mightyjoey
17 reviews liked by mightyjoey
"There is no such thing as Art for everyone" said suda51 as a way to explain what the fuck he just made
Resident Evil 2
1998
this is mr. buttsex reporting for boot- OH GOD THEY'RE EVERYWHERE
Resident Evil 2
2019
Nightmare logic and 'nightmarish' are often reserved for works that evoke forces of total disorder that are malicious and occult and cosmic in scope. But these kinds of nightmares are thrilling, immediate, and easy to recognise as phantasms on waking up. I love these nightmares: they turn you into the happy audience of your subconscious' greatest horror film. There is always great catharsis to a descent into hell! The worst nightmares are the ones that are so ordinary that they are basically indistinguishable from daily life, that because they feel like a bad day rob you of the feeling of having slept. These nightmares sometimes recall situations and settings from your ordinary life, and even when they don't they capture its mundane processes and anxieties. If the former nightmares amplify these things to an extravagant scale, these ones cut through and distil the essence of life's exhaustion. Resident Evil 2 is this nightmare of ordinary life. It follows nightmare logic because it is deeply paranoid, and it is nightmarish because it is both very boring and very stressful.
Anyone who has ever worked in hospitality or customer service might think fast paced first person games distinctly nightmarish in their evocation of the horror of daily life. There is a universal alienation to moving through a crowd and realising that nobody sees anyone else, but what's worse is thousands of faces rushing directly toward you and you specifically and wanting something from you. Resident Evil 2 though is working as a teacher or administrator, performing as best you can with all eyes on you, putting out fires when they come up, and knowing that however well you resolve an issue in the moment you will never be on top of things. You are employed to make disorder manageable for minutes at a time from within the eternal disorder of human affairs. If things could ever be permanently ordered not only would you be out of a job, but humanity would cease to be human. The horror of daily disorder is also the beauty of ordinary life. I have nightmares about students challenging me in front of the class, but that's only because this can and should happen. If my lesson plans could be uploaded into the heads of a passive class-body, this would eliminate the need for interaction as well as thought. Teaching and learning is not about the absorption of information, but about thinking as a creative and disruptive process. If nothing is changing, then no thought is occurring. I have also had nightmares about online systems crashing, and databases dying with them. But the absence of interruption in an online system means that either the system is not being used, or that its uses have been exhausted. And if these databases could not be corrupted, they could also not be read. It is not a metaphor but a fact that disorder is at the essence of any working system, and noise is the essence of all transmission.
Both administration and pedagogy conduct disorder to maintain or further productive ends. Games are the same: disorder and precarity are the essence of the videogame's interplay of human and machinic agencies that test and collide and alter one another toward new and unforeseen outcomes. When outcomes are totally predictable, when disorder is under control, this means a victory to either the human or the game system, and this is when the game ceases to be a game. The system stops producing novelty when it is under control, and this happens when its heterogeneous components do not participate but dominate one another. Resident Evil 2 can be mastered by those players deeply committed to imposing order on systems, but as a game it works hard to maintain nightmarish precarity. The only thing inevitable about it is things, however under control they might appear, inevitably going the other way. It never makes the player feel entirely helpless like other survival horror games, and it never gives them a sense of triumph like other games with an atmosphere so dire. It is not about defeat or triumph or anything where things can be dominated or overcome. It is instead about just temporarily managing disorder before the cards are redrawn and disorder must once again be negotiated. The machine reads the player and the player reads the machine, and they both continue to adapt to and challenge one another.
This ongoing mind-game might sound strange because zombies are stupid, and the zombies in Resident Evil 2 are exceptionally zombie-ish, which means exceptionally stupid. But again Resident Evil 2's brand of nightmare is not always about the specifics of its settings or entities but instead life's quotidian processes and anxieties. Its horror is one of the failures of administration. The player can never be entirely on top of things, and the only way to progress is to memorise things and forget things and plan for things and when it inevitably happens, adapt to it all going wrong. It is to try and remember and account for all your mistakes and failures, and to manage as best you can the sinking ship of your best intentions. The introduction of Mr X and Lickers is not so much about introducing more mechanically powerful foes, but undoing your meagre efforts to put things into order. No one thing is scary or even difficult, but the game dynamically works obstacles, enemies, and affordances into a series of ad hoc recipes where the goal is always player frustration. Having Mr X walk into a room where you have things basically under control (one zombie with its legs blown off, another in the corner, another stunned, you're on low health but you know where you're going) is like having a supervisor watching you work. And sneaking past a Licker, then past a distracted zombie, and having Mr X walk in is like having a car backfire outside and wake up the baby you swear to god you almost, finally, had to sleep. Because you can never directly respond to Mr X, so continues an eternal chase through the same god damn corridors where hands are once again played with the hope of a new outcome. Because we memorise certain routes and blindspots and dangers, Resident Evil 2 makes the case that repetition in systems might lead to a sense of familiarity, but it also always leads to difference.
Resident Evil 2 is also the scariest game for how it so beautifully handles slow-moving frustration within a space that a single stray bullet can throw everything into disarray. Zombies are not intrinsically scary but they are always uncanny; Romero's zombies move slow to mimic the world of humans undone by capitalism and Fulci's present the ultimate desecration of human life and the divine order of our belief systems. Both inhabit films that feel zombie-like: sluggish, falling apart, and singularly focussed on devouring the future. Resident Evil 2 is smooth, albeit circular and obsessive. Here the zombies are obstacles for management, and the horror of managing the impossible makes them scary. It is a game made for fans of the series, and fans of the series are big fans. It's a cult franchise that's also enormously popular; it's a cult on the scale of a supermarket or mall chain. Like the zombie it returns from the dead and moves with obsessive purpose. As such it is made to be played twice 'officially', four times 'thoroughly', and a hundred times 'realistically'. It gets less scary the more it is repeated, because repetition gives the space to experiment with new ideas and outcomes. The second play is more laborious than anything else because it involves re-seeing what once scared you, this time as blank obstacles. The third however unlocks a new kind of obsession in the player's brain, where the pain and joy of managing disorder comes back stronger than ever before. It takes about fifteen hours to complete, but like the zombie it cannot die an ordinary death and is never really over.
Resident Evil 2's gore is not affecting, but the lighting and always obscured sight-lines return the player to this infantile state where they are afraid of the dark. We play as the detached adult, dealing with problems systematically, playing Tetris with keys and herbs, but we are also aways the irrational child hiding under the blankets from the boogeyman. Both are always at play: one does not contradict the other. Resident Evil Biohazard plays this up well by swapping out Mr X for Jack Baker, the lunatic father looking for you, his 'son' who won't stop slamming doors and ruining dinner and staying out past curfew. X is interesting because when you can only hear him he functions as a Michael Myers-esque 'shape', or abstraction as persistent as the shadows at your feet. But then when you see him he looks like a fucking idiot. He is frightening because of how he upsets your plans, because of how he reminds you that no amount of trying will ever allow you to control your surroundings, but he is also terrifying because he looks like such a fucking idiot. Commonsense would suggest he'd be more ominous the more abstract his appearance, but the idiot physicality of his bozo suit and hat and weirdly serene face is actually chilling because it's also funny.
The screwball comedy of this game is also one of its greatest strengths because it keeps things terrifying, and rubs your mistakes in your face as if to say how this whole thing's your fault. I had to laugh out loud when I returned to this room to pick something up that I had not been into in a week, and there were like five zombies I had not dealt with and had forgotten about and it scared the shit out of me, then Mr X entered from the other side with perfect comic timing like Honey I'm home what's with all this mess!. It was like getting ready to go on holiday and at the last minute remembering that final little job you had to get out of the way but it was sent to that other inbox you're not really checking any more because you've tapped out and you just want to see the water and sit in the grass for a bit but now there's like a hundred emails in there that get progressively less polite as they add up.
Life is shit because it's boring and hard and unpredictable all at the same time but it's also really beautiful for the same reasons and is worth doing forever. This is Resident Evil 2's philosophy, and also what makes it such a brilliant game.
Anyone who has ever worked in hospitality or customer service might think fast paced first person games distinctly nightmarish in their evocation of the horror of daily life. There is a universal alienation to moving through a crowd and realising that nobody sees anyone else, but what's worse is thousands of faces rushing directly toward you and you specifically and wanting something from you. Resident Evil 2 though is working as a teacher or administrator, performing as best you can with all eyes on you, putting out fires when they come up, and knowing that however well you resolve an issue in the moment you will never be on top of things. You are employed to make disorder manageable for minutes at a time from within the eternal disorder of human affairs. If things could ever be permanently ordered not only would you be out of a job, but humanity would cease to be human. The horror of daily disorder is also the beauty of ordinary life. I have nightmares about students challenging me in front of the class, but that's only because this can and should happen. If my lesson plans could be uploaded into the heads of a passive class-body, this would eliminate the need for interaction as well as thought. Teaching and learning is not about the absorption of information, but about thinking as a creative and disruptive process. If nothing is changing, then no thought is occurring. I have also had nightmares about online systems crashing, and databases dying with them. But the absence of interruption in an online system means that either the system is not being used, or that its uses have been exhausted. And if these databases could not be corrupted, they could also not be read. It is not a metaphor but a fact that disorder is at the essence of any working system, and noise is the essence of all transmission.
Both administration and pedagogy conduct disorder to maintain or further productive ends. Games are the same: disorder and precarity are the essence of the videogame's interplay of human and machinic agencies that test and collide and alter one another toward new and unforeseen outcomes. When outcomes are totally predictable, when disorder is under control, this means a victory to either the human or the game system, and this is when the game ceases to be a game. The system stops producing novelty when it is under control, and this happens when its heterogeneous components do not participate but dominate one another. Resident Evil 2 can be mastered by those players deeply committed to imposing order on systems, but as a game it works hard to maintain nightmarish precarity. The only thing inevitable about it is things, however under control they might appear, inevitably going the other way. It never makes the player feel entirely helpless like other survival horror games, and it never gives them a sense of triumph like other games with an atmosphere so dire. It is not about defeat or triumph or anything where things can be dominated or overcome. It is instead about just temporarily managing disorder before the cards are redrawn and disorder must once again be negotiated. The machine reads the player and the player reads the machine, and they both continue to adapt to and challenge one another.
