Resident Evil 4 vs House of the Dead

And so, the prodigal smartarse returns. Returning indeed, from my classy French lifestyle of skiing, hobnobbing with the social elite, and of course, snorting premium crack cocaine from the breasts of even more premium Alpine hookers, to find a sorely neglected blog waiting for me like a spurned love one waiting to do horribly violent things to me with my prized sculpture of the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Those of you waiting desparately with breath held so long you've turned purple can breath a sigh of relief. And then go fuck yourselves because I can't be arsed to write up my trip just yet.

"Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition" is, unsuprisingly to all but absolute retards (those who play drums then) a remake of the Gamecube game "Resident Evil 4" but comparing the two of them just isn't going to happen, mostly because I never played the Gamecube version. So thus I compare it to my favourite arcade game, House of the Dead. (Any of them, they're all basically the same thing, but with different gimmicky weapons).

RE4 opens with the somewhat odd concept of the President's daughter (Ashley, who was destined right from her conception to be a popular Deviantart figure) being kidnapped, and a foppishly haired character from a previous RE (Leon) being sent to a dirty Spanish peasant village to rescue her. Whilst unbelievable, we'll let the game off simply because any excuse to destroy hoards of zombies is to be taken.

This is where RE4 takes an unforgivable turn, in the form of Ashley. We expected terrible dialogue and poor storytelling, but the voice acting is absolutely fucking DIRE. Everytime I hear Ashley screaming "LEON!" I want to join the hoards of peasents, zealots and various freaks and sacrifice Ashely to whatever god these fellows pray too, something which is not really explained in the game, with the exception that apparently there are parasite which infect people, unexpectedly departing from the T-Virus of previous Resident Evils, so I guess the whole approach was just to cash in on the franchise.

House of the Dead, on the other hand, is a brilliantly fun arcade shooter with unlimited ammo weapons, no puzzles, and no horror.

Anybody who played the original RE games will ponder how I can compare them to House of the Dead. It's simple. RE4 gives you ammo and health every step of the way, and if you take a bit of time to look, you can get a shotgun after playing for 2 minutes, and everything becomes a zombie decapitating laugh. All elements of horror disappear from the game completely, and it becomes a House of the Dead rip-off. The crappy story, dialogue and voice acting are as interchangeable as the backing members of Queen, and the whole experience becomes as frightening as Flash Gordon.

So a warning I guess is in order to all you cockweed game developers. If you want us to be scared by a game, make the characters we control likeable, and also vulnerable. And quite frankly the only way to make up for putting Ashley in RE4 is to include a Mini-Game in which she can be shot multiple times with a variety of exciting weaponry. This opportunity is remarkably absent for some reason, so RE4 remains unforgiven.

-Az