First Impressions: Resident Evil 5

Continuing with my habit of playing games on my PS3 that were popular three or more years ago, I've spent the last weekend playing the 2009 video game, Resident Evil 5.

Years ago when I first came into contact with the Resident Evil series, it was through the original Playstation game Resident Evil 2, wherein you played through the same story twice first as a rookie cop named Leon and a college student named Claire, who have overlapping stories and the first example of long-term planning I've come across in gaming - wherein if on your first play through you use up all the resources available in certain locations, there will be nothing left for you to use on your second time through the game as the other character.

After playing my way through Resident Evil 2, I got a lot more interested in the zombie sub-genre of horror, and have enjoyed all of the movies as they've become available on DVD.  I hadn't actually touched any of the other games in the series however, until this one.

The pacing of Resident Evil 5 is quite different than that of 2, for starters the "zombies" are actually infected humans and are therefore much cleverer and faster than the majority of the creatures in the earlier game.  I will happily admit I got stuck for a long time in the first stage of the game as I couldn't quite put together what the game designers wanted me to do and had to look for tips online to figure my way past.

Otherwise the game is pretty fun, the setting is interesting and once I got a handle on the how the controls worked I began moving my way through the story at a pretty good clip. The scares are definitely there, and although the plot seems a little overly complicated for my taste, it's still a fun way to play a great horror story in a well-established series.

Bookmonkey vs Hack/Slash: Day Sixteen

They Knew All Along!

One of the interesting things of any continuing series is you get to ask the question of how the series effects and is affected by the larger world. In the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, for example, there comes a point where the original victims of the killer have all run out (mild 20+ year spoiler) as the killer was targeting the children of the people who had killed him years before.

In the world of Hack/Slash, wherein a number of killers have risen from the grave and then proceed to kill all sorts of victims, the question has to be asked? Hasn’t anyone put this together other than our protagonists Cassie and Vlad?

The answer is a definite yes, both in a good and bad way.

The good way is the creation of an organization (starting out as two people) called Hack/Slash Inc., which is basically made up of people who have been saved by Cassie and Vlad over the years and are now working to network with other survivors and help Cassie find more Slashers as she travels the world.

The bad way (and a really common way in Science Fiction and Science Fiction-themed Horror, seen in films ranging from Alien (1979) to The X-Files (1993-2002) and Resident Evil (2002)) is that of government and corporate agencies looking to somehow capitalize on the phenomenon of Slashers, which they have renamed Revenants, for personal gain. “…These are organizations populated by utilitarian capitalists, power-hungry careerists or selfish research scientists” (Parker, 2000, 81)  In the world of Hack/Slash, this begins as a private company, then becomes a shadowy agency and later may even involve Cassie in a way she could never expect.

As the series moves form one-shots to a continuing storyline, the world of Hack/Slash began to grow into new and intriguing ways, and a big part of these involve making Slashers a phenomenon that exist beyond Cassie and Vlad's experience.

WORKS CITED
Parker, M. (2000). Manufacturing bodies: Flesh, organization, cyborgs. Body and organization. London: Sage Publications, 71-86.

IMAGE USED
Hack/Slash: Slice Hard. Retrieved Online at : http://static.comicvine.com/uploads/scale_small/1/10162/216736-19305-115843-2-hack--slash--slice.jpg

Bookmonkey Saw: Day 23

Saw VI

All right, Saw VI, first thing first – the winner of the first season of Scream Queens appears in her breakthrough role in the first scene!  Her character and a co-worker are trapped in joined cages and can only save themselves by feeding bits of their bodies to a machine and do it faster than the other.

Yuck.

It is a big scene, and although she doesn’t get to use her skills she learned on Scream Queens to be seductive, angry or the girl who defeats the villain, she does get to look terrified and then crazy as she works to out-do her coworker.

Also, the two of them are locked up because they are bankers, and bankers are bad.  I guess because the sometimes make unfair mortgages with customers.

Actually, that might be the biggest beef I have with the sixth film, the victims are (the two previously mentioned) bankers and a whole lot of health insurance company workers.  Because those people are bad, and take advantage of the poor and sick.