This ongoing mind-game might sound strange because zombies are stupid, and the zombies in Resident Evil 2 are exceptionally zombie-ish, which means exceptionally stupid. But again Resident Evil 2's brand of nightmare is not always about the specifics of its settings or entities but instead life's quotidian processes and anxieties. Its horror is one of the failures of administration. The player can never be entirely on top of things, and the only way to progress is to memorise things and forget things and plan for things and when it inevitably happens, adapt to it all going wrong. It is to try and remember and account for all your mistakes and failures, and to manage as best you can the sinking ship of your best intentions. The introduction of Mr X and Lickers is not so much about introducing more mechanically powerful foes, but undoing your meagre efforts to put things into order. No one thing is scary or even difficult, but the game dynamically works obstacles, enemies, and affordances into a series of ad hoc recipes where the goal is always player frustration. Having Mr X walk into a room where you have things basically under control (one zombie with its legs blown off, another in the corner, another stunned, you're on low health but you know where you're going) is like having a supervisor watching you work. And sneaking past a Licker, then past a distracted zombie, and having Mr X walk in is like having a car backfire outside and wake up the baby you swear to god you almost, finally, had to sleep. Because you can never directly respond to Mr X, so continues an eternal chase through the same god damn corridors where hands are once again played with the hope of a new outcome. Because we memorise certain routes and blindspots and dangers, Resident Evil 2 makes the case that repetition in systems might lead to a sense of familiarity, but it also always leads to difference.
Resident Evil 2 is also the scariest game for how it so beautifully handles slow-moving frustration within a space that a single stray bullet can throw everything into disarray. Zombies are not intrinsically scary but they are always uncanny; Romero's zombies move slow to mimic the world of humans undone by capitalism and Fulci's present the ultimate desecration of human life and the divine order of our belief systems. Both inhabit films that feel zombie-like: sluggish, falling apart, and singularly focussed on devouring the future. Resident Evil 2 is smooth, albeit circular and obsessive. Here the zombies are obstacles for management, and the horror of managing the impossible makes them scary. It is a game made for fans of the series, and fans of the series are big fans. It's a cult franchise that's also enormously popular; it's a cult on the scale of a supermarket or mall chain. Like the zombie it returns from the dead and moves with obsessive purpose. As such it is made to be played twice 'officially', four times 'thoroughly', and a hundred times 'realistically'. It gets less scary the more it is repeated, because repetition gives the space to experiment with new ideas and outcomes. The second play is more laborious than anything else because it involves re-seeing what once scared you, this time as blank obstacles. The third however unlocks a new kind of obsession in the player's brain, where the pain and joy of managing disorder comes back stronger than ever before. It takes about fifteen hours to complete, but like the zombie it cannot die an ordinary death and is never really over.
Resident Evil 2's gore is not affecting, but the lighting and always obscured sight-lines return the player to this infantile state where they are afraid of the dark. We play as the detached adult, dealing with problems systematically, playing Tetris with keys and herbs, but we are also aways the irrational child hiding under the blankets from the boogeyman. Both are always at play: one does not contradict the other. Resident Evil Biohazard plays this up well by swapping out Mr X for Jack Baker, the lunatic father looking for you, his 'son' who won't stop slamming doors and ruining dinner and staying out past curfew. X is interesting because when you can only hear him he functions as a Michael Myers-esque 'shape', or abstraction as persistent as the shadows at your feet. But then when you see him he looks like a fucking idiot. He is frightening because of how he upsets your plans, because of how he reminds you that no amount of trying will ever allow you to control your surroundings, but he is also terrifying because he looks like such a fucking idiot. Commonsense would suggest he'd be more ominous the more abstract his appearance, but the idiot physicality of his bozo suit and hat and weirdly serene face is actually chilling because it's also funny.
The screwball comedy of this game is also one of its greatest strengths because it keeps things terrifying, and rubs your mistakes in your face as if to say how this whole thing's your fault. I had to laugh out loud when I returned to this room to pick something up that I had not been into in a week, and there were like five zombies I had not dealt with and had forgotten about and it scared the shit out of me, then Mr X entered from the other side with perfect comic timing like Honey I'm home what's with all this mess!. It was like getting ready to go on holiday and at the last minute remembering that final little job you had to get out of the way but it was sent to that other inbox you're not really checking any more because you've tapped out and you just want to see the water and sit in the grass for a bit but now there's like a hundred emails in there that get progressively less polite as they add up.
Life is shit because it's boring and hard and unpredictable all at the same time but it's also really beautiful for the same reasons and is worth doing forever. This is Resident Evil 2's philosophy, and also what makes it such a brilliant game.
Resident Evil 4
2023
To me, the heart and soul of Resident Evil 4 is the combat, and that’s what this review is about. Everything else about the remake is something I can take or leave, but I have many issues with the gameplay and its design, and I’d like to talk about why because it feels like everything that the original did right has been forgotten by both the devs and the fans.
To be clear, I am okay with Resident Evil 4 Remake being a different game than the original. In fact, I would like it more if it was more different and tried to execute a new idea well. My issue with it is that I don’t think the remake succeeds at carving out its own niche gameplay-wise, and instead it feels like a mismade version of RE4 held up by band-aid fixes to try to maintain the illusion of being a decent action game, and I will try to explain why I feel this way.
A core pillar of RE4 is the tank controls, they are what adds nuance to even the simplest encounters in the game and everything is designed around the limitations brought on by them. The Remake inevitably takes out the tank controls and, because of that, much of the original design crumbles, the solution to which is to make an entirely new game around the modernized controls. However, they did not do that, they instead applied a bunch of reactionary changes trying to make the game feel functional and challenging despite the removal of its core design pillar.
To illustrate this, let’s talk about one of the basic enemy types of the game, the axe-thrower. An axe is thrown at you in the original RE4, the tank controls prevent you from easily sidestepping the issue. You need to either walk forward at an angle to dodge it which drastically influences your positioning and can move you towards the crowd of enemies, or you need to shoot the axe as it’s being thrown at you to stop it. Both of these options have quite a bit of nuance to them, as dodging with your movement requires you to turn in advance since Leon’s turn speed isn’t instant, meaning that a level of prediction and foresight is required to pull this off, and shooting the axe requires you to ready your weapon, get a read on the axe’s trajectory to aim at it, and expend ammo. These are not the only ways, but they serve as good enough examples.
Come to the remake and now you have a variety of options to dodge the axe that make it a non-threat compared to the original. You can sidestep it to get out of the way, you can block it with your knife by holding a button, and you can duck under it to dodge it without needing to move. All this stuff lets you get around it in ways that dont push you into interesting situations. These enemies however are still here in the remake and they act about the same, seemingly just because they were there in the original, not because they do anything interesting for the combat. This to me exemplifies a lot of the ways most of the enemies lost their purpose and "fun" since the mechanics that made them interesting to deal with are gone, and illustrates the value that the tank based controls brought to simple interactions. For some reason we have even more options that are even easier to use against an enemy that is already made ineffective by the core system changes.
So how does the game maintain any challenge? The devs tried to do so in a couple ways but I don’t think they make for a fun or nuanced game. For one, they made it so that all unarmed enemies have long, lunging grabs that require you to sprint away from for quite a while as they chase you. If they are already close, they perform instant grabs that can’t be dodged in any way. Enemies also can’t get stunned by your shots as consistently so that you can’t counter their aggression with your guns. In short, on the highest difficulties your best bet is always keep a safe distance from all unarmed enemies. Yes, I am aware that lunging grabs can be ducked, but grabs that begin at close range cannot be ducked, so your gameplan is ultimately still the same, be far from enemies to prevent unwinnable situations. The ability to duck far lunging grabs ultimately doesn’t change your decision making in any significant way.
Another big factor is that melee was nerfed and made extremely inconsistent, especially on the higher difficulties. Shooting an enemy in the head no longer guarantees a stun that gives you a melee prompt, and the kick itself has a much smaller hitbox and no lasting i-frames. While the kick being nerfed is something I can understand and play around with, the fact that it was also made unusable due to the RNG to trigger it is baffling to me. I am okay with it taking more than one headshot, but you can shoot an enemy 5 times in the head in professional and never get the stun. If the stuns were consistent to trigger through applicable rules, you would be able to pick an enemy in the crowd to get a stun on, lure enemies around them for crowd controls, or use the kick animation to i-frame through other attacks by planning ahead. But because of its inconsistency it's not a reliable strategy that allows you to play aggressive and risky with enemies. The melee stun is now essentially a random thing that the game “gives you”, similar to how you randomly get crits, and that change on its own removes half the appeal of RE4 for me, and I don't think the game compensates for it sufficiently.
Given what they did to melees, it’s quite funny that they still have enemies who wear helmets to stop you from headshotting them. In the original this mattered a lot since it meant you can’t headstun them to use them for crowd control and i-frames, and instead you had to go for knee shots which were less reliable and weren’t useful for dealing with a crowd. Yet the enemies in the remake still wear helmets as if it matters, but all it does is simply force you to shoot them in the body which only takes one/two more shots more than shooting the head. It’s another case of the enemy design losing what made it compelling due to short-sighted changes in mechanics and the devs failing to realize how much it would take away from the game.
The kind of gameplay these changes lead to is one of constant backpedaling, since your melee is no longer strong and reliable, and enemies have instant lunging grabs with no counterplay to them at close range, at higher difficulties the game devolves to simply running away from enemies and shooting. Sometimes you get lucky and get to do a melee, but it’s not a part of the plan. The plan is to make space, sprint away, and circle around the arena and shoot. If anything gets in your way, a quick shotgun shot can disable them. The game’s challenge is now simply asking you to run and use ammo. I don’t think this is a particularly compelling gameplay loop when the ammo management never feels difficult as long as you hit your shots due to the leniency provided by the dynamic difficulty ensuring you get the drops for the weapons you are low on ammo on. Even if the ammo management was super tight, what kind of gameplay would that lead to? Simply clumping up enemies into tight corridors so you can shotgun/rifle multiple of them at a time for ammo efficiency? Or doing the same gameplan except slower to get focus shots with your pistol? Or if you play for rankings, simply run past all the enemies and encounters. It’s not fun to pull off, it’s simply boring.
