N-Gage has decent games, what are the odds?

Resident Evil Degeneration is based on the movie of the same name - a distinction no other Resident Evil movie would receive, to my recollection. I watched the movie itself before playing this tie-in; in terms of accuracy, there's not really any point comparing because this game only covers the setting of Degeneration's opening act, heavily padding it out and expanding on it to the point of being a videogame's worth of content. Despite this, it still clocked in at a measly sub-2 hours; there's an achievement for beating it in under 45 minutes.

Graphics are about on par with early PS1, but on a phone screen - both remarkable for the time, but also pretty paltry compared to say, the DS, and utterly ugly to witness now. Leon's character model is the only one that received much love; the other human characters are ugly and kind of misshapen, Senator Ron Davis in particular having a head that looks like it came out of Goldeneye with cheats on. Environments aren't so bad, with some neat effects on offer. I did, however, get a chuckle out of the endlessly reused "Flying to the UK?" poster, plastered about 4 times on every wall. It can't have been a memory issue, because the same poster appears in at least 4 different colours throughout - I'd love to have been a fly on the wall in the dev's offices to see what the reasons were for the many unique decisions made throughout the 15 month development.

Most of the effort likely went into gameplay - which is a legitimately impressive distillation of Resident Evil 4's mold-breaking gameplay style, crammed down onto a Nokia phone. The aiming, the knifing, the ability to kick enemies and doors alike, it's just about all here. Even the sodding instant-kill quicktime events, which are almost as annoying here as they were in actual RE4. I noticed a bit of unresponsiveness with inputs, and it took me a long time to adapt to the limited assortment of available buttons.

I'd make a point about how easy the game was, even on normal - zombies appear in small numbers, and are easily felled by headshots. Even the knife, if timed right, can dispatch a zombie with little resistance. This might be the easiest knife-only run in the franchise, with the short length and abundance of healing items at every turn. By the end, I still had 3 first aid sprays and 10+ green herbs on me, and not for lack of using them! Yellow herbs also appear to increase Leon's maximum HP, and you don't even have to mix them with green herbs...because herb mixing, understandably, did not make it in. The inventory sorting system was also cut - again, entirely reasonable. However, having played this via an emulator, and mapping the inputs to a controller, it likely offered a far greater precision than an actual Nokia phone ever could have. So with all this considered, the game may be far more appropriately difficult on actual hardware. Still, there are a lot of concessions made...

You simply have a (pretty gargantuan) amount of storage available compared to past Resi games, which can be expanded further by buying from the merchant. No, sadly not the cloaked weirdo with the funny voice from RE4 (actually, almost no voice acting at all, other than Leon's iconic death moan from RE4), but other special forces soldiers who went in to fight the infected, and uh...decided to set up shop instead? Everything is pretty cheap even to begin with, but with the sheer amount of money that enemies dropped (THOSE DOGS HAD $300 ON THEM?! EACH!?) there are treasures adding to Leon's immense wealth even further. It's very, very easy to end up with every weapon fully upgraded around the three-quarters point - and the knife is still all you really need anyway.

Altogether, it's a very short plod (Leon is slow as hell here), through handfuls of easily dispatched zombies, poorly rendered character models, and brain-dead bosses (there are no less than THREE separate Tyrants in this game. Which, in case you were wondering, is three more Tyrants than there were in the movie.). But between the technical achievements, enjoyable banter between Leon and Hunnigan (when not endlessly repeating the mission objectives) and attempt at cinematic cutscenes...I can't help but have a certain fondness for this game! They made something that was very much designed to be played on an old shitty mobile phone with fuck-all battery and inconvenient buttons that are ill-suited to gaming. To make a fully-functioning Resi game that plays like a scaled-down Resi 4 while still catering to these limitations has earned my respect...and it's not entirely unfun, either!

I don't know much about the actual quality of the N-Gage library, but this feels like a must-play as far as that service is concerned. As far as Resi in general goes? If you have the means to play it, I genuinely think it's worth a quick try - maybe you'll take as much a liking to it as I did!