To refer back to last week’s October’s piece about my beloved Resident Evil 4, at no time during my 9-hour playthrough of Resident Evil: Code Veronica (only my second ever, tellingly) did I remark aloud “Fuck me, I love Resident Evil: Code Veronica like it were a person”, nor shall I likely ever. I don’t love it even like I love extraneous family members (analogy) that you love by default because they’re related to you (a game you like), even though the rest of the family (video games) are amongst my favourite humans (games) of all time.
Will I go as far as to say I hate it? Well, even though m’maw always told me hate was too strong a word for any situation, I’ve already written the title and much more relevantly I do indeed hate the fucker. I hadn’t played RECV in eight years when it was announced back in Spring that it would be remastered for PS3 alongside Resident Evil 4 for release in September despite having committed large portions of RE titles released before and since it to memory (here’s one reprinted wholesale), but the fact that it was selling for half price if purchased with RE4 and my good buddy Jimmy ‘going halfsies’ on it made the asking £4 too good an offer to refuse. My memory of the game wasn’t that barbed, and my presiding impression of it was that it was pathetically unscary and far too long and difficult. I’ve since had to reassess this trilogy of opinions, but only to double their intensity before re-shelving them in my mindchives in the very same slots if a tad more bloated. For no reason, I’ve decided to write the opposite of what I actually feel. The game is too bad to try and take seriously without getting legitimately angry over.
1: Even though going up stairs without using the action button in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis was neat, I really felt like we needed to get back to basics re: use of the action button to go up stairs, and Code Ronnie delivers in spades. It also uses the same background zombie moans as Resident Evil 2, acting as a sort of spiritual sequel to that over-rated slab of pixelated garbage.
2: Steve Burnside. Steve Burnside is a wimpy, possibly Canadian (he says, like, I can’t find an appropriate phonetic spelling but he pronounces ‘sorry’ like a douchebag) fuck with daddy issues (has to kill his daddy issues in the face) and dresses like John Connor would have if he’d been raised by the Village People. Shit, I wrote what I actually meant there. Um. He’s real cool. That’s what I meant. Really glad they created and cast him.
3: Perhaps the best thing about the original Resident Evil, better than “master of unlocking”, the squelchy arms-in-front zombies or this opening cinematic, is the occasional appearance of Albert Wesker, the game’s villain and an all-round great guy. I mean horrible guy. Wesker’s appeal can be attributed to his amazing 1990s hairstyle and his betrayal of his fellow American team-mates in order to make a quick buck. That’s about the height of him. Blonde, American, bit of a bastard. In Resident Evil: Code Veronica (the first game he’s appeared in since being KILLED in Resident Evil), he’s suddenly British (because you have to be to be evil, it seems), invincible and sporting a whole new set of superhuman backflips and designs on world domination and the like, though it should be mentioned that he’s not changed his outfit in five years. Capcom succeeded in taking the best of Resident Evil’s terrible characters and turning him into something EVEN BETTER. It’s possibly the best development in the series’ history.
4: The characters speak just like real people. Like, when one character is dying, another’ll say something like “oh no”. I know that’s what I’d do in that situation. Later on, Steve tells Claire he loves her (he’s dying at the tiOH NO) and even though he’s known her less than a day and clearly has the mind of a fucking child, I too believe that love can bloom on the battlefield.
5: Even though the music is crap, it doesn’t matter because it’s only music and if I want good music I’ll just turn the radio on to listen to.
6: There is no number six because just because.
7: Get this. The Resident Evil games had always been known for their amazing enemies, which fell into one of three categories – mutated animals, dead people and hulking great mansters.* For Code Ronnie, they decided to step outside their own mythos and challenge the unbelievers with a new kind of enemy which subversively would not only fail to frighten but look downright foolish. Enter the Bandersnatch (named for Lewis Carrol’s poetry for some reason which probably exists), a goofy looking motherfucker with one arm and yellow skin that, rather cleverly, confuses you into submission before blunting you to death with its fleshbits. I wish they’d been there from the start. I even wish Dawn Of The Dead had just had Bandersnatches running around the mall.
8: The plot is deep as a hole dug straight through the earth, ie: totally infinite. Basically, there’s these ants, right, and this pair of twins who aren’t actually twins because it’s one guy dressing up like his sister sometimes but then she IS real but she’s made of plants and tentacles so they shackled their dad in the basement but he broke out and shoots this purple gas at you and you die and then Steve turns into a comedy monster going “arrrrrghllllllburbleburble” and then a plane and then a man runs up a wall but pipes can’t kill him but then Europe and after that some more and finally the credits, and it all happens so fast that you barely have time to take it in or make a fuck of sense out of it because Capcom are genii, for certs yo.
9: Well, I really like how if you don’t plan a couple of hours ahead with regards to your saves and conservation of ammunition there at least two sections of the game where you literally cannot progress. This serves those lazy gamers who’ve never completed Code Veronica just right for being so culturally ignorant. They deserve to be thrown out of a plane or crushed by Alexandralexiaford’s bug tentacle.
10: It made the absolute best of the Dreamcast’s and PS2’s abilities to make a cutting edge postmodern Resident Evil experience before the 2002 Gamecube remake had a chance to sully everything up with its murk and grace.
CLOSURE!
*God bless Jim Ross for calling fat fuck wrestler Vader a “half man, half monster- he’s a manster” way back in 1996. My ensuring love of portmanteau likely stems from this one moment.
RAMBLEAST 