There is another aspect to the defense in this game which I haven’t mentioned yet and that is the knife but I think it only exacerbates the game’s issues. On the surface you can say the knife adds more flexibility to the gameplay and parry allows you to get melees consistently, which is true, but to me that undermines the appeal of the mechanics it’s meant to interact with. The knife allows you to parry the attacks of any armed enemy, which in a kind of backwards way makes all the armed enemies way less dangerous than unarmed ones and their undodgeable grabs. Being able to get a melee off of it consistently is a sad way to relegate the mechanic, since it prevents you from using it aggressively and making your own choices when it comes to who and and when you want to use melees on, instead its simply something that happens to you, you get to do parry into melee if the game pits you against armed enemies that allows you to circumvent anything that could be challenging about them with an easy timing challenge. Even when made a bit more challenging with enemies varying their attack timings on Pro mode, the parry doesn’t ever feed into the rest of the game’s systems as the knife durability cost is virtually nothing for doing it. All it does is simply give you a “Get Out Of Jail For Free” card when it comes to armed enemies since their attacks are a boon to you, and in a backwards way it makes them easier than unarmed enemies and their grabs.
This is probably one of the places where I have the most disconnect with this game because I really don’t get the fun of parries in a game like this. Dodging through positioning and making decisions by planning around enemy behavior is where I get fun from this kind of action game, but with an instant parry like in RE4 with the static and slow enemies of this game it does absolutely nothing for me. If it had a big durability cost then maybe it would be a justifiable decision where you trade the damage and utility of the knife to escape a bad situation, but instead you just know the timing and nullify the entire enemy’s presence. The coolness of the animation is not enough to make up for how damaging it is to the game design to put so much on a simple timing challenge.
Ultimately, a big realization I made about RE4 Remake compared to the original is that it’s a game where things simply happen to you, rather than a game where you can make things happen.
You do the melee prompt when the game graces with you a stun animation, it’s not something you can reliably control and make decisions around.
You use knives to finish off enemies when the game lets you do so against transforming enemies, but you can’t control when it pops up since it doesn’t appear on most enemies and it’s not like you have a way of identifying Plagas enemies and knocking them down in advance. Because of that, stabbing grounded enemies never feels like a decision, just a prompt that you obey since you have little reason not to unless you wasted your knives getting grabbed. If every enemy on the ground had a stab prompt then at least you would be thinking about which enemies you choose to not do it on to save your knife resources.
You aren’t meant to use the knife aggressively since it can’t stun well anymore and the wide swings do pitiful damage, but you are meant to use it to parry attacks when an armed enemy happens to get into your range. When you parry attacks, you always get the same melee as a reward, you don’t get to make the choice of using a knee stun melee or a head stun melee for different purposes. You have little control in this game and most of the gameplay loop is obeying on-screen instructions in-between kiting and shooting
Compare this to the original RE4, where your backwards movement is much slower than your forward movement, so playing aggressively is encouraged, and running away from something comes at the cost of losing vision to it. You can choose what enemy to shoot in order to stun them, you choose where to shoot them to make a choice between the roundhouse kick for great crowd control or the straight kick/suplex for better single target damage. You can weave around enemies, bait them into quick attacks that you can feasibly whiff punish with your knife to get a headstun and turn close quarters situations in your favor. Compared to this, constant running away and shooting at enemies in the remake feels shallow and boring. To make it clear I don’t think the remake is hard, the strategy you are pushed into is so effective and easy to execute its hard to be very difficult once you get a hang of it, but it’s not fun either, and even if they found a way to make it hard it would just be boring due to how limited the mechanics are and how little options the player has in actually influencing the way fights progress.
And that about sums up my issues with the game. I can’t think of a good way to tie it together other than that I am deeply disappointed by what this remake had to offer. The devs clearly don’t have experience in making action games, they want to make a survival horror game so badly with the way professional is designed but it’s just not a good survival horror game either. If this was a more horror and resource management oriented RE4, that would be cool, but I think it’s simply a shitty action game where you point and click at enemies in-between kiting them.
If it were not a remake of RE4 then I would just see this as a mediocre third person shooter that tries hard with the encounter design, which is better than we get most of the time, but this game was made off the incredibly strong foundation of RE4 and yet managed to miss just about everything that was fun about it to me.
That this could be viewed as a good remake and a refinement of the original feels very strange to me, but I guess I’m completely divorced from the way people view action games nowadays. I guess as long as it has good animation work and easy controls it’s good enough, but I want more than that out of these games and the industry isn’t interested in providing that anymore. Unfortunate that I grew up to care about this stuff.
Addendum:
Since people gaslight themselves with this game into thinking the stuns are consistent, here is evidence of them being inconsistent and unreliable where I can shoot an enemy to death without ever getting a stun:
https://streamable.com/fovauq
https://streamable.com/a6jcux
https://streamable.com/nmb8lz
https://streamable.com/08vazy
First two clips are on hardcore with a fully upgraded Red9, last two clips are at the start of Professional.
To be clear, I am okay with Resident Evil 4 Remake being a different game than the original. In fact, I would like it more if it was more different and tried to execute a new idea well. My issue with it is that I don’t think the remake succeeds at carving out its own niche gameplay-wise, and instead it feels like a mismade version of RE4 held up by band-aid fixes to try to maintain the illusion of being a decent action game, and I will try to explain why I feel this way.
A core pillar of RE4 is the tank controls, they are what adds nuance to even the simplest encounters in the game and everything is designed around the limitations brought on by them. The Remake inevitably takes out the tank controls and, because of that, much of the original design crumbles, the solution to which is to make an entirely new game around the modernized controls. However, they did not do that, they instead applied a bunch of reactionary changes trying to make the game feel functional and challenging despite the removal of its core design pillar.
To illustrate this, let’s talk about one of the basic enemy types of the game, the axe-thrower. An axe is thrown at you in the original RE4, the tank controls prevent you from easily sidestepping the issue. You need to either walk forward at an angle to dodge it which drastically influences your positioning and can move you towards the crowd of enemies, or you need to shoot the axe as it’s being thrown at you to stop it. Both of these options have quite a bit of nuance to them, as dodging with your movement requires you to turn in advance since Leon’s turn speed isn’t instant, meaning that a level of prediction and foresight is required to pull this off, and shooting the axe requires you to ready your weapon, get a read on the axe’s trajectory to aim at it, and expend ammo. These are not the only ways, but they serve as good enough examples.
Come to the remake and now you have a variety of options to dodge the axe that make it a non-threat compared to the original. You can sidestep it to get out of the way, you can block it with your knife by holding a button, and you can duck under it to dodge it without needing to move. All this stuff lets you get around it in ways that dont push you into interesting situations. These enemies however are still here in the remake and they act about the same, seemingly just because they were there in the original, not because they do anything interesting for the combat. This to me exemplifies a lot of the ways most of the enemies lost their purpose and "fun" since the mechanics that made them interesting to deal with are gone, and illustrates the value that the tank based controls brought to simple interactions. For some reason we have even more options that are even easier to use against an enemy that is already made ineffective by the core system changes.
So how does the game maintain any challenge? The devs tried to do so in a couple ways but I don’t think they make for a fun or nuanced game. For one, they made it so that all unarmed enemies have long, lunging grabs that require you to sprint away from for quite a while as they chase you. If they are already close, they perform instant grabs that can’t be dodged in any way. Enemies also can’t get stunned by your shots as consistently so that you can’t counter their aggression with your guns. In short, on the highest difficulties your best bet is always keep a safe distance from all unarmed enemies. Yes, I am aware that lunging grabs can be ducked, but grabs that begin at close range cannot be ducked, so your gameplan is ultimately still the same, be far from enemies to prevent unwinnable situations. The ability to duck far lunging grabs ultimately doesn’t change your decision making in any significant way.
Another big factor is that melee was nerfed and made extremely inconsistent, especially on the higher difficulties. Shooting an enemy in the head no longer guarantees a stun that gives you a melee prompt, and the kick itself has a much smaller hitbox and no lasting i-frames. While the kick being nerfed is something I can understand and play around with, the fact that it was also made unusable due to the RNG to trigger it is baffling to me. I am okay with it taking more than one headshot, but you can shoot an enemy 5 times in the head in professional and never get the stun. If the stuns were consistent to trigger through applicable rules, you would be able to pick an enemy in the crowd to get a stun on, lure enemies around them for crowd controls, or use the kick animation to i-frame through other attacks by planning ahead. But because of its inconsistency it's not a reliable strategy that allows you to play aggressive and risky with enemies. The melee stun is now essentially a random thing that the game “gives you”, similar to how you randomly get crits, and that change on its own removes half the appeal of RE4 for me, and I don't think the game compensates for it sufficiently.
Given what they did to melees, it’s quite funny that they still have enemies who wear helmets to stop you from headshotting them. In the original this mattered a lot since it meant you can’t headstun them to use them for crowd control and i-frames, and instead you had to go for knee shots which were less reliable and weren’t useful for dealing with a crowd. Yet the enemies in the remake still wear helmets as if it matters, but all it does is simply force you to shoot them in the body which only takes one/two more shots more than shooting the head. It’s another case of the enemy design losing what made it compelling due to short-sighted changes in mechanics and the devs failing to realize how much it would take away from the game.