Seriously, the writing at this point in the series is pretty awful and entirely inconsistent with the original concept.  Originally, the Jigsaw Killer kidnaps random people and claims they don’t appreciate their lives enough, and then he gives them a horrible decision to make and (I honestly believe) hopes that they will succeed at their challenge.

By this point in the series, only bad people are caught, people who need to be taught a lesson.  In fact, this movie actually uses retroactively continuity to show us that the Jigsaw Killer planned this all along, making the whole series about a vendetta killer, effectively removing one of my favourite aspects of the first film, the killers motive.

The "evil" health insurance company in the film is called Umbrella Health (in Saw’s equally prolific contemporary horror franchise Resident Evil, The Umbrella Corporation is behind the zombie plague which is the focus of each film), and unlike the previous films conceit of using flashbacks to describe how the victims were kidnapped, this film shows everything in chronological order.

Also this is by far the most disgusting of the films in terms of on-screen violence – I thought Saw V was bad, but this film really takes the cake (the gore-cake, if you will, which I hope isn’t an actual thing in the final Saw film).

The only positive thing I can say about the DVD is that in addition to the all the special features focusing on the horrible traps of the film (and actually, they are pretty poorly conceived in the film, most of them being shotgun traps with few of the mechanized grinding parts that seemed to appeal to fans of the previous films), was one focusing on how actor Tobin Bell worked to make his performance of the Jigsaw Killer more believable, and I found that eight minute segment to be pretty interesting.

(Quick side-note - this review of Saw VI actually marks my 500^th post to this blog since I started in August of 2009 – Pretty Cool!  Sorry it was about Saw VI, but hey – at least you didn’t have to watch it.)

Bookmonkey Saw: Day 18

Taking a step away from the films for a few days, lets look at some the other Saw-related media out there.

But first a little background.

1) In 1999 Konami released a survival-horror video game called Silent Hill (which in itself became the beginning of a series of games, comic books, movies, and novels), in which an "everyman" type character explored the frightening town of Silent Hill and sometimes slipped into a darker and more violent place.  Unlike it's most popular competitor in survival horror, the Resident Evil series of video games, Silent Hill focused on moody atmosphere and could best be described as psychological horror rather than the zombie-filled action horror of the Resident Evil series.

2) One year earlier, in 1998 the television series Felicity began airing which focused on the character of Felicity Porter (played by Keri Russell) as she attends college at the fictional University of New York, and throughout the series balances school with a love triangle involving two boys named Ben Convington and Noel Crane.  The first season ended on a cliffhanger, wherein Felicity had to choose between taking a road trip to California with Ben, or a trip to Europe with Noel.  Season two began with the knowledge that Felicity chose (mild, 13-year-old spoiler) the road trip with Ben.

Now, before you get upset and and start wondering why I'm filling my Saw blog with Silent Hill and Felicity, bear with me, It will all make sense I promise.

1a) Before season two of Felicity began, fans could buy a novel called Felicity: Summer which focused on her European trip with NOEL!?!  Which, of course, didn't happen (although the series does get involved in time travel later - seriously - so who knows, maybe it did?).

2a) Already considered one of the leaders of horror games in the video game industry, Konami began to look for a new concept which would further cement their hold on this sub-genre of video games.

Now, let's talk about Saw, for Playstation 3.  Like Felicity: Summer, Saw the game plays around with the franchise, taking place between Saw and Saw II, and featuring the character of Detective Tapp, who DIED in the first film, as the main character.  At the time of the games release, Saw VI was due out in about a month, so a game wherein the main character, who is clearly referred to as dead in the second film, somehow survives and gets to go through another bout with the Jigsaw killer may seem strange, but that is what players were met with.

The game looks an awful lot like Silent Hill, taking place in a largely-abandoned location, and with a very similar atmosphere, it is easy to make comparisons.  Also, having played through the first half of the game myself, it is probably the most fun I've had with a Saw-themed text since the first film.  The game is filled with timed mini-puzzles, and although it has a pretty high violence factor, the fact that you control the character makes it a heck of a lot more enjoyable than watching another half-dozen random characters get fed through death-manchines (sorry, Saw III - V).

So there you have it, even a passing familiarity with the series of films is all you need to enjoy the game, and as long as you are not put off by the onscreen violence, it was actually a lot more fun than I expected.

Also I got to put Saw and Felicity together for the first time on the web!