The Old School Still Has It

After a long stretch in tight corridors, cramped, weird rooms, sewers, zombie dogs, esoteric puzzles and B movie dialog, RE2 gives you this, right before the endgame.

It's the transport train you board to take you down to the evil underground laboratory (is there any other kind?) where you'll learn the secrets to the final mysteries and hopefully, escape Raccoon City forever.

I think it's a really pretty shot. A relief from the gloom with a beautiful moonlit night. The full moon allows for a nod to scary movie tropes, while still letting the designers show off a little.

RE2RE doesn't do this mostly because it doesn't have to. Because everything already looks amazing, other incongruities start to stand out, such as a hallway in the police station where it's always raining, even after you've left the building to cleared skies-it doesn't matter. If you go back, the hallway on the second floor is always raining.

However, RE2RE does fix Claire's mission in two ways: First, by using story mechanics to remove most of the escorting, and second, via technology that has improved the AI of the escort. So when I did have to take Sherry from one point to another, she kept up with me. This make's Claire's story more fun to play through and helps keep the pacing and atmosphere consistent.

All in all, the classic game still stands on its own, but RE2RE is exactly how I'd want to see a classic redone. 

The Remix

One of the most iconic moments in the Resident Evil series-and I would suggest even in videogaming history-is the gator sequence.

Essentially: You end up in a hallway, a giant mutated alligator appears, and you'd best defeat the gator before it eats you.

Because it will eat you.

The designers even gave players a little extra somethin'-somethin' during this sequence, allowing you to run away until the alligator caught a gas tank in its mouth. Shoot the gas tank and the gator explodes, a la Jaws. You didn't have to do that but it was possible.

It was a deliberate callback to film history, done because the designers thought that was cool and once players found out you could do this, well, why do anything else?

RE2RE does something a little different.

Sure, the end result is the same-as you can see-but the way I got there was a riff on the original while being very much it's own thing, informed by modern gameplay knowledge.

Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema is all about remix culture and a fun read to boot, and that book has come up often for me while playing RE2RE.

All the important elements are here, everything I expected from Resident Evil 2 to make it into the remake have appeared.

But modern sensibilities and culture have been injected into it. A trite love story in RE2 is replaced by an antagonistic-ish (and manipulative) relationship in RE2RE. A callback to Jaws is now a callback to Resident Evil 2.

I'm not sure how else one could've made this game and still executed well, without throwing the whole concept of a remake out the window and doing something new.

I don't want to suggest that RE2RE isn't excellent on its own merit. It gladly shucks all the stuff that doesn't work anymore because we have the technology to solve those problems, and solves those problems! Holding on to the spirit, not the letter, of things is what makes it wonderful.

I've now played through Leon's first campaign in both games but I'm only playing Claire's in RE2RE, at least for now.

Because Claire's run in RE2 is plagued by the dreaded escort mission. Again, RE2RE has solved this problem using modern gameplay techniques, notably storytelling elements that mean you don't have to be involved in an escort mission for long. Even RE2 used storytelling tricks to keep the escorting from going on too long, but what it also did was anchor you to the escort in an incredibly tedious way, making the player feel more like a yo-yo.

If you went too fast, your escort stopped and you had to go get her. If you just walked...at walking speed, Resident Evil 2 becomes tedious. Walking is for cautious approaches, but with an escort, this often wasn't an issue-you'd want to run through places until you realized that you'd left your anchor in a corner and have to double back.

So far, that hasn't been an issue in RE2RE and again, I'm all the happier for it.

Safe Rooms

There's a saferoom in RE2 and geographically, it's located in the same space in RE2RE: second floor, first office on the east side. It even looks the same-with massive graphical upgrades of course:

The layout is similar and while there isn't an item box, nearly everything else is the same from the original Resident Evil 2.

Which was how RE2 handled pacing: You run run run through various rooms, collect what you can, try not to die and then, 'whew' the save room theme music kicks in and you know you can stop.

There are no zombies in here, no weird mutations of creatures to eat your face. You are, effectively, in the clear. You can dip back into the hallways of fear whenever you've organized your stuff and are ready to go.

Part of this, of course, was about technology: when you need to stop and create save files, creating an unfun scenario to do so is detrimental to your game. When your character has to press an action button to climb stairs or go through doors, that means that the zombies become, effectively, old school Daleks. When rooms were cleared of enemies, returning to those rooms meant returning to rooms that were empty, which can be a little unnerving too, because it suggested someone was coming behind you can cleaning up after you.