The kind of gameplay these changes lead to is one of constant backpedaling, since your melee is no longer strong and reliable, and enemies have instant lunging grabs with no counterplay to them at close range, at higher difficulties the game devolves to simply running away from enemies and shooting. Sometimes you get lucky and get to do a melee, but it’s not a part of the plan. The plan is to make space, sprint away, and circle around the arena and shoot. If anything gets in your way, a quick shotgun shot can disable them. The game’s challenge is now simply asking you to run and use ammo. I don’t think this is a particularly compelling gameplay loop when the ammo management never feels difficult as long as you hit your shots due to the leniency provided by the dynamic difficulty ensuring you get the drops for the weapons you are low on ammo on. Even if the ammo management was super tight, what kind of gameplay would that lead to? Simply clumping up enemies into tight corridors so you can shotgun/rifle multiple of them at a time for ammo efficiency? Or doing the same gameplan except slower to get focus shots with your pistol? Or if you play for rankings, simply run past all the enemies and encounters. It’s not fun to pull off, it’s simply boring.
There is another aspect to the defense in this game which I haven’t mentioned yet and that is the knife but I think it only exacerbates the game’s issues. On the surface you can say the knife adds more flexibility to the gameplay and parry allows you to get melees consistently, which is true, but to me that undermines the appeal of the mechanics it’s meant to interact with. The knife allows you to parry the attacks of any armed enemy, which in a kind of backwards way makes all the armed enemies way less dangerous than unarmed ones and their undodgeable grabs. Being able to get a melee off of it consistently is a sad way to relegate the mechanic, since it prevents you from using it aggressively and making your own choices when it comes to who and and when you want to use melees on, instead its simply something that happens to you, you get to do parry into melee if the game pits you against armed enemies that allows you to circumvent anything that could be challenging about them with an easy timing challenge. Even when made a bit more challenging with enemies varying their attack timings on Pro mode, the parry doesn’t ever feed into the rest of the game’s systems as the knife durability cost is virtually nothing for doing it. All it does is simply give you a “Get Out Of Jail For Free” card when it comes to armed enemies since their attacks are a boon to you, and in a backwards way it makes them easier than unarmed enemies and their grabs.
This is probably one of the places where I have the most disconnect with this game because I really don’t get the fun of parries in a game like this. Dodging through positioning and making decisions by planning around enemy behavior is where I get fun from this kind of action game, but with an instant parry like in RE4 with the static and slow enemies of this game it does absolutely nothing for me. If it had a big durability cost then maybe it would be a justifiable decision where you trade the damage and utility of the knife to escape a bad situation, but instead you just know the timing and nullify the entire enemy’s presence. The coolness of the animation is not enough to make up for how damaging it is to the game design to put so much on a simple timing challenge.
Ultimately, a big realization I made about RE4 Remake compared to the original is that it’s a game where things simply happen to you, rather than a game where you can make things happen.
You do the melee prompt when the game graces with you a stun animation, it’s not something you can reliably control and make decisions around.
You use knives to finish off enemies when the game lets you do so against transforming enemies, but you can’t control when it pops up since it doesn’t appear on most enemies and it’s not like you have a way of identifying Plagas enemies and knocking them down in advance. Because of that, stabbing grounded enemies never feels like a decision, just a prompt that you obey since you have little reason not to unless you wasted your knives getting grabbed. If every enemy on the ground had a stab prompt then at least you would be thinking about which enemies you choose to not do it on to save your knife resources.
You aren’t meant to use the knife aggressively since it can’t stun well anymore and the wide swings do pitiful damage, but you are meant to use it to parry attacks when an armed enemy happens to get into your range. When you parry attacks, you always get the same melee as a reward, you don’t get to make the choice of using a knee stun melee or a head stun melee for different purposes. You have little control in this game and most of the gameplay loop is obeying on-screen instructions in-between kiting and shooting
Compare this to the original RE4, where your backwards movement is much slower than your forward movement, so playing aggressively is encouraged, and running away from something comes at the cost of losing vision to it. You can choose what enemy to shoot in order to stun them, you choose where to shoot them to make a choice between the roundhouse kick for great crowd control or the straight kick/suplex for better single target damage. You can weave around enemies, bait them into quick attacks that you can feasibly whiff punish with your knife to get a headstun and turn close quarters situations in your favor. Compared to this, constant running away and shooting at enemies in the remake feels shallow and boring. To make it clear I don’t think the remake is hard, the strategy you are pushed into is so effective and easy to execute its hard to be very difficult once you get a hang of it, but it’s not fun either, and even if they found a way to make it hard it would just be boring due to how limited the mechanics are and how little options the player has in actually influencing the way fights progress.
And that about sums up my issues with the game. I can’t think of a good way to tie it together other than that I am deeply disappointed by what this remake had to offer. The devs clearly don’t have experience in making action games, they want to make a survival horror game so badly with the way professional is designed but it’s just not a good survival horror game either. If this was a more horror and resource management oriented RE4, that would be cool, but I think it’s simply a shitty action game where you point and click at enemies in-between kiting them.
If it were not a remake of RE4 then I would just see this as a mediocre third person shooter that tries hard with the encounter design, which is better than we get most of the time, but this game was made off the incredibly strong foundation of RE4 and yet managed to miss just about everything that was fun about it to me.
That this could be viewed as a good remake and a refinement of the original feels very strange to me, but I guess I’m completely divorced from the way people view action games nowadays. I guess as long as it has good animation work and easy controls it’s good enough, but I want more than that out of these games and the industry isn’t interested in providing that anymore. Unfortunate that I grew up to care about this stuff.
Addendum:
Since people gaslight themselves with this game into thinking the stuns are consistent, here is evidence of them being inconsistent and unreliable where I can shoot an enemy to death without ever getting a stun:
https://streamable.com/fovauq
https://streamable.com/a6jcux
https://streamable.com/nmb8lz
https://streamable.com/08vazy
First two clips are on hardcore with a fully upgraded Red9, last two clips are at the start of Professional.
text by tim rogers
★★⋆☆
“DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO 'THE NEW RETRO'.”
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Biohazard (Resident Evil) 4 to the “Five years or less away from being considered ‘Retro Gaming'” club. The third version of this game (after the Gamecube original and the PlayStation 2 port) is for the Nintendo Wii, and the inclusion of precise, snappy motion controls simultaneously perfects the beautiful skeleton that’s existed for three years and exposes all the tiniest flaws to new scrutiny.
First, know this: if you or someone you trust has recently expressed doubts about playing Resident Evil 4 on the Nintendo Wii because you’re “not sure how the motion controls could add anything to the experience”, or maybe because you’ve “played that Red Steel (1/2*) game, and boy that sucked ass“, you need to wake up and smell the wrong and/or get the heck over yourself. Motion controls make this game control perfectly. I do not use that word lightly: perfectly. If you want to shoot a zombie in the head, you point the remote at his head and you press the B button (on the bottom of the remote) to command Leon S. Kennedy to whip out his firearm and aim it right at that nasty Hispanic cranium, and then you press the Action Button to fire the shot. Some will puzzle about this game, and declare with a weird degree of mouth-breathing fetishism that they need not possess in order to continue living that this game was perfect with the Nintendo Gamecube controller so they’ll only buy the Wii version for its true 16:9 video output, and only if you can play it with the Gamecube controller. Really, though, this isn’t Zelda, with motion controls shoehorned in cutely: this is a game about shooting mobs of deranged men in the head in rapid succession, and the point-and-shoot interface here is about as good as it gets. If you’d rather consider holding a big pillowy shoulder button down and moving an analog stick to aim “perfect”, be my guest, and be also wrong. You’re probably the kind of person who wanted a dual-analog-stick control scheme in Metroid Prime, because the auto-lock thing is “so fake” and “for babies”. Yeah, I’m sure the boys in the foxholes in World War I enjoyed drawing figure-eights against the starry skies of Germany with their gun muzzles.
Wii remote aiming is visceral and weirdly real; it feels like a lightgun shooter felt before you were too mature to realize how vapid Duck Hunt was — and it’s deep, because you’re controlling the character’s movement, as well. The sound of a spent shotgun cartridge hitting a wooden floor echoing out of the speaker in the middle of the videogame controller in your hands is worth the price admission to anyone with a Shadow of the Colossus limited-edition print poster on his wall. Pointing, aiming and shooting with the Wii remote is unabashedly fantastic stuff. No, it’s nothing like aiming with a mouse and a keyboard. It’s not that tacky. It feels real — you aim, you shoot. Moving Leon with the nunchuk is pretty smooth as well. Sometimes the position of the nunchuk shifts around in my hand so that I’m holding it a little funny, and I accidentally press it to the left or right when I mean to go up, though I guess that’s my fault for not knowing the palms of my own hands very well, or my fault (again) for not buying the rubber sweat-grip-thing for the nunchuk, or even Nintendo’s fault for not making the nunchuk out of a surface more conducive to gripping ecstatically while hip-deep in the semi-undead.
If pressed to mention a negative aspect of the Wii remote controls, I’d have to say that the lack of an option to turn the aiming reticle off is kind of stupid. I mean, it’s so intuitive as-is. You know when you’re pointing at a zombie’s head, because you can see the remote pointing at the television. Hell, the remote even thumps in your hand when you aim the gun at an enemy. Why can’t we rely completely on the tactile feedback? Wouldn’t that add a neat little element of challenge? Instead, there’s the aiming reticle, crowding up the screen. Hey, at least it’s not as bad as the enormous HUD in Zelda: Twilight Princess.
And that’s about it. As the old saying goes, it takes only one blinged-out young man with diamond-encrusted platinum teeth (we call those “ice teeth”) to steal a tricky ho off an old playah, and Gears of War has long held Resident Evil 4 over its thigh and spanked the ever-loving stuff out of it. If the game industry were working correctly (Protip: it’s kind of not), this is how it would be for the next couple of years: game A revolutionizes a genre, and then game B arrives, taking the revolution into account, while marrying the genre back into the family where it belongs and rendering game A pretty much irrelevant. Gears of War has perfected the Resident Evil 4 formula: the challenges are faster and the enemies are more thrilling to kill. The set-pieces are simple and more honest; in Gears of War, climbing up a staircase into a mansion feels meatier and more meaningful than the original Resident Evil‘s entire zombie-infested mansion. After Gears of War, Resident Evil 4 feels more like a frequently-interrupted stroll through some rustic horror film scenery.
