wanted to dive into the classic REs because I wanted to play nemesis and code veronica down the line (and maybe zero) so I figured I might as well start from the beginning. this is the ultimate director's cut hack which restores the original uncut and colorized FMVs along with the soundtrack from the first two editions, so no ghostwritten MIDI squelches for me. it seems like a weird combination of elements of both the original and director's cut: original american difficulty (in terms of enemy/player HP and resource drops) with auto-aim restored and enemy layouts from director's cut. the translation even seems to interleave the old and the new at separate points... the infant-to-elder puzzle has the awkward original hints while the pool password puzzle has the revised, more legible hints. I had a fascinating time watching some videos and reading up on all the differences and finding where this hack (and the dualshock version) manages to fuse them together.
even though the presentation is purely vintage, the core design shines through. as this was a chris playthrough, I felt more pressed than my remake playthrough with jill to plan item usage carefully and optimize my routes. chris lacks access to jill's lockpick and two of her inventory slots, giving him heavy constraints over how much he can carry at once. a single firearm, an ammo supply (which thankfully never stretched into two slots during my playtime), and a full heal eats up half the space straight away, leaving just enough room to bring whatever your next key item is to its corresponding puzzle along with room to pick up whatever you find along the way. with these restrictions careful item box placement becomes essential to keeping backtracking from becoming too strenuous.
resident evil achieves this simply by how contained its world is: the core realm of the first two thirds of the game can be ran across front to back (west side of mansion to the back of the guardhouse) within a couple of minutes. plenty of analysis already mentions how the protracted door transitions heighten the apprehension of exploring a new area, but they also manage to make each area feel just a hair more immense. cutting from the top of the elevator to the bottom without watching that slowly-lowering rust-covered platform would make it more than clear just how small the environment actually is, for better or worse. on a first appearance the depths of the mansion and its surrounding areas seem endless, but once the majority of the threat has been cleared out and you're left to simply clean up items it sort of ceases to become enjoyable. in effect the fear is gone since you know that no more zombies walk the halls and you're left to run through endless garishly well-lit rooms.
if anything the real fear comes from the encounters, specifically in the latter half of the game. once you know the head-splattering shotgun trick regular zombies and their naked variants towards the end of the game feel effortless to dispose of, but hunters and chimeras are a much more dicey proposition. hunters specifically have copious i-frames on their jump and can easily decapitate you without much warning, and walking into an area to discover they've suddenly infested it becomes an ever-present fear in the second mansion visit and the catacombs. however, the director's cut bumps up the hunter count in these areas and it's pretty clear from watching videos of the original release that I might have preferred having fewer in the game... they're the most annoying enemy to fight by far (chimeras are also bad but magnum ammo is not in short supply by the time you reach the labs). missing a shotgun round because they immediately jumped upon standing up is frustrating to say the least, and the auto-aim doesn't fare well with their ability to juke the player. this all adds up to finding the right balance to properly scare the player however: weaken the enemy too much or make them too easy to dodge and they won't be able to take the threat seriously, while make the enemy too annoying to deal with and the actual combat mechanics overwhelm the player's suspension of disbelief. in my case I had gotten tired of them by the time I reached the catacombs (which feels oddly unfinished as a whole) while my roommate was sitting in rapt fear watching me get utterly shredded in these sections, a reaction I didn't even see from her when she watched me play silent hill. not bad for these muppet-ass looking monsters from '96!
anything else I can delve into regarding the mechanics undergirding this game I probably already covered in my review of the remake from last year, specifically the "dungeon crawler" reconnaissance/optimization cycles moving through each of the areas. it all exists here, and while the puzzles and overall structure may not be as robust, virtually everything that game does simply builds on top of this. the ingredients are all here after all. it's important to note as well that this game in particular feels more comfortable letting puzzles lead to nowhere or letting the player remain confused on totally optional content that may or may not actually help them in the wrong one. so many important items found entirely out of the proximity of where they're actually used, and random items that have bespoke interactions with no seeming purpose (what was that crack at the bottom of the wall in the labs even for?). more experimental without as many expectations and restrictions as the later titles in the series would need to contend with. also
even though the presentation is purely vintage, the core design shines through. as this was a chris playthrough, I felt more pressed than my remake playthrough with jill to plan item usage carefully and optimize my routes. chris lacks access to jill's lockpick and two of her inventory slots, giving him heavy constraints over how much he can carry at once. a single firearm, an ammo supply (which thankfully never stretched into two slots during my playtime), and a full heal eats up half the space straight away, leaving just enough room to bring whatever your next key item is to its corresponding puzzle along with room to pick up whatever you find along the way. with these restrictions careful item box placement becomes essential to keeping backtracking from becoming too strenuous.
