Whether you’re a fan of the series or not, there’s undoubtedly no argument that Resident Evil helped redefine videogames in the mid-Nineties and propelled the Sony PlayStation into a more mature demographic. Open and tense locations, limited ammunition, a mysterious corporation, oblique puzzles and, of course, those shambling undead corpses all contributed massively to a successful regeneration of the survival horror genre. And back in 1996, we didn’t seem to mind the tank controls and those painful door animations. This was a frightening experience like no other. “I remember walking into a lot of walls!” smiles Alex Moore, designer on Firesprite’s brutal VR survival horror game, The Persistence. “The controls and camera suited the game at the time, but they were a high skill floor for players to learn.”
While it retained the tank controls and prerendered backdrops, Resident Evil 3: Nemesis included a few nods to a new direction. Much of the original game’s anxious skulking of tight corridors was gone, as was the laborious trudging across the map to find a specific item. Instead, we got the mutated Nemesis, stalking Jill Valentine with a rough gargled exhortation of “STARS” as the series took a notable move towards action-based gameplay. Then, with further advances arriving with the Sega Dreamcast game Resident Evil – Code: Veronica in 2000, Capcom’s decision to publish a remake of the original game on the Nintendo GameCube pointed the way to a new beginning.
This story is from the Issue 244 edition of Retro Gamer.
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This story is from the Issue 244 edition of Retro Gamer.
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