Now Playing: RESIDENT EVIL REVELATIONS 2

 In which Capcom get desperate and

recycle the box art from Condemned 2: Bloodshot.

Developed and Published by Capcom.

Released throughout March 2015 (download version), end of March 2015 (disc version)

Available on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 3, Xbox One, Xbox 360.

Version reviewed:  PlayStation 3 (disc)

It's been pretty difficult to talk about Resident Evil lately.  The more time passes, the less fond memories I seem to have, and there seem to be fewer and fewer people around who actually want to hear about it.  Whatever happened to all the enthusiastic gushing about dogs through windows and tangled conspiracies?

...okay, a succession of duff games on the trot is what happened.  Like most major publishers these days, Capcom couldn't just leave Resident Evil to BE Resident Evil, because succeeding within a niche somehow wasn't enough.  It had to be a shoot-em-up with online components!  And microtransactions!  And a dedicated multiplayer mode!  But don't forget it's meant to be scary, too!  We'll put that somewhere between 'mud physics' and 'protagonist junk size' on the priorities list.

Even so, it wasn't all bad.  Somewhere between the glitchy nonsense of Operation Raccoon City and...the also glitchy nonsense of RE6 came RE Revelations, and it was, mostly, good.  The gunplay was still in the mold of the unloved RE5 but the all-too-human enemies had been swapped out for intimidating bullet-sponge sea monsters, the pacing was slowed down and atmosphere turned up...other than a lack of obtuse door-lock puzzles, it felt like the old days were clawing their way back.

And now here comes Revelations 2.  Is this the promised land?  Do we finally have the game we can point at and say, "yes, THIS is what Resident Evil should be?"  Short version, no, we don't.  But it's not all doom and gloom just yet.

Opinion Blog: Ranking the Resident Evils

 Class photo!  Everybody pout and brandish firearms!

This likely surprises no-one after the kicking I gave the last movie but I loooove Resident Evil.  Love love love it, through thick and thin, for almost as long as I've been gaming.  These are the places and monsters that creeped me out as a kid the way a Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees might have done for past generations, and I've been meaning to do more about the series on the blog for a while now.

So, while I'm in the midst of playing through all the games I've got laying around here again, I'm going to start by explaining where on the scale of...goodness?...each individual game stands, as not all Resis are created equal.

(Note: This post will strictly concern itself with the 'core' Resident Evil titles, ignoring rail shooters, mobile games, Gaiden and the various online-focused multiplayer games.)

PHICEN Nina Armoury Post 3

It's been a while, but with more figures in the collection now I've got more Things Nina Can Hold, and more amateurish photos to prove it!

Craig's Most Wanted Games of 2013 (So Far)

Does exactly what it says on the tin.  These most certainly won't be the only games I buy over the next calendar year - I've got a lax understanding of fiscal responsibility - but they're the ones I'm really anticipating, and would definitely put money aside for in advance if I had that kind of sense.

Professor Layton and the Azran Legacies (3DS)

The Professor Layton series has been a pretty recent obsession of mine.  I completed the first game, Curious Village, almost 2 years ago, then forgot about the series, and only recently remembered them in the run-up to the arrival of the most recent game, Miracle Mask (also the first 3DS outing, and developers Level 5 made the transition very well).  Since then I've beaten Pandora's Box, Lost Future and Miracle Mask and am in the midst of Spectre's Call.  Whilst the simple logic puzzles are addictive in their own right, it's the quirky world, characters and stories that form each game's framework that have made me a fan, and with the promise that game 6, Azran Legacies, will both wrap up the overarching plot of the 'prequel trilogy' and be the last game to feature Layton himself as the protagonist (!), I'm very anxious to get my mitts on this one.  It's due out in Japan in February, but given the massive volume of text to localise, I'm not expecting it to drop in the UK until much later in the year.  It'll be worth it.

Aliens: Colonial Marines (multi-format)

Probably the most imminent arrival of everything on this list, Gearbox Software's love letter to Aliens doesn't look to be the most original or daring FPS I or anyone else has ever played, but it does look set to play to the strengths of the Marine campaigns in the various AVP games (typically the best parts of those titles) and the universe of Aliens is the sort of world I never mind returning to.  It helps that the devs have been hyping up the Wii U version as the 'best' version, though what this means beside using the GamePad as a movie-accurate motion tracker is beyond me.

Film Reaction: RESIDENT EVIL RETRIBUTION

WEARING.  TOO MANY.  GODDAMN.  BUCKLES.

It took me a while to decide whether or not there was much point in doing a write-up of my experience watching Retribution, the latest in what is still, mind-bogglingly enough, the most successful videogame-to-film series of all time.  This is mainly due to fatigue with the series and the attitude of its architects - every time  a new film comes out, professional critics and simple fans alike express in many cases the same grievances, and every time series overseer Paul W.S. Anderson politely sticks his fingers in his ears, smiling mildly at the okay box office returns which more than double whatever the film cost to make.  Then it's back on the merry-go-round for another whirl, with the script blithely tying itself in knots to explain (or not explain) the absence of characters from the last film and sudden appearance of replacements.

That said, after leaving this blog to rot for far too long, I feel the need to continue my current activity levels, and while Retribution certainly fell into a few of the same pits as its predecessors, it also found new, hitherto-unknown ways to fail, too.  And who says innovation is dead?

WARNING:  SPOILERS FOLLOW.