It also meant that the designers didn't have to worry about what they threw at players, especially right after a save point, because you'd just gotten a break. The time was usually ripe to amp up the scares. The beats would be measured out in accordance to the doses you wanted.

RE2RE has the advantage of improved technology, so you don't have to create save files anymore. You can, of course (they even created theme music), but it also autosaves for you. As a result, enemies no longer have the same limitations as they did before.

Which means that pacing becomes very different. The first time a zombie came up the stairs after me, I vividly remember saying "Oh fuck this." Because they weren't supposed to do that-I had spent 20 years with games where they didn't do that.

It also meant that safe rooms weren't safe anymore. Which I didn't know...until it was horribly, terrifyingly clear that I wasn't safe there.

Now, instead of bursts of anxiety, dread infests RE2RE. Every corner is one where I might have to run away. Rooms that I've cleared still keep the downed enemies in them, and those enemies may not be dead.

Safe rooms are no longer places of respite.

And that is doing a number on my brain, I'll tell you. I'm worried about everything-the only rooms I am relatively certain do not have enemies in them are ones where I have to actively solve a puzzle.

But as soon as that puzzle is solved? Oooooooh boy....

RE2 & RE2RE

Resident Evil 2 is one of my all time favorite games. The dual stories, the slight campiness, the use of camera angles to create tension, music; so much came together correctly in a troubled production, in order to create what is rightly considered a classic of the genre.

And now, there's the Resident Evil 2 remake.

I still own my copy of the original Resident Evil 2, so I thought it might be fun to play both games concurrently and give some impressions! To save my fingers a bunch of trouble, I'll be abbreviating RE2 and RE2RE to separate one game from the other. There will be some spoilers and I am presuming that you know something about a game that is twenty years old. I mean c'mon. There's even a drink.

Plus, I started last night, so thunderbirds are go!

RE2 is more difficult than I recall, and yet as I am running through the city to the police station, my hands remember the controls, remember that I need to press the action button to ascend or descend stairs. I don't have to review the control scheme and the tank controls don't bother me much; I'm used to it, somehow, even though it's been years since I really sat down to do a playthrough of the game.

What is bothersome is the ergonomics of it: muscles I haven't had to use in a long, long time are getting a little sore as I press the d-pad to move around, instead of the much more friendly thumbsticks.

But I haven't even solved one puzzle and I've already died three times. Worse, I am out of ammo. I've cleared out some of the police station but have to go back through at least two zombie hordes in order to get some critical upgrades and I'm not sure what to do. I don't remember the game being this stingy on ammo before! THAT is a bigger problem and one I'm not sure how I'm going to resolve.

This speaks to how they wanted to create tension: use strange camera angles, low supplies, eerie music and, for the first time, a character that reacted to damage. I remember knowing I was in trouble when Claire started limping after an attack. You moved even slower than you usually do and that felt shocking and worrisome. In 1999, this was as big deal! Even now, the effects still work to create a sense of unease.

There's something distinctly off about everything in RE2, frequently comically so-as when you are in a room with a giant bloodstain on the floor, but checking the scenery around you provides a "Nothing is wrong" message. The booming "Resident Evil...2" voice that comes up when you boot up the game, trying to use bombast to startle all of us.

It's still got a lot of charm...but I am still out of ammo and worried.

In RE2RE...I am also out of ammo. The sprint to the police station is much shorter and easier but I ran out of ammo after my first encounter with a zombie and now I don't know what I'm going to do. The foyer of the police station feels more daunting, because I have so little. In RE2, I arrived with a handgun and 25 bullets, and believe me, you start counting those bullets fast when surrounded.

Here, I have no bullets at all and it's having a similar effect on me as it did in RE2, except I haven't taken a single step past the foyer and I have a sense of what's waiting for me.

But only a sense; the entire scene has been remixed, not just for modern audiences and graphics but for a sense of tension, too. Zombies weave drunkenly now, making it more difficult to get a bead on them to accurately fire.

Lighting is different as well; in many spaces, you only have a flashlight to guide you by and this radically changes how I move through environments. Where in RE2, the character-avatar would look at something of interest in order to help the player discover things in lower-resolution environments, now you're expected to see the objects in question.

There are more than a few old school nods though to help players: the map now highlights objects of interest so players can find them without onscreen prompts and then there's this:

That's a direct callback to the RE2 death screen and I am here for it.