Resident Evil: Deadly Silence Post-Mortem (1)

[Now Experiencing] [Computer Gaming]

When the grotesque corpses of the past rise from their graves and shamble horrifically back into the midst of civilisation, we tend to refer to them as "zombies". Unless, of course, we're Capcom, in which case we call it Resident Evil: Deadly Silence and retail it as a premium-price DS game.

This is not an in-depth review of Resident Evil DS. In fact, it's a lot closer to a review of the original Resident Evil.

When you boot up Resident Evil DS, you'll find it comes in three flavours. Option number one is called the "Rebirth" mode, and it's essentially a remix of the original PlayStation Resident Evil. All the original content is there (including hideously acted live action cutscenes and atrocious voice-overs), except Capcom has turned the zombie knob up to 11, and given you the extra ammo and health items necessary to dispense with this newly engorged horde of the dead. There's also new puzzles (in addition to the old ones), plus occasionally when you open a door you'll be treated to a first-person knife-fight minigame that requires you to stab at things with your DS stylus. For some reason.

I really can't speak much to the Rebirth mode. I haven't played it yet.

The third option (no, I didn't miss number two, we're coming back to it) is multi-card play, which is a fancy-pants way of saying "multiplayer". There's a versus mode, and a co-operative mode. You can't play the whole original game co-operative style, just certain sections that have been specially designed as co-operative missions. Each player needs their own copy of the game.

It sounds like a ton of fun, but again, I haven't played that yet.

Why haven't I played these two options? The answer is, because I'm a Resident Evil virgin. Well, almost. I have this horrible traumatic memory of trying to play whichever one of the series starts near a wrecked tanker, and being eaten by zombies again and again in the opening seconds of the game (*shudder*) but beyond that when it's been time to choose a horror franchise, I've been a Silent Hill man all the way.

But to learn and grow we must face our zombie-themed fears. So as the rest of the world began to rave about the wonder that is Dead Rising, I sat myself down in my 360-less house and commenced to play through Resident Evil DS's "Classic" mode. Which is to say, a straight, near-perfect port of the original PlayStation game.

Let me say this. I now understand exactly why Resident Evil is such a cult hit, and at the same time I cannot believe that this game ever warranted a sequel. There must have been some magic about being there at the dawn of a genre, because this game has more problems than a wet cat in a room full of electrified dobermans.

Okay, the plot's pretty simple. Playing as either Jill Valentine or Chris Redfield, you're a member of S.T.A.R.S., a squad of some kind of government super-soldier-cop-things. A team of your buddies has gone missing in the vicinity of Raccoon City, and it's your job to go find them. Unfortunately, shortly after you deploy in (for some reason) a cornfield, your squad is attacked by a kind of zombie-velociraptor thing, and gets split up. You and some of your friends make it to a nearby mansion, which looks comparitively safe next to Velociraptor Children of the Corn, but unfortunately it turns out to be full of humans and animals that have been turned into brain-eating monstrosities by a biological weapon called the T-virus.

Moving from room to room, solving simple puzzles and stocking up ammunition and medicine, your job is to find any survivors of the S.T.A.R.S. teams, uncover the secret of the T-virus, and ultimately live to tell your story.

It's a pretty decent premise. It's in the execution where things get hairy.

First up is the save system. You can only save your game at a typewriter. Which is annoying, but fair enough - we're all used to save points. It gets worse, however. Each and every time you save you have to use up an Ink Ribbon, a type of item you find during your travels. There are maybe a maximum of 35 to 40 Ink Ribbons in the game, total. For me, this turned out to be more than enough to make it through the game, but I can't really think of any good reason for this nauseating game mechanic.

Next up are the controls. The game uses fixed camera angles, which do a reasonable job of adding some tension to an otherwise fairly predictable game. Your character's movement, though, isn't relative to your position on the screen, but rather relative to which way you're facing. Pressing up moves you in the direction you're looking, and left and right turn you around. In other words, you steer like a truck. It's frustrating, but you eventually get used to it. It never feels natural, though, and in some rooms with particularly odd camera schemes it's just downright aggravating.

The third strike is the inventory. As Jill, you have eight inventory slots. As Chris, you have six. One slot will go to storing your collection of ink ribbons. Another will be your current weapon. A third will be spare ammo, and a fourth is usually some medicine. For the first half of the game you're likely to be carrying around at least one key, as well. That leaves you with, at most, one to three spots free for picking up what you see. Most rooms contain at least one thing worth picking up - some have as many as four.

You can't drop inventory items on the ground - the only place you can leave them is in a storage chest, of which there are only two in the first half of the game. The inventory of these chests is effectively unlimited, and all chests are linked, so you can put stuff in in one room and take it out in another. But that still means that you're going to be doing a LOT of backtracking to drop off loot every time you find a stash of medicine or ammo. Not to mention when you find a puzzle or locked door and realise that the key item to open it is way back in your horde.

For all its horrible, horrible faults, though, Resident Evil still remains a fun game. There's something about the backtracking, restricted saves, and clunky controls that makes the whole procedure feel very methodical and satisfying. I don't know why that is, but even now, after making my first laboured journey to the game's ending, I half-feel like I want to go back and do it all again.

The plot is filled in over the course of the game by means of badly-acted cutscenes and text-heavy "file notes". Unlike the surreal and vague plots of the Silent Hill series, Resident Evil seems to have a definite and understandable story, which helps make the game's long backtracking moments at least feel purposeful.

Theoretically, Resident Evil is survival horror, but really it's just survival. This is far and away the least scary game in the genre I have ever played. There is nothing spooky to be seen, the monsters aren't particularly grotesque, and the few times that enemies "leap out at you" would be a lot more effective if the movement of zombies was given more to actually leaping, and less to slowly and unmenacingly shambling. Today's run-of-the-mill first person shooter typically does a better job of conveying suspense than anything in this ageing classic.

Graphically, the game is a perfect port of the PlayStation original. Bear in mind that the PlayStation didn't look as good as you remember it looking, and that Resident Evil wasn't the best looking PlayStation game in the first place, and you'll understand when I say that the visuals here are perfectly adequate to the demands of the gameplay without ever being attractive or atmospheric.

The sound is awful. The music, on the rare occasions that there's any music at all, is standard B-movie fare, with no real character or style. The sounds of weapons firing are suitably satisfying, but missing an enemy sounds largely the same as hitting one. Monsters shuffle around with sound effects ranging from "wet dough scraping on wood" through to "mouldy bread scraping on metal", and make uninspired and rather dull roars when they eventually decide to charge at you. The voice acting is on a whole plane by itself, though, being so hideously inappropriately bad that it goes through annoying and out the far side into being deeply memorable (for all the wrong reasons).

With all its faults, though, I'm really glad I've finally put my toe into the shallow murky pond of Resident Evil. Having finished the original game, I might give the Rebirth mode a try in the near future, or try out some of the sequels on the GameCube. And if you have some tolerance for frustrating mechanics, and you've never played the original game either, then getting Resident Evil: Deadly Silence for the Nintendo DS could be the start of a beautiful friendship.