Go Green!

I'd just like to say congrats to MSU! It's been a dream run through the NCAA tourney. No matter what happens in the final game, you've played incredibly. It almost brought tears to my eyes seeing Jim Calhoun, one of the best coaches who has ever worked in NCAA basketball talking so respectfully and reverently about the Spartans. Tom Izzo just proved that he is one of the best coaches in history. Let's ride this out, we've got the final game of the season on my birthday, so GO GREEN!

Also, since this is probably Jim Calhoun's last season, I think we should all recognize him as one of the best coaches who has ever been involved with Basketball. Coach Calhoun, you did get outplayed in this round, but you've certainly been the inspiration for generations of coaches. So, coach Calhoun, wonderful career, congrats on all the success. If you'd been playing anyone else... maybe I would have rooted for you... if there weren't any other teams playing that I liked... or anything...

Resident Evil 5... what a disappointment...

If any of you have a TV, you've seen the promos for the new Resident Evil game. To be honest, I don't really know what their marketing team was thinking. They show some footage of the game that's visually stunning (as the entire game is) as the "plot" which causes someone to commit suicide. They're literally saying "This product will make you want to kill yourself" because it's a "fear you can't forget." Here's the thing, not only is that an awful way to sell a product - especially a product like this that everyone was excited to play after playing Resident Evil 4 that you could have sold just by showing footage - but it's also disingenuous as hell. I played through the entire game, never once was I frightened. Not a single time. In fact, it becomes evident early on that this was Capcom's power play towards the action genre. Someone threw the game engine of Resident Evil 4 in with Gears of War, and this is what emerged... nothing but a disappointment in my mind, let's run through some of the things this game does well. (It goes without saying that this is going to be full of SPOILERS)

1. Visuals - The game is graphically stunning. From the environment down to the character models, everything is done extremely well. While the environments themselves aren't normally something to write home about (save for the lush African landscapes that you encounter for about half the game and some of the National Treasure 2-esque cave exploration scenes that are far far cooler than watching that movie) the lighting is consistently solid and the ambience of the levels enjoy a good bit of continuity.

2. Throwback Value - If you're a Resident Evil fan, you're going to get this game. No matter how much kicking and screaming you do about them making an action game, just face it, you want to see what happens to Chris Redfield. Once you start playing this game, you realize they've they've created an elaborate homage to early Resident Evil games. That's right, they've brought the patented Grenade Launcher and 40 different (not really, but something like 6-10) different type of rounds back. Also, remember the hunters from the original Resident Evil? Yeah, they're back too... except they're less green this time and more red. They will one-shot you just like they did in the old days too... they'll incapacitate you with their tongue or get right to the point with a claw through the chest. Wesker and Jill are here, there are references made to Leon Kennedy and his romp through Resident Evil 4 (via the "Kennedy Report",) and there are still the classic "piece the emblem together" doors that have been a staple of RE games forever.

3. Digestibility - This game is very user friendly. Anyone can pick this game up, even if they've never played a Resident Evil game before, and play it. That has to be what Capcom had in mind when designing this game - the generation that played the original Resident Evil is now older, many of whom probably were turned off by the radical redesign of the game engine from RE 3 to RE 4. When that was originally released, I was one of those people who thought "They're straying from their 'Survival Horror' roots and their stationary camera, which added its own degree of difficulty to the game, yet provided players with a really cool and frightening game experience."" You have to admit, it's terrifying when you walk into a room with a really weird angle shot that just shows the character and the door they just walked through and all you can hear is a scratching noise that almost certainly spells doom - or you walk down a silent hallway that has windows to the outside that the camera is actually looking through as a number of infected dogs ambush you - that's just genius. Anyway, RE 4 really did an incredible job of making a new survival horror experience based upon an action game platform. RE 5 tries to take up the torch, but ultimately just collapses into a forgettable action game. What doesn't this game do well.

1. Real-Time Inventory - I know this is becoming all the rage now with games like Dead Space which do not incorporate a pause into the usage of your inventory, which you're forced to manage in real time, but this should be adjusted based upon the difficulty level of the game. If you're playing on easy or normal, the game should pause. Expert players should have to be proficient enough with the inventory to be able to do things on the fly. RE 4 incorporated this in with a very good and logical system of give-and-take: players could use healing items from the inventory, but they could not reload. This was brilliant and should have been kept. Instead, players are forced to manage 9 measly inventory spaces through the entirety of the game, forcing them to spend time either before levels or after dying to manage that inventory, the partner's inventory, and a meta-inventory that had a ton of spaces. I think this was their way of reconciling the small real-time inventory with the flow of the game. There was some allure of a random stranger that somehow could sneak past all the Ganados in RE 4 and set up shop, complete with a huge blue torch, without anyone noticing. That, and he had the power of teleportation, one room he would be peddling his wares and, one room later, he was handing out prizes at the shooting range (not to me though, I was too busy getting laughed at by the phantom crowd.)

2. A Fear you can't Find - This game wasn't even remotely scary. There are some points that are pretty interesting that they could have exploited more to make it absolutely bone chilling. For example, there are some enemies later in the game, the "Reapers," that are basically huge cockroaches. They emit this gas which causes everything around them to be really hazy and blurry. You stick a couple of these enemies in a really dark yet open room with pillars and a couple pinpoint light sources and what do you get? Instant terror. Instead, the only time anything even remotely approaches terrifying is a result of the player not doing their homework and scouting an area.

3. Less-than-memorable Boss Fights - The coolest boss fight in this game is the fight against the huge Oruboros thing on the ship. You needed to disable the arms and then hit them with a huge satellite laser beam to blow them up. It truly is a cinematic moment. What wasn't cool about this was that Sheva wasted all my ammo and so she just sorta sat in the corner and would occasionally attempt to knife the Oruboros wormies that the boss would throw at you - this, at least, was pretty funny to watch. Aside from that, the Gigante, the giant Crab, the giant Bat... uninspired bosses with less than memorable fights. You shoot something, something changes, you shoot whatever changed, end of fight.

4. Clumsy Controls - I hate, I hate, I hate games that have the generic action button for the most part. The reason? What happens in this game... You have to jump over something, attach yourself to cover, or jump down from somewhere so you run over to that spot and mash on the x button... and wait... and mash on the button, and wait.... and finally give up and sit there. Two seconds later, the game realizes what's going on and responds, "Oh, my bad, X for Jump Down." Gah, so frustrating. When playing the muliplayer game, this manifests itself by reaching a zone-door and yelling "Come On!" about 8 times before the door lets you go through. Seriously, work on your engine, make it instantly context specific - there's no excuse for a game of this caliber that's being advertised this widely to be so damn clumsy. Resident Evil 4 had an infinitely better game engine on a last generation console!

For all these reasons, I would say that RE5 bit off way more than it could chew. It might have been an ambitious endeavor, but the end result wasn't great. Sure, it was graphically impressive, but that seems to be the industry standard with high quality titles. You have to have something which stands out. This game is a tired action game that only appeals to fans of the series through familiar characters and an appeal to RE4 fans through a similar (yet inferior) engine. If I were considering buying this game, I'd play the demo on XBL first and keep in mind that what you're playing is the whole experience, then delete the demo and go on with your lives. By the end of this game, you'll be way more interested in not having to play it anymore than you will be to see how it ends.

My rating: 3.5/10

* = A little shout to those Eddie Izzard fans out there