resident evil achieves this simply by how contained its world is: the core realm of the first two thirds of the game can be ran across front to back (west side of mansion to the back of the guardhouse) within a couple of minutes. plenty of analysis already mentions how the protracted door transitions heighten the apprehension of exploring a new area, but they also manage to make each area feel just a hair more immense. cutting from the top of the elevator to the bottom without watching that slowly-lowering rust-covered platform would make it more than clear just how small the environment actually is, for better or worse. on a first appearance the depths of the mansion and its surrounding areas seem endless, but once the majority of the threat has been cleared out and you're left to simply clean up items it sort of ceases to become enjoyable. in effect the fear is gone since you know that no more zombies walk the halls and you're left to run through endless garishly well-lit rooms.
if anything the real fear comes from the encounters, specifically in the latter half of the game. once you know the head-splattering shotgun trick regular zombies and their naked variants towards the end of the game feel effortless to dispose of, but hunters and chimeras are a much more dicey proposition. hunters specifically have copious i-frames on their jump and can easily decapitate you without much warning, and walking into an area to discover they've suddenly infested it becomes an ever-present fear in the second mansion visit and the catacombs. however, the director's cut bumps up the hunter count in these areas and it's pretty clear from watching videos of the original release that I might have preferred having fewer in the game... they're the most annoying enemy to fight by far (chimeras are also bad but magnum ammo is not in short supply by the time you reach the labs). missing a shotgun round because they immediately jumped upon standing up is frustrating to say the least, and the auto-aim doesn't fare well with their ability to juke the player. this all adds up to finding the right balance to properly scare the player however: weaken the enemy too much or make them too easy to dodge and they won't be able to take the threat seriously, while make the enemy too annoying to deal with and the actual combat mechanics overwhelm the player's suspension of disbelief. in my case I had gotten tired of them by the time I reached the catacombs (which feels oddly unfinished as a whole) while my roommate was sitting in rapt fear watching me get utterly shredded in these sections, a reaction I didn't even see from her when she watched me play silent hill. not bad for these muppet-ass looking monsters from '96!
anything else I can delve into regarding the mechanics undergirding this game I probably already covered in my review of the remake from last year, specifically the "dungeon crawler" reconnaissance/optimization cycles moving through each of the areas. it all exists here, and while the puzzles and overall structure may not be as robust, virtually everything that game does simply builds on top of this. the ingredients are all here after all. it's important to note as well that this game in particular feels more comfortable letting puzzles lead to nowhere or letting the player remain confused on totally optional content that may or may not actually help them in the wrong one. so many important items found entirely out of the proximity of where they're actually used, and random items that have bespoke interactions with no seeming purpose (what was that crack at the bottom of the wall in the labs even for?). more experimental without as many expectations and restrictions as the later titles in the series would need to contend with. also
Pangburn
1 year ago
1) big issue with combat performance is that the coordinates of a character will move with their model during an attack/aim animation. since most of these stances feature the player leaning back, there's a chance that the player would inadvertently move into a camera transition and thus lose visual contact with the monster (alternatively could still be visible but ruin orientation). auto-aim fixes this to some extent. two solutions to solve this off the top of my head: either have the x,y coordinates not change when character animations occur (would likely affect hitboxes), or include a conditional in the transition check that overrides the transition when in the aim state. potentially messy if multiple states are used for neutral->aim animation, aim stance, aim->neutral animation. solution to that is create top level state classifiers for lower level states, or just suffer the if (player.state == BEGIN_AIM) || (player.state == AIMING) || (player.state == ATTACKING) etc. nonsense.
2) auto-aim will sometimes seem to target a random monster rather than focusing on whatever you previously attacked. my first instinct is that it does a cartesian distance check when aiming begins and chooses the closest monster. consider the case where two hunters are flanking you. you are aiming at one closer to you, but you drop your aim to readjust for a juke while the hunter behind you jumps and becomes physically closer. aiming at this point will cause the player to rotate around, losing precious time and presumably making the fight more difficult, as focusing on killing a single monster to isolate the other is generally preferable unless you are in a position to perfectly alternate enemy staggers. my solution to this would be to add an element of memory to the aim, where whatever enemy was previously shot will be the default target (overriding the distance check) for X seconds. would have to play around with it to see how that improves the handling.
3) also