Dead or Alive producer Tomonobu Itagaki once somewhat-famously quipped, of Resident Evil 4, that though he appreciated the game for its integration of concepts, he couldn’t exactly stand playing it for too long because of how the main character had to stop and stand in place every time he fired his pistol. “What kind of man stops to fire a pistol?” asked Itagaki, to the fist-pumping, aww-yeahing, and hilarity of much of the internet. The truth is, a man who doesn’t want to throw his back out is the kind of man who stops to fire a pistol. Though you know what? I can let Itagaki’s ignorance slide; he’s obviously the kind of man who learned everything he needs to know about real life from Contra III: The Alien Wars. He knows what this world is about: brawny men hefting two-ton beef-cannons and strut-rushing into the collective face of the red-fleshed alien bitch-menace. And you know what else? Maybe he’s kind of right. There’s a certain avant-garde love to be found in this recent art-like obsession with detailing, in fiction of whatever format, the real-life-like reactions of ordinary people to fantastic situations. We’re a couple half-decades away from “summer blockbuster” being synonymous with a film about a labcoat-wearing scientist defeating a Hummer full of werewolves with a champagne glass full of orange Skittles.
Either way, why not let Leon move when he’s firing his gun? Really? The situation around him is already pretty hecked-up; disbelief all over the place is going to be suspended through the roof. We’ve got hundreds of psychic Spanish-speakers sharing a half a dozen faces, starting fires and brandishing pitchforks, over here. Leon is able to pause the action whenever he wants, and eat one of many green herbs that he finds conveniently lying all over the place. Why stay dead-realistic about the gun aiming, then? I’m not asking for rocket shoes and X-ray vision or anything. In fact, I could hardly even care less about being able to walk and shoot simultaneously. I’m sure it would be nice, though, really, I’ve played this game before, and I think I can handle it.
“I’ve played this game before, and I think I can handle it”. That’s a pretty meek way of putting it, though hey. There you go.
What other game-design misdemeanors do we put up with in the name of “enjoying” a “classic”? How about the completely, terribly bullstuff story? Resident Evil 4‘s story is pretty bad. Sorry to have to break it to you, kiddo. Does its story have to be good? I guess not; Super Mario Bros. had a lame-ass story about a guy rescuing the princess of a fungus fairyland from a turtle-dragon, though it manages to ascend to the status of almost art because it carries itself with noblest distinction.
Resident Evil 4 is not so noble. It’s lazy, in fact: it begins with a man named Leon S. Kennedy, who once fought zombies on his first day as a police officer (because a rookie cop was a good choice for a main character of a game (Resident Evil 2) set during a zombie outbreak in a small town), now on his way to a city in a Spanish-speaking country the name of which was omitted because Capcom Japan feared legal action from a tourism department or two, to rescue the president’s daughter from an unknown organization with unknown demands. “The president’s daughter” is the primary goal of this mission at the start because “The president” seemed too difficult for the story planners: on the one hand, the United States of America Tourism Department might end up suing Capcom because of the implication that the American President’s bodyguards are weak enough to allow him to be captured, which might increase the possibility of terrorism attempts; on the other hand, this is a Japanese videogame, and there is significantly less opportunity to show the president’s panties than there is to show the president’s daughter‘s panties, because the president probably wouldn’t be wearing a skirt, even on vacation.
Right from the start, the storytelling is hokey; the little secrets and somethings they’re not telling us are either groaningly obvious or sighingly contrived. The “president’s daughter” could be a brilliant MacGuffin, though in order for that to happen, it would have to stay a MacGuffin. You rescue her, because the planners were eager to get a skirt on the screen, and the “real plot” begins. That a “real plot” exists at all is kind of &^#$#ed; in the end, all they’re doing is giving Leon reasons to shoot beastly men in the head (or reasons to shoot them anywhere except the head), and each longwinded radio conversation screen functions something like a ten-minute cut-scene between world 2-4 and world 3-1 of Super Mario Bros., during which Super Mario meets a gnarly old man in the woods, eats sausages while discussing the meaning of life until sundown, and is eventually driven, on the old man’s bitching Harley, to the castle gates at World 3 under cover of midnight: thus, the sky being blue in World 2 and black in World 3. In other words, who the heck cares? In other words: don’t you dare say to me that Resident Evil 4 is a silly action game, and the story “doesn’t matter”. The simple fact that it has a story is confirmation enough, straight from the developers’ mouths, that they believed a story was necessary.
This weird, cautious self-importance manages to seep into the game’s soil and poison its reservoir in the tiniest spots. The story’s “chapters” are made up of large, ingenious interconnecting set-pieces teeming with the semi-undead; usually, to get from one section to another, you need to open up a few treasure boxes and find magic items — crests or whatever — to open doors. The first time I played this game, I’m pretty sure I didn’t ever once reach a door and find I didn’t have the right items. Why have the items at all? Why advertise the game’s genre as “Survival Horror” on the box (yes, that’s what the genre is listed as in the Japanese version), if it’s more of an “Adventure Horror”? Sure, “survival” in this case indicates that we must move forward at all costs, which means finding those crests, keys, or whatever. The menu screen is pretty nice — Diablo-like, space-based, kind of a mini-game in and of itself — though really, why have herbs and whatnot, anyway? This game lets you continue at the beginning of an area when you die, just like any old FPS. And death normally comes pretty suddenly, after a short burst of hard hits. Why not just have a Gears of War-esque “run away, take cover, and wait” healing system? I suppose that would be because the enemies aren’t very smart, and running away from them isn’t always difficult.
Let’s see how many more times we can mention Gears of War: how about the radio communication segments? Why does this have to take up the whole screen? I’m sure that the little camera whirling around Leon as he detaches the radio from his belt and holds it up to his ear has become something of a gaming archetype in recent years, though really, let’s look at this, here. When the screen fades to the radio correspondence mode, Leon is holding the radio up to his ear. Yet now we see a video image of him. And we see a video image of whoever he’s talking to. Of course, as he’s holding the radio up to his ear, this means that the camera in front of Leon must be hovering on an invisible wire over his face, and that the image of his current conversation partner is kind of sitting against his cheek. At first, the game’s eagerness to show you the radio is kind of understandable, because you’ve never seen the person that Leon is going to be talking to, so they might as well show you. Eventually, though, little things stick out like gangrenous thumbs: why the hell is the name of the character speaking displayed above the (huge) subtitle window? There are obviously only two faces visible at any given time, and if we can’t tell the difference between the two characters’ voices, then it’s not our fault — it’s the storytellers’. Why, in Gears of War, the main character only ever converses on the radio with someone he’s seen in person before, and even then, it’s only in voiceover. Sure, radio transmission also forces the main character to stick his finger in his ear and slow his trotting pace down to a crawl, though hey! At least it doesn’t swamp up the whole hecking screen and make our trigger fingers itchy. Dead Rising did something kind of right smack in the middle of Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War, with the walkie-talkie banter being displayed only in text and requiring the main character to hold the walkie talkie up to his head powerlessly. Either Gears of War 2 or Resident Evil 5 will have fixed this I’m guessing.
Either way, here it is, broken as can be, stinking up several parts of Resident Evil 4; the break-ins aren’t as frequent as in, say, Metal Gear Solid 3, though I dare say that they are also not one-tenth as well-written.
And here I will also compliment Resident Evil 4, by saying that even though the interruptions are not frequent, they are terribly painful, because I want to continue playing the game.
And now I will frown: the voice acting, as per Capcom, is pretty bone-chillingly atrocious, which may or may not have been for “camp” value, or maybe not. If the bad voice-acting, the stuffty story, and the weird inconsistencies like the radio-screen video-image paradox are, in any way, ever confirmed to be throwbacks, elbow-nudges, or send-ups of other “videogame cliches”, then I will be boarding an airplane with a pair of ceramic brass knuckles in my carry-on baggage, I swear. Resident Evil is already a send-up of horror movie cliches, now made thrilling because I’m in control of the action. We don’t need “ironic” videogame references stuffting in the game design gene pool, please.
If you read the internet (Protip: You’re doing so right now), you might have seen a story with “OMG” in the headline, which detailed the censorship of the Japanese version of this game. The censorship is not new news; the previous Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions were censored in exactly the same way. Namely, there’s no blood (none, of any kind, at all, et cetera) and the satisfying, explosive pop-splash of shooting a man in the head is deleted in favor of making every single location on an enemy’s body cause the same amount of damage when shot. Yes, this means you can shoot an enemy in the head five or six times in a row. Yes, this kind of breaks the game as the story starts to develop. Capcom is a fan of doing this to their games on both sides of every ocean: here in Japan, for example, where the content rating system consists of four ratings that are not “enforced” (A (all ages), B (12-13), C (13-17), D (17 and up)) and one rating that is “enforced” (Z (ages 18 and up only)), companies like Capcom are left with no other choice than to cast a vote of no-confidence in the system, and censor their games out of “social responsibility”. The simplest way of looking at it is this: the ratings board is stating from the start that none of their ratings matter except the one that does, so why should retailers trust the one rating that does, if the board is admitting that all of the other ratings are bullstuff? And, ironically, as with anything containing “mature” content (blood, alcohol, cigarettes, sex, income taxes), games like Resident Evil 4 are mostly popular amongst snot-nosed twelve-year-olds, anyway. It’s a shame, then, that the censorship practices have to kind of break the game — not as bad as in the US release of Monster Hunter, though, where the blood was removed because the enemies’ similarities to animals elevated the game to something of an animal-cruelty simulator, which is not to be chuckled at in this time of hooker-killing-simulators. Unfortunately, blood was also the game’s indicator of when you were hitting an enemy in the right spot (Monster Hunter keeps numbers out of the gameplay), so the game was essentially broken.
It’s a weird culture-clash, I tell you. The best solution, probably, is to just leave the games how they are intended to be, and everyone will be happy. I’ll be damned if the mere sight of a realistic man pointing a gun at a realistic man-monster wasn’t enough to cause an actual girl who dresses mostly in pink to avert her eyes from the screen. Should she keep her eyes on the screen after the “bang”, even she would raise critical questions about the absence of blood.
