For me, these key points are as follows: a B-Movie style zombie plot with a surprisingly amount of depth, greater conspiracies at work than what you might expect when you start out, absurdly designed environments with all manner of secret labs, tunnels and areas that make no logistical sense, puzzles that similarly have no place in the real world space, and genuine terror and horror as you navigate this world, facing preposterous monsters, always feeling slightly one step behind, and with very limited resources to aid you. What I think Resident Evil 2 (2019) succeeds in is that it looks at what Resident Evil is meant to be and brings those core concepts across in a balanced way. …it looks at what Resident Evil is meant to be and brings those core concepts across in a balanced way… This is before we get into how the late 90’s jagged polygon look is no longer especially conducive to generating horror in the viewer. Purists would say that it added to the tension: being hard to control made it hard to survive in a survival- horror game, but for me that answer is the very definition of artificial difficulty, as it should only very rarely and carefully be considered a good thing to make a game more irritating to control for thematic reasons behind it. This was especially before the analogue controls became a standard part of the PSX control scheme. The obvious technical reason they existed in the first place was that 3D games were new at the time and everyone had a different idea about how it would be best to control movement. The fabled Tank Controls of myth and legend. But they are, in fact, tediously unplayable, for one major reason, and that is the control system. Resident Evil 1-3 and Dino Crisis 1-2 are what spring to my mind as classics of their genre, and I loved them all when they first came out. If you doubt me, please go back and play one of those survival- horror games from Capcom in the PS1 era. Yes, micro-transactions suck a lot of the time and everything can be a bit soulless, but we did learn plenty of good things from that time too that we stuck with today. We shouldn’t just think that “past good, present bad,” when it comes to everything. Exciting at the time, innovating and dynamic, but we did find what worked well and we stuck with it for good reason. They’re often hell to play now because nobody knew what they were doing at the time, and it was all being invented for the first time. It has nothing to do with “dumbing down” of systems in games or changing tastes or just not being used to them. Here is my next claim: early 3D PlayStation games often don’t hold up today in terms of playability. That brings us to the final form of remake, and the most ambitious: the kind that Resident Evil 2 is really pioneering here. And while I loved both of those and like the style of them, it does make them more comparable to the originals, and more open to scrutiny if you changed anything from the original.
Solidly rebuilt, but loyally so: a one to one recreation of the original, more homage than anything else. Great games, but great because they were always great, to begin with.
The next type of remake was the kind we saw with the Crash Bandicoot and Spyro re-creations.
#RESIDENT EVIL 2 REMAKE REVIEW 480P#
“Remaster” in this sense meant scaling from 480p to 720p and calling it HD, but fair enough, you usually got 2 or 3 good games in a single box, so why not. Let me pontificate (as you must do, gentle reader) – most remasters and re-whatever of the past decade have been for games that were barely 5 or 10 years old, to begin with, and basically were a result of fewer consoles being backwards-compatible. It would be considered a good game even if it was not part of an existing franchise, but as it is, it manages to remind us all why Resident Evil fascinated us so much in the 90s. It manages to capture the feeling, the mood and setting of the original game but brings 20 years of technical advancements on top of that. I will be somewhat controversial right off the bat, and say that Resident Evil 2 (2019) is one of the best pieces of evidence possible for the validity of remasters/remakes in video games.