I've been playing a lot of the older Resident Evil games the past few months in preparation for a 75 hour marathon. While playing the Resident Evil outbreak games it hit me... I was having fun. Sure I died 3 times before completing one of the scenarios but I enjoyed each death, each trial, and each puzzle. Too often during Resident Evil 5 I felt it was a slog to the end. The action did not wow me and where was the challenge? Before people cry wolf yes I was playing on the highest difficulty yet at that point the enemies just took more hits to kill.

For me it boils down to what makes a Resident Evil game. Does putting the name "Resident Evil" on a title make it a RE? If the name of Resident Evil 5 was something like Zombies take over the world, or Sand infection would people have cared about it? To me a RE game has to have limited supplies and an evil corporation trying to create BOW's for profit. Zombies have to be a part of the game.... traditional ones not fast zombies, or zombies that shoot guns, but real honest to god zombies. Sure I'm jaded because I grew up with the classics, but why change the format? It seems like they changed it just to change it with no real basis other then profit. I guess the path to more video game sales is to abandon the format that got you there.

I've been playing a lot of the older Resident Evil games the past few months in preparation for a 75 hour marathon. While playing the Resident Evil outbreak games it hit me... I was having fun. Sure I died 3 times before completing one of the scenarios but I enjoyed each death, each trial, and each puzzle. Too often during Resident Evil 5 I felt it was a slog to the end. The action did not wow me and where was the challenge? Before people cry wolf yes I was playing on the highest difficulty yet at that point the enemies just took more hits to kill.

For me it boils down to what makes a Resident Evil game. Does putting the name "Resident Evil" on a title make it a RE? If the name of Resident Evil 5 was something like Zombies take over the world, or Sand infection would people have cared about it? To me a RE game has to have limited supplies and an evil corporation trying to create BOW's for profit. Zombies have to be a part of the game.... traditional ones not fast zombies, or zombies that shoot guns, but real honest to god zombies. Sure I'm jaded because I grew up with the classics, but why change the format? It seems like they changed it just to change it with no real basis other then profit. I guess the path to more video game sales is to abandon the format that got you there.

A 75 hour marathon? Jesus Christ!

outbreak is old school now? did i step into a wormhole?

but yeah.. current RE's are a joke.

I think they changed the format because Resident Evil 4 was a giant fluke success.

It was originally supposed to be a side story to the main game, but it wound up getting so much attention for being so "great" (I use the quotation marks because that is not a good game even though I had a ton of fun with the Wii version. As with any RE game, the game the developers were making and the game people enjoyed were two different things) that all the rest of the sequels tried to recapture that lighting in a bottle.

So, it didn't change just to change, it changed to be more like a game people liked that fell into being called Resident Evil.

I imagine the next RE game, if they make a next RE game, will be back to basics.

I only bought RE4 (my first RE) for the first time about three years back and it quickly turned into one of my most favorite games. I eventually went back and got 1 through 3 on PSN and I enjoyed those quite a lot as well, despite them being very aged by the time I got to them. Those still hold up as legitimately fun and tense experiences for the most part. RE5 though.. just didn't feel right. And from the sound of things, RE6 falls even further in that direction.

I think there's some fundamental lacking in basic game design in all their post-RE4 games, and I'm not entirely sure how exactly. It's probably a combination of level design, enemy placement, camera design, UI design, and a lot of other similar details that have been neglected with the loss of Shinji Mikami on their development staff.

Old RE games are better than 4 onwards. But I guess we like more the survival horror genre than the TPS

I know this wasn't the focus, but why a 75-hour marathon? Curious. Also, why 75 hours? Three days and then three extra hours?

I'm a fan of 4 onward, but I definitely prefer the older games. It's not necessarily nostalgia either, it's just that those games are legitimately fun to play. At the same time, I see why they changed the format of the games, you can't expect to make the same style of games for 10 years and maintain solid praise. RE4 was extremely solid, and I just played through 5 for the first time this week and I dug it but it didn't have the same high level of polish as 4. In 4 it seemed like there was a whole lot of time put into every environment, every cutscene, every scripted sequence, and it was all memorable. 5 didn't quite have that.

The Marathon is to help raise money for Child's Play charity. The Marathon starts on November 29th at 6:00 pm and goes to Sunday December 2nd until 9:00 pm so 75 hours.

Interesting to read since I could never really get into the older games.