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.