Clattertron

[dc]A[/dc]fter beating Uncharted 3 last weekend, I got the itch to play Resident Evil 4 again. I think after a year of playing my way through Dragon Age II, an action-shooter was a nice change.

Now, I never beat Resident Evil 4, despite a couple of attempts over the past few years (but I beat the original, Resident Evil 2-3, and the GameCube update of the original). There’s a special place for the RE series in my game playing heart: the original Resident Evil convinced me to get a Sony PlayStation so many years ago.

Join me as I give it another go, and hopefully finish this time (I still need to finish Ocarina of Time by the way, but that’s for another day. Or  year).

SD in an HD World

I briefly considered dropping the $20 for the PlayStation 3 HD remaster of Resident Evil 4. Several reviews convinced me not to, as they all pretty much had the same refrain: if you already own RE 4, the HD version isn’t really worth the money, because they just up-scaled the graphics and didn’t add anything (there aren’t any new extras, options, or control settings).

I dusted off my Game Cube version of RE 4, dug out my Nintendo Wii¹ and hooked it up to our HD TV set. The result is what I expected: an old SD game going into an HD TV, and not via an HDMI cable, doesn’t look amazing.

I’m not one to suffer motion sickness while playing video games, but playing RE 4 blown up on my HD TV had me feeling kind of queasy.

Control

I eventually got my “sea-legs” (sea eyes?) and felt better, but I almost stopped before I barely started. I don’t think it was just the graphics so much as it was the graphics combined with the very old school controls and the game’s camera.

Going from Uncharted 3’s controls to RE 4’s is pretty jarring (especially when aiming weapons), and it took a lot of adjusting. I did flip the aiming axis in the control setting, which helped a bit. I am a fan of the Game Cube controller, however.

So Much Creepy

While the graphics and controls really show their age, RE 4 still gets full marks on atmosphere and sound design. It remains super creepy and made me jump a few times in the early stage, despite my familiarity. I definitely felt The Panic while playing, wondering what was around the corner or in the spooky building down the road.

Now I Remember

As Leon got his butt handed to him by a mob of villagers early in the first encounter, and lost his head later on to a chainsaw swinging psycho, I remembered why I never finished RE 4. It remains a difficult game, and you can’t get an Easy setting until beating it on Normal. I think the furthest I got in my most recent attempt a few years ago was section 4-1. RE 4 is not a very forgiving game.

Still Fun

Eventually, muscle memory kicked in and I got the hang of the controls once more. RE 4 remains a very fun game, despite its difficulty.

Plus, things got a bit easier once I finally found the shot gun (the starting handgun ain’t great).

Right now, I’m just about to clear the Farm area. I’m sure nothing terrible happens in the near future. ::gulp::

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¹ The Wii was the rare Nintendo non-portable console that was actually backwards compatible.