Like Ninja Gaiden on the PlayStation 3, Resident Evil 4 is getting a somewhat-deserved second wind on the Wii. It’s a breezy game despite its heavy subject matter, and despite the intrusion of some nasty game design archetypes and some groan-worthy narrative choices, it has exceptional flow, some awesome bosses, and tons of visceral crunch. The Wii version is the best version available, and I’m trying real hard to not mention how heart-breaking it is that the game can’t display in at least 720p resolutions, or how I wish Gears of War could use this control scheme, because hey, these things just aren’t possible. You have to make do with what you have.
I’ve saved the best for last: you know those brain-dead quick-timer events in the Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions, where you have to press a button quickly in order to make Leon cinematically avoid chains of certain perils? If you answered “Yes, that’s one of the dumbest trends in videogames today”, then you’re correct. They’re all gone in the Wii version — kind of. Rather than press buttons in time, all you have to do for every quick-timer event is shake the controller from side to side as vigorously as possible. Even long, elaborate sequences require no more than a vigorous controller shaking. I was prepared to call this the worst part of the game, and bemoan it as the lamest possible forced implementation of the Wii motion controls. I was going to say that, in a game where the motion controls are used so maturely and cleanly, they really didn’t have to put this in here. That was until I figured out the secret — you don’t have to shake the controller side-to-side. No, no, if you’re a man, you already know the best way to grip the controller. I tell you, I was sitting here in the middle of the night, window open, cool spring breeze wafting in, jerking this Wiimote like it was a pretty plastic penis, and there, on the screen in front of me, not some hot babe engaged in pornographic pleasure — no, it was Leon S. Kennedy running toward the screen, huffing and puffing, a boulder hot on his heels. There was a sudden, electric disconnect between Leon’s huffing and puffing and the jacking-off-like motion of my hand on the Wiimote, and a big spark jumped up in my throat and I had what was probably the best laugh I’ve had in months. Of course, I thought, of course. Thank you, Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, for making that perfectly clear to me. I’d been on the fence about it for years.
★★⋆☆
“DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO 'THE NEW RETRO'.”
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome Biohazard (Resident Evil) 4 to the “Five years or less away from being considered ‘Retro Gaming'” club. The third version of this game (after the Gamecube original and the PlayStation 2 port) is for the Nintendo Wii, and the inclusion of precise, snappy motion controls simultaneously perfects the beautiful skeleton that’s existed for three years and exposes all the tiniest flaws to new scrutiny.
First, know this: if you or someone you trust has recently expressed doubts about playing Resident Evil 4 on the Nintendo Wii because you’re “not sure how the motion controls could add anything to the experience”, or maybe because you’ve “played that Red Steel (1/2*) game, and boy that sucked ass“, you need to wake up and smell the wrong and/or get the heck over yourself. Motion controls make this game control perfectly. I do not use that word lightly: perfectly. If you want to shoot a zombie in the head, you point the remote at his head and you press the B button (on the bottom of the remote) to command Leon S. Kennedy to whip out his firearm and aim it right at that nasty Hispanic cranium, and then you press the Action Button to fire the shot. Some will puzzle about this game, and declare with a weird degree of mouth-breathing fetishism that they need not possess in order to continue living that this game was perfect with the Nintendo Gamecube controller so they’ll only buy the Wii version for its true 16:9 video output, and only if you can play it with the Gamecube controller. Really, though, this isn’t Zelda, with motion controls shoehorned in cutely: this is a game about shooting mobs of deranged men in the head in rapid succession, and the point-and-shoot interface here is about as good as it gets. If you’d rather consider holding a big pillowy shoulder button down and moving an analog stick to aim “perfect”, be my guest, and be also wrong. You’re probably the kind of person who wanted a dual-analog-stick control scheme in Metroid Prime, because the auto-lock thing is “so fake” and “for babies”. Yeah, I’m sure the boys in the foxholes in World War I enjoyed drawing figure-eights against the starry skies of Germany with their gun muzzles.
Wii remote aiming is visceral and weirdly real; it feels like a lightgun shooter felt before you were too mature to realize how vapid Duck Hunt was — and it’s deep, because you’re controlling the character’s movement, as well. The sound of a spent shotgun cartridge hitting a wooden floor echoing out of the speaker in the middle of the videogame controller in your hands is worth the price admission to anyone with a Shadow of the Colossus limited-edition print poster on his wall. Pointing, aiming and shooting with the Wii remote is unabashedly fantastic stuff. No, it’s nothing like aiming with a mouse and a keyboard. It’s not that tacky. It feels real — you aim, you shoot. Moving Leon with the nunchuk is pretty smooth as well. Sometimes the position of the nunchuk shifts around in my hand so that I’m holding it a little funny, and I accidentally press it to the left or right when I mean to go up, though I guess that’s my fault for not knowing the palms of my own hands very well, or my fault (again) for not buying the rubber sweat-grip-thing for the nunchuk, or even Nintendo’s fault for not making the nunchuk out of a surface more conducive to gripping ecstatically while hip-deep in the semi-undead.
If pressed to mention a negative aspect of the Wii remote controls, I’d have to say that the lack of an option to turn the aiming reticle off is kind of stupid. I mean, it’s so intuitive as-is. You know when you’re pointing at a zombie’s head, because you can see the remote pointing at the television. Hell, the remote even thumps in your hand when you aim the gun at an enemy. Why can’t we rely completely on the tactile feedback? Wouldn’t that add a neat little element of challenge? Instead, there’s the aiming reticle, crowding up the screen. Hey, at least it’s not as bad as the enormous HUD in Zelda: Twilight Princess.
And that’s about it. As the old saying goes, it takes only one blinged-out young man with diamond-encrusted platinum teeth (we call those “ice teeth”) to steal a tricky ho off an old playah, and Gears of War has long held Resident Evil 4 over its thigh and spanked the ever-loving stuff out of it. If the game industry were working correctly (Protip: it’s kind of not), this is how it would be for the next couple of years: game A revolutionizes a genre, and then game B arrives, taking the revolution into account, while marrying the genre back into the family where it belongs and rendering game A pretty much irrelevant. Gears of War has perfected the Resident Evil 4 formula: the challenges are faster and the enemies are more thrilling to kill. The set-pieces are simple and more honest; in Gears of War, climbing up a staircase into a mansion feels meatier and more meaningful than the original Resident Evil‘s entire zombie-infested mansion. After Gears of War, Resident Evil 4 feels more like a frequently-interrupted stroll through some rustic horror film scenery.
Dead or Alive producer Tomonobu Itagaki once somewhat-famously quipped, of Resident Evil 4, that though he appreciated the game for its integration of concepts, he couldn’t exactly stand playing it for too long because of how the main character had to stop and stand in place every time he fired his pistol. “What kind of man stops to fire a pistol?” asked Itagaki, to the fist-pumping, aww-yeahing, and hilarity of much of the internet. The truth is, a man who doesn’t want to throw his back out is the kind of man who stops to fire a pistol. Though you know what? I can let Itagaki’s ignorance slide; he’s obviously the kind of man who learned everything he needs to know about real life from Contra III: The Alien Wars. He knows what this world is about: brawny men hefting two-ton beef-cannons and strut-rushing into the collective face of the red-fleshed alien bitch-menace. And you know what else? Maybe he’s kind of right. There’s a certain avant-garde love to be found in this recent art-like obsession with detailing, in fiction of whatever format, the real-life-like reactions of ordinary people to fantastic situations. We’re a couple half-decades away from “summer blockbuster” being synonymous with a film about a labcoat-wearing scientist defeating a Hummer full of werewolves with a champagne glass full of orange Skittles.
Either way, why not let Leon move when he’s firing his gun? Really? The situation around him is already pretty hecked-up; disbelief all over the place is going to be suspended through the roof. We’ve got hundreds of psychic Spanish-speakers sharing a half a dozen faces, starting fires and brandishing pitchforks, over here. Leon is able to pause the action whenever he wants, and eat one of many green herbs that he finds conveniently lying all over the place. Why stay dead-realistic about the gun aiming, then? I’m not asking for rocket shoes and X-ray vision or anything. In fact, I could hardly even care less about being able to walk and shoot simultaneously. I’m sure it would be nice, though, really, I’ve played this game before, and I think I can handle it.
“I’ve played this game before, and I think I can handle it”. That’s a pretty meek way of putting it, though hey. There you go.
What other game-design misdemeanors do we put up with in the name of “enjoying” a “classic”? How about the completely, terribly bullstuff story? Resident Evil 4‘s story is pretty bad. Sorry to have to break it to you, kiddo. Does its story have to be good? I guess not; Super Mario Bros. had a lame-ass story about a guy rescuing the princess of a fungus fairyland from a turtle-dragon, though it manages to ascend to the status of almost art because it carries itself with noblest distinction.
Resident Evil 4 is not so noble. It’s lazy, in fact: it begins with a man named Leon S. Kennedy, who once fought zombies on his first day as a police officer (because a rookie cop was a good choice for a main character of a game (Resident Evil 2) set during a zombie outbreak in a small town), now on his way to a city in a Spanish-speaking country the name of which was omitted because Capcom Japan feared legal action from a tourism department or two, to rescue the president’s daughter from an unknown organization with unknown demands. “The president’s daughter” is the primary goal of this mission at the start because “The president” seemed too difficult for the story planners: on the one hand, the United States of America Tourism Department might end up suing Capcom because of the implication that the American President’s bodyguards are weak enough to allow him to be captured, which might increase the possibility of terrorism attempts; on the other hand, this is a Japanese videogame, and there is significantly less opportunity to show the president’s panties than there is to show the president’s daughter‘s panties, because the president probably wouldn’t be wearing a skirt, even on vacation.
