Resident Evil 5
(*looks at header* Not to say the game is bad or anything.) I actually liked Resident Evil 5, despite the numerous flaws. What I like about gaming is when I blog about really big games, because I can make really funny jokes that people can actually understand. That in mind, Resident Evil 5 gave me a treasure trove of material for quirky jokes, and, like any good Resident Evil game, it all begins with the story.It's been some time since Umbrella has died (but not really), and at some point before the beginning of this game, Wesker became a Nobody, changed his name to Wrexesk, and decided to conquer Kingdom Hearts with yet another variation of the Progenitor Virus. Obviously, Chris and Jill cannot have this, so they thought the best idea was to kill Wrexesk. This somehow gets Jill dead and sends Chris to Africa years later. OK, this is all a complete load, but it's better than the story this game has to offer. (Plus it let me play The 13th Struggle during Wesker fights :P.) Again, like any good Resident Evil game, it's overflowing with clichés and logical fallacies, like ancient underground ruins with sunbeam lasers of death.
I'd have said that the game is racist, too, but that's common knowledge by now. We all know that a large part of the game is playing a white man ordering a black woman to pick nearby plants for him. What I found more interesting is what people didn't discuss: how the game tries to explain the racism away. According to RE5, Tricell (the new Umbrella) invented a virus that makes black men dress in warrior garb, jump 12 feet in the air, and chuck spears in your general direction for a large part of the game. Not only is it kinda funny how they slapped this on to justify the racism, but unfortunately, a bit unoriginal; I've seen it done both in Aqua Teen and Drawn Together before RE5.
These aren't survival horror melee moves like, "clumsily slap the enemy", but rather things like uppercut, hook, crotch headlock, etc. Once you allow Chuck Norris to design your game, it's no longer survival horror. Fine, so RE5 isn't survival horror, it's a shooter. I can handle that, especially since it makes the cover system make sense in this game. Yes, there's a cover system in this game, but (fortunately) it doesn't make up a large portion of the experience. I wish it did, so I could comment on it further, but seeing as how it didn't, I really can't say much. I'll limit it to "this is RE5 following trends again."
Fortunately, the other major part of the shooting aspect, the partner system, is a much larger part of the game and one for which I have many comments. As I alluded to in the third paragraph, a large part of the game is shooting zombies with your new partner, Sheva. Other than (unsuccessfully) trying to make the game less racist, her purpose is to aid you on your quest to destroy Wrexesk. In that regard, she's actually too successful. Sure, she'll heal you and give you ammo/protection when you need it, but she'll also heal you/swipe nearby items/perform context sensitive actions when you don't need her to. I noticed that I could slightly influence her by switching her modes, but I feel like the game didn't want me to do that. Whenever I switched her to attack mode (again, totally not racist to issue commands to your partner), the only thing that happened was that Sheva would slowly pelt the enemy with a more powerful weapon for a few seconds before returning to cover mode.
Speaking of cover, another th....oh, wait, I already did that. What haven't I done yet? Oh, of course, the inventory system. Despite ripping
Oh, and while I'm on the subject of ammo, why the hell can't I directly buy any ammo!? OK, I can buy it for one weapon, but that doesn't solve the problem, especially when that one weapon does widely varying amounts of damage depending on what type of ammo you use. For every other weapon, you have to upgrade them, which comes with several problems. First, this obviously comes with a cap, since you can only upgrade a revolver so many times, and with each upgrade, the cost increases. Combine this with the lack of a health refill between levels, and you have a game that failed Remedial Video Game Design in high school.
OK, to be fair, the game still does a lot of things right. As I said before, the shooting is intact, the boss battles are awesome, and Wrexesk is worthy of The 13th Struggle. But again, to be fair, this game also does quite a few things wrong. The game is short (although that's probably a good thing, given the circumstances), several of the new characters are one-note, and the enemy animation is...weird. Whenever you shoot them, they do this very embellished, enthusiastic jump, almost as if they are jumping for joy over the fact that you shot the racism out of their grayed bodies. So what do I think of this game? Is it a decent follow-up to Resident Evil 4, or a mess that you should avoid like...well, like the Africa of this game? *flips coin, calls tails, gets heads* It's a good game. I give it the Sephiroth Award for Sheer Defiance of Death. The game starts off by saying Umbrella is no more, but dispels th...hold on. *checks coin* I called tails on a double-headed coin. I am a supreme idiot.
Review Synopsis
- Yes, it's racist, but do I really have to say that?
- For better and for worse, quite a bit has been ripped straight from its predecessor.
- Of all the things to rip from Resident Evil 4, why wasn't the inventory system one of them?
The Onion is great, and what I post is proof of that.
Mazin Saga Mutant Fighter
(OK, this game is a bit weird, too, but in terms of quality.) Again, this is a good game, but unlike RE5, it isn't a consistent quality. At certain times (that I'll explain later), it can be a really good game, and the next minute, it's an unplayable mess. What makes it weirder is that it's a very noticeable pattern of good at one moment, utter crap the next. Imagine it as the Jekyll & Hyde of video games, only, you know, not that.Well, that introduction certainly was confusing, so allow me to explain: MSMF is a beat em up based on the old Mazinger-Z anime. I haven't watched it, but if the game is accurate, it was about a robot man from Mars who spent his time beating up Godzilla knock-offs. In the game itself, that only makes up a small portion of the experience; the rest of the time is spent getting to the actual monster, slicing through any poor robot that happens to walk down the street. This part of the game (also known as "the majority of it") is actually really good. You have a variety of moves you can pull off, a variety of enemies to beat up, and one or two scenarios that differ from the usual "ram your sword into the living" that this game does quite a bit. It's really fun, easy to play, and I don't have many complaints about it. In fact, I guess the only flaw I found was that you needed to be quite specific with your vertical alignment, but that's not enough to actually destroy the game.
However, the Hyde portion of this game is. The simple beat em up portions are the kindly Dr. Jekyll of Mazin Saga; at night, this
That's the major flaw behind this fighting game thing: it's really unfair. As I said, the enemies have long range chip damage moves, but they also have a longer range than you; I could swat at them for no damage, and they'd be able to knock off a large portion of my HP from the same distance. This happened with every boss, and what makes it especially confusing is that the final two bosses are clones of you to whom this still applies. It's almost as if the developers actually went out of their way to make it incredibly cheap. Yea, I'll just state that as fact, since the collision detection also seems somewhat biased. Most of my time was spent unsuccessfully slicing their knees, hoping to Black Knight them to death, but I've seen instances where they somehow uppercut me while I'm crouching. I am not kidding.
So again, why did they include this part of the game? My best guess is that they were insecure and wanted their game to stand out amongst all the Final Fights, Double Dragons, and Battletoads. Unfortunately, that's probably as far ahead as they thought, since it's clunky, controls like crap, and, as I spent the last paragraph discussing, is incredibly cheap. So again, what's the overall quality of this game? Well, that depends on how much you loved Streets of Rage, and how much you can tolerate bad fighting games. I liked the former and haven't played the latter, so I gave it a decent score of 7.3 out of 10 and a superfluous award called the Ultraman Award. Why? I think you can figure it out.
Review Synopsis
- Excellent beat em up sections of the game.
- The fighting sections are cheap, clunky, and crap.
- The game seems to favor the enemies over the player in a fight.
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