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.