Right from the start, the storytelling is hokey; the little secrets and somethings they’re not telling us are either groaningly obvious or sighingly contrived. The “president’s daughter” could be a brilliant MacGuffin, though in order for that to happen, it would have to stay a MacGuffin. You rescue her, because the planners were eager to get a skirt on the screen, and the “real plot” begins. That a “real plot” exists at all is kind of &^#$#ed; in the end, all they’re doing is giving Leon reasons to shoot beastly men in the head (or reasons to shoot them anywhere except the head), and each longwinded radio conversation screen functions something like a ten-minute cut-scene between world 2-4 and world 3-1 of Super Mario Bros., during which Super Mario meets a gnarly old man in the woods, eats sausages while discussing the meaning of life until sundown, and is eventually driven, on the old man’s bitching Harley, to the castle gates at World 3 under cover of midnight: thus, the sky being blue in World 2 and black in World 3. In other words, who the heck cares? In other words: don’t you dare say to me that Resident Evil 4 is a silly action game, and the story “doesn’t matter”. The simple fact that it has a story is confirmation enough, straight from the developers’ mouths, that they believed a story was necessary.
This weird, cautious self-importance manages to seep into the game’s soil and poison its reservoir in the tiniest spots. The story’s “chapters” are made up of large, ingenious interconnecting set-pieces teeming with the semi-undead; usually, to get from one section to another, you need to open up a few treasure boxes and find magic items — crests or whatever — to open doors. The first time I played this game, I’m pretty sure I didn’t ever once reach a door and find I didn’t have the right items. Why have the items at all? Why advertise the game’s genre as “Survival Horror” on the box (yes, that’s what the genre is listed as in the Japanese version), if it’s more of an “Adventure Horror”? Sure, “survival” in this case indicates that we must move forward at all costs, which means finding those crests, keys, or whatever. The menu screen is pretty nice — Diablo-like, space-based, kind of a mini-game in and of itself — though really, why have herbs and whatnot, anyway? This game lets you continue at the beginning of an area when you die, just like any old FPS. And death normally comes pretty suddenly, after a short burst of hard hits. Why not just have a Gears of War-esque “run away, take cover, and wait” healing system? I suppose that would be because the enemies aren’t very smart, and running away from them isn’t always difficult.
Let’s see how many more times we can mention Gears of War: how about the radio communication segments? Why does this have to take up the whole screen? I’m sure that the little camera whirling around Leon as he detaches the radio from his belt and holds it up to his ear has become something of a gaming archetype in recent years, though really, let’s look at this, here. When the screen fades to the radio correspondence mode, Leon is holding the radio up to his ear. Yet now we see a video image of him. And we see a video image of whoever he’s talking to. Of course, as he’s holding the radio up to his ear, this means that the camera in front of Leon must be hovering on an invisible wire over his face, and that the image of his current conversation partner is kind of sitting against his cheek. At first, the game’s eagerness to show you the radio is kind of understandable, because you’ve never seen the person that Leon is going to be talking to, so they might as well show you. Eventually, though, little things stick out like gangrenous thumbs: why the hell is the name of the character speaking displayed above the (huge) subtitle window? There are obviously only two faces visible at any given time, and if we can’t tell the difference between the two characters’ voices, then it’s not our fault — it’s the storytellers’. Why, in Gears of War, the main character only ever converses on the radio with someone he’s seen in person before, and even then, it’s only in voiceover. Sure, radio transmission also forces the main character to stick his finger in his ear and slow his trotting pace down to a crawl, though hey! At least it doesn’t swamp up the whole hecking screen and make our trigger fingers itchy. Dead Rising did something kind of right smack in the middle of Resident Evil 4 and Gears of War, with the walkie-talkie banter being displayed only in text and requiring the main character to hold the walkie talkie up to his head powerlessly. Either Gears of War 2 or Resident Evil 5 will have fixed this I’m guessing.
Either way, here it is, broken as can be, stinking up several parts of Resident Evil 4; the break-ins aren’t as frequent as in, say, Metal Gear Solid 3, though I dare say that they are also not one-tenth as well-written.
And here I will also compliment Resident Evil 4, by saying that even though the interruptions are not frequent, they are terribly painful, because I want to continue playing the game.
And now I will frown: the voice acting, as per Capcom, is pretty bone-chillingly atrocious, which may or may not have been for “camp” value, or maybe not. If the bad voice-acting, the stuffty story, and the weird inconsistencies like the radio-screen video-image paradox are, in any way, ever confirmed to be throwbacks, elbow-nudges, or send-ups of other “videogame cliches”, then I will be boarding an airplane with a pair of ceramic brass knuckles in my carry-on baggage, I swear. Resident Evil is already a send-up of horror movie cliches, now made thrilling because I’m in control of the action. We don’t need “ironic” videogame references stuffting in the game design gene pool, please.
If you read the internet (Protip: You’re doing so right now), you might have seen a story with “OMG” in the headline, which detailed the censorship of the Japanese version of this game. The censorship is not new news; the previous Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions were censored in exactly the same way. Namely, there’s no blood (none, of any kind, at all, et cetera) and the satisfying, explosive pop-splash of shooting a man in the head is deleted in favor of making every single location on an enemy’s body cause the same amount of damage when shot. Yes, this means you can shoot an enemy in the head five or six times in a row. Yes, this kind of breaks the game as the story starts to develop. Capcom is a fan of doing this to their games on both sides of every ocean: here in Japan, for example, where the content rating system consists of four ratings that are not “enforced” (A (all ages), B (12-13), C (13-17), D (17 and up)) and one rating that is “enforced” (Z (ages 18 and up only)), companies like Capcom are left with no other choice than to cast a vote of no-confidence in the system, and censor their games out of “social responsibility”. The simplest way of looking at it is this: the ratings board is stating from the start that none of their ratings matter except the one that does, so why should retailers trust the one rating that does, if the board is admitting that all of the other ratings are bullstuff? And, ironically, as with anything containing “mature” content (blood, alcohol, cigarettes, sex, income taxes), games like Resident Evil 4 are mostly popular amongst snot-nosed twelve-year-olds, anyway. It’s a shame, then, that the censorship practices have to kind of break the game — not as bad as in the US release of Monster Hunter, though, where the blood was removed because the enemies’ similarities to animals elevated the game to something of an animal-cruelty simulator, which is not to be chuckled at in this time of hooker-killing-simulators. Unfortunately, blood was also the game’s indicator of when you were hitting an enemy in the right spot (Monster Hunter keeps numbers out of the gameplay), so the game was essentially broken.
It’s a weird culture-clash, I tell you. The best solution, probably, is to just leave the games how they are intended to be, and everyone will be happy. I’ll be damned if the mere sight of a realistic man pointing a gun at a realistic man-monster wasn’t enough to cause an actual girl who dresses mostly in pink to avert her eyes from the screen. Should she keep her eyes on the screen after the “bang”, even she would raise critical questions about the absence of blood.
Like Ninja Gaiden on the PlayStation 3, Resident Evil 4 is getting a somewhat-deserved second wind on the Wii. It’s a breezy game despite its heavy subject matter, and despite the intrusion of some nasty game design archetypes and some groan-worthy narrative choices, it has exceptional flow, some awesome bosses, and tons of visceral crunch. The Wii version is the best version available, and I’m trying real hard to not mention how heart-breaking it is that the game can’t display in at least 720p resolutions, or how I wish Gears of War could use this control scheme, because hey, these things just aren’t possible. You have to make do with what you have.
I’ve saved the best for last: you know those brain-dead quick-timer events in the Gamecube and PlayStation 2 versions, where you have to press a button quickly in order to make Leon cinematically avoid chains of certain perils? If you answered “Yes, that’s one of the dumbest trends in videogames today”, then you’re correct. They’re all gone in the Wii version — kind of. Rather than press buttons in time, all you have to do for every quick-timer event is shake the controller from side to side as vigorously as possible. Even long, elaborate sequences require no more than a vigorous controller shaking. I was prepared to call this the worst part of the game, and bemoan it as the lamest possible forced implementation of the Wii motion controls. I was going to say that, in a game where the motion controls are used so maturely and cleanly, they really didn’t have to put this in here. That was until I figured out the secret — you don’t have to shake the controller side-to-side. No, no, if you’re a man, you already know the best way to grip the controller. I tell you, I was sitting here in the middle of the night, window open, cool spring breeze wafting in, jerking this Wiimote like it was a pretty plastic penis, and there, on the screen in front of me, not some hot babe engaged in pornographic pleasure — no, it was Leon S. Kennedy running toward the screen, huffing and puffing, a boulder hot on his heels. There was a sudden, electric disconnect between Leon’s huffing and puffing and the jacking-off-like motion of my hand on the Wiimote, and a big spark jumped up in my throat and I had what was probably the best laugh I’ve had in months. Of course, I thought, of course. Thank you, Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition, for making that perfectly clear to me. I’d been on the fence about it for years.
To this day, no other fighting game is as mechanically loaded yet easy to get into as Persona 4 Arena Ultimax.
On the surface level, it seems like somewhat of an easy game in terms of execution with how prevalent auto-combo is for a lot of characters, though once you get deeper into the mechanics there is a lot to mess around with. Movement is extremely interesting with the existence of Manual Airturn/Airturn Backdash, IBs are extremely rewarding, playing around Awakening is really fun, One More Burst/Frenzy is really interesting to build gameplans around, and Persona Displacement allows for extremely creative use of your character's moveset. All of these elements combined take this seemingly simple game, and give it a ton of depth.
The mechanics themselves are a lot, but this game also has some of the most interesting fighting game characters period. A lot of this I think comes from the fact they are NOT afraid at all to give characters really broken stuff, so the overall character power in this game is EXTREMELY HIGH. No matter their place on the tier list, every character in this game is a nuclear bomb and will KILL YOU if you let them. This aspect of the game is probably the most divisive part of Persona, but it's something I've learned to love, especially as a Shadow Labrys player.
You can't really go wrong with either version of this game, give it a shot if you are considering it.
