few weeks the so-called Gold Edition will hit store shelves, adding content, costumes, and eventual motion control (PS3 only) to an already impressive game.

Past RE games created much of their tense atmosphere by keeping you, the player, completely alone throughout the game. Resident Evil 5 separates itself from its predecessors by giving you a partner. You play the game as Chris Redfield, a familiar series personality, and your new partner is an African woman named Sheva Alomar. Chris and Sheva meet in the fictional African country of Kijuju to locate and destroy a new biological weapon that the Umbrella Corporation, a corrupt pharmaceutical company, is creating to sell to terrorists.

While the story's setup is perhaps more "real-world" than that of many video games, it spirals quickly out of control, delivering the big, gooey monsters and groan inducing one-liners the series is famous for. It should be noted, however, that Resident Evil 5 manages to close several of the storylines the series has opened since its creation in 1996. If you have never played another RE game, you should still be able to enjoy the ride in this one, but you will certainly miss a lot of the fan service and nods to earlier games.

So what do you do in this game? You shoot big, scary guns at big, scary monsters until you run out of ammo, then you either run away to find more ammo or succumb to the zombie horde. Resident Evil 5 is not a relaxing game. But it is paced like a summer blockbuster film and, in my opinion, contains better cinematography and choreography. It is a ten-hour big-budget melodramatic monster movie where you play the hero, and is a breath of fresh air from the pathetically unimaginative and misogynistic torture-based horror movies clogging theaters these past few years.

But (note to parents) you should also realize that Resident Evil 5 was not created for children. Remember back when parents flipped out over The Simpsons twenty years ago because a cartoon child cursed and talked back to his parents? Well, audiences have come to grips with the idea that not all cartoons are made for children, and the same is doubly true for video games.

Remember, gamers who experienced the original Resident Evil in high school or college are now in their late twenties and early thirties. So while an adult may get a chuckle or two out of the corny plot and dialogue in Resident Evil 5, the events and images in the game could ruin a sensitive child's sleep cycle for weeks.

If your kid wants this game and you're not sure if he or she should play it, rent it and play it yourself first. And if you and your kid both enjoy it, so much the better! Resident Evil 5 has a cooperative mode where you and one other person can play the entire game, from start to finish, together on the same television or over the internet-an exciting first for the series.

There is still a lot more to say about this game-like the fascinating discussion of race roles in a Japanese game starring a white American man and African woman fighting against poisoned and mutated residents of a poor African country-but if my review hasn't enticed or turned you off yet, it probably won't.

I'll close by saying that Resident Evil 5 is a combination of Night of the Living Dead, Die Hard, and Godzilla. If any part of that sounds cool, you'll probably have a great time with the game.

Final Grade: A-