On the surface level, it seems like somewhat of an easy game in terms of execution with how prevalent auto-combo is for a lot of characters, though once you get deeper into the mechanics there is a lot to mess around with. Movement is extremely interesting with the existence of Manual Airturn/Airturn Backdash, IBs are extremely rewarding, playing around Awakening is really fun, One More Burst/Frenzy is really interesting to build gameplans around, and Persona Displacement allows for extremely creative use of your character's moveset. All of these elements combined take this seemingly simple game, and give it a ton of depth.
The mechanics themselves are a lot, but this game also has some of the most interesting fighting game characters period. A lot of this I think comes from the fact they are NOT afraid at all to give characters really broken stuff, so the overall character power in this game is EXTREMELY HIGH. No matter their place on the tier list, every character in this game is a nuclear bomb and will KILL YOU if you let them. This aspect of the game is probably the most divisive part of Persona, but it's something I've learned to love, especially as a Shadow Labrys player.
You can't really go wrong with either version of this game, give it a shot if you are considering it.
Elden Ring
2022
Starnger Of Paradise will be better
Demon's Souls
2020
cannot say i am particularly enamored with the idea that we should frame this discussion in any way that pretends it is not ultimately a willful net loss for games preservation. the idea that in order to aggressively push hardware a development team was enlisted to resurrect a long forsaken ip, in the process fundamentally misunderstanding the majority of its artistic sensibilities (sometimes aggressively so) to showcase a console’s power rubs me the wrong way for several reasons. and there’s potent irony here because we must also remember that in essence sony is banking on from softwares death cult to launch a console cycle for the second time in a row now. recall the invective words of shuhei yoshida, 2009: 'This is crap. This is an unbelievably bad game.' surely what is now a valuable ace in the sleeve for sonys financial strategy in the 9th generation of consoles onwards deserves more respect than this?
as an immediate contrast in the field of remakes, i’ll put forward that at the very least, ff7 is one of the most ubiquitous games of all time - to such a degree that altering its content and expanding on its themes in a rebuild-esque scenario is not only sensible, but appreciated. the same case is difficult to make for demon’s in my opinion.
perhaps bluepoints alterations, seldom rooted in any reverence for aesthetics but instead prioritizing largely perfunctory gameplay, are to your tastes. but they are not to mine. the original demon’s souls is an intensely difficult work to assess, litigate, and reconcile with, to be sure, but whatever your stance on it, it’s difficult to deny how exquisitely it worked with its limitations to fashion something that was entirely inspired and bold, yet quintessentially from software. none of that same evocative ethos is reflected here, and for these reasons i find bluepoint’s iteration extremely difficult to respect - doubly so because im in a position now of having twice been told to give bluepoint a chance on a remake, both times to personally and deeply unsatisfactory results. i only wish more folks had a convenient way of experiencing the original so they were free to pass their own judgments
as an immediate contrast in the field of remakes, i’ll put forward that at the very least, ff7 is one of the most ubiquitous games of all time - to such a degree that altering its content and expanding on its themes in a rebuild-esque scenario is not only sensible, but appreciated. the same case is difficult to make for demon’s in my opinion.
perhaps bluepoints alterations, seldom rooted in any reverence for aesthetics but instead prioritizing largely perfunctory gameplay, are to your tastes. but they are not to mine. the original demon’s souls is an intensely difficult work to assess, litigate, and reconcile with, to be sure, but whatever your stance on it, it’s difficult to deny how exquisitely it worked with its limitations to fashion something that was entirely inspired and bold, yet quintessentially from software. none of that same evocative ethos is reflected here, and for these reasons i find bluepoint’s iteration extremely difficult to respect - doubly so because im in a position now of having twice been told to give bluepoint a chance on a remake, both times to personally and deeply unsatisfactory results. i only wish more folks had a convenient way of experiencing the original so they were free to pass their own judgments
Demon's Souls
2009
Thanks RPCS3. My favourite Souls - Blanketed in sorrow and an intoxicating ambiguity. An artstyle akin to a faded picturebook you've plucked out of an ancient water-logged library. I love so much that all of the environments feel restrained and utilitarian. A soundtrack that is wholly unique, doesn't feel a little inspired by the Hollywood Orchestral Epics nor does it even attempt to hit those notes.
The one title in the franchise that actually feels like a fantastical adventure, with encounters and environments that are more often a challenge of wit and intuition than attack pattern memorisation or a side-flippy shounen damage value race. It reeks!!! But it reeks beauty. I genuinely don't believe FromSoft in their current form have it in them to create a boss battle like King Allant again.
Solid and innovative, continues to be the breath of fresh air now as it was when I first played it in 2009. Nothin like it!!!!
All I'll say on the Bluepoint demake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5z2-hpZB1w
The one title in the franchise that actually feels like a fantastical adventure, with encounters and environments that are more often a challenge of wit and intuition than attack pattern memorisation or a side-flippy shounen damage value race. It reeks!!! But it reeks beauty. I genuinely don't believe FromSoft in their current form have it in them to create a boss battle like King Allant again.
Solid and innovative, continues to be the breath of fresh air now as it was when I first played it in 2009. Nothin like it!!!!
All I'll say on the Bluepoint demake: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5z2-hpZB1w
"content dictates form. less is more. god is in the details.
all in the service of clarity, without which, nothing else matters."
- stephen sondheim
above is a quote from one of my lifelong heroes who passed away a few months ago. mr. sondheim's work defined a great deal of my teenage and transitional years and upon hearing the news of his tragic passing, i took the opportunity to reflect on the ways with which he'd influenced my art, my views, and my conduct. i'm by no means a theatre type - while i spent a few years in high school co-directing and acting as a dramaturge for a local company, by no means do i enjoy the theatre as it exists to the common eye and ear. i left that world to escape the despotism of what 'must be' and what 'sells' by the overseeing eye of the major companies and self-satisfied bigwigs because, as any artist knows, when you climb a few rungs of the ladder no art is political, but all art is politics.
yet i find myself, years removed from theatre, years removed from pushing my own envelope of personal expression to a public eye, many nights in front of a google doc, or a blank notepad, or staring at my shelf, wondering when the spark is going to hit and i'll write the next pieces of my screenplay, or my next chorus to a song, or my next analysis of some 20-year-old adventure game made by a small passionate team from the literal opposite of the world. sometimes i wonder if my minimalism, my expression of big feelings in small boxes, through white and black forms with bright technicolor lights, if it's a crutch, if i'm an imitator of the conglomerate great ideas of people before me... if i shoot half this short film adaptation of a novel as a silent work, am i up my own ass for it? if i push myself creatively as a musician to a one-man audience by design, am i selling myself short? have i missed my shot at truly expressing MYself?
of course, if you've got your head screwed on halfway right, you'll realize this self-talk is a complete load of bullshit. just put the pen to the paper. put the fingers to the keys. don't worry about who sees it, don't worry about why you do it, but if you believe in it - content dictating form - and if your style is simple short strokes with deep, cutting lines - less is more - and if your heart hurts to watch it play back - god is in the details. if you are an artist, if you are a person who needs to be able to say something for the sake of saying it, you must throw away preconceptions, you must disregard what people have said of you and your work, you must take that future into your hands and seize it. all in the service of clarity, without which, nothing else matters.
live your daily rut. get up, go to work.
push hard to make those days count.
let your work be your work, and let your work be your work.
to find happiness is to be honest with oneself.
recognize the monotony but don't let it overtake you.
your career isn't your person.
every person on this site, every person reading this
i think each one of us has art inside of us waiting to blossom.
you need to be willing to find love in your heart for that, for yourself, and the willingness to seize that potential regardless of the cost and regardless of how you've hurt before.
you need to seize the future.
you need to kill the past.
flower, sun & rain was me all along, wasn't it?
all in the service of clarity, without which, nothing else matters."
- stephen sondheim
above is a quote from one of my lifelong heroes who passed away a few months ago. mr. sondheim's work defined a great deal of my teenage and transitional years and upon hearing the news of his tragic passing, i took the opportunity to reflect on the ways with which he'd influenced my art, my views, and my conduct. i'm by no means a theatre type - while i spent a few years in high school co-directing and acting as a dramaturge for a local company, by no means do i enjoy the theatre as it exists to the common eye and ear. i left that world to escape the despotism of what 'must be' and what 'sells' by the overseeing eye of the major companies and self-satisfied bigwigs because, as any artist knows, when you climb a few rungs of the ladder no art is political, but all art is politics.
yet i find myself, years removed from theatre, years removed from pushing my own envelope of personal expression to a public eye, many nights in front of a google doc, or a blank notepad, or staring at my shelf, wondering when the spark is going to hit and i'll write the next pieces of my screenplay, or my next chorus to a song, or my next analysis of some 20-year-old adventure game made by a small passionate team from the literal opposite of the world. sometimes i wonder if my minimalism, my expression of big feelings in small boxes, through white and black forms with bright technicolor lights, if it's a crutch, if i'm an imitator of the conglomerate great ideas of people before me... if i shoot half this short film adaptation of a novel as a silent work, am i up my own ass for it? if i push myself creatively as a musician to a one-man audience by design, am i selling myself short? have i missed my shot at truly expressing MYself?
of course, if you've got your head screwed on halfway right, you'll realize this self-talk is a complete load of bullshit. just put the pen to the paper. put the fingers to the keys. don't worry about who sees it, don't worry about why you do it, but if you believe in it - content dictating form - and if your style is simple short strokes with deep, cutting lines - less is more - and if your heart hurts to watch it play back - god is in the details. if you are an artist, if you are a person who needs to be able to say something for the sake of saying it, you must throw away preconceptions, you must disregard what people have said of you and your work, you must take that future into your hands and seize it. all in the service of clarity, without which, nothing else matters.
live your daily rut. get up, go to work.
push hard to make those days count.
let your work be your work, and let your work be your work.
to find happiness is to be honest with oneself.
recognize the monotony but don't let it overtake you.
your career isn't your person.
every person on this site, every person reading this
i think each one of us has art inside of us waiting to blossom.
you need to be willing to find love in your heart for that, for yourself, and the willingness to seize that potential regardless of the cost and regardless of how you've hurt before.
you need to seize the future.
you need to kill the past.
flower, sun & rain was me all along, wasn't it?