Resident Evil 6 (PS3): Taking Cues from the Movies.

I used to love Resident Evil. Actually, that probably isn't fair because I'd like to think I still do. When I go back to reflect on the series on the series as a whole, I can honestly say that there weren't any major disappointments. Sure, there were some bumps in the road (See Resident Evil: Survivor, Dead Aim, and Outbreak) but all and all the main core of the Resident Evil series was consistently good.

1, 2, 3, and Code Veronica continued to improve on a format I enjoyed. Then Nintendo of all people threw us a curve ball and threw us a nice glossy remake of this first game and prequel in Resident Evil Zero, both of which I loved.. Things were looking great and then they shook up the whole industry with Resident Evil 4, which stands as probably the best game on the Gamecube. Completely shook up the formula on how its played and was hugely successful. 5 tried to follow suit and throw in co-op but it never took off like the 4 did. It wasn't a bad game it just wasn't as great as 4.

So it was with somewhat of a heavy heart I picked up my version of Resident Evil 6. I was pretty excited to pick the game but the week before the game was released, a number of pretty credible review sources started unceremoniously smashing the game with poor reviews. I still picked the game up, but now its with the curiosity if this series truly could have stepped so off the mark. 

RESIDENT EVIL 6 ANTHOLOGY (PS3)

Its usually at this point in my reviews I like to give a recap of the story. But really that is becoming exceedingly more difficult to do as each release in this series comes out. This series has never really been known for its excellent story telling, but I'll try to give it a shot. The story takes place near the end of 2012 and tries to interweave 3(4) stories to Resident Evil 6's complex tale. It bases of crossing events of Leon Kennedy, Chris Redfield, and Jake Muller.

Leon is currently at the side of fictitious 2012 president Adam Benford. He planned to release the truth about the Raccoon City Incident of so many years ago, in an attempt to try to quell the influx of bio-terrorism. However, they are attacked by a group called Neo-umbrella and basically the Raccoon City Incident is repeated. Leon is forced to shoot down the now infected president, and secret service agent, Alena Harper (who looks like Lori from Walking Dead but is about 8 billion times less of a cunt) tells him if he follows her to the cathedral, he will find answers.

"I don't give a shit that you lost Carl again."

Chris is spending his days getting shitfaced in a dive bar in Europe battling a colossal depression (at first, I thought this was a game starring me). He is confronted by his former BSAA subordinate Piers McNotfuckingimportant for abandoning his unit. You come to learn that Chris lost a squad of soldiers in a mission gone awry thanks to the betrayal of Ada Wong, whom at the time they thought they were saving. Chris then takes up his gun again in vengeance with sole goal of finding Ada and killing her.

Finally, Jake we see actually starting this story (in a chronological perspective) working as a mercenary in Edonia. He is given some kind of injection by Ada Wong that doesn't affect him, but mutates his colleges into BOW monsters. He's then confronted by special US agent Sherry Birken (the same little girl from Resident Evil 2). She is tasked to bring Jake to the US because he has the anti-bodies that might be able to provide a cure to BOW terrorism, and Jake goes along with her under the expectation of high compensation.

So ok, we start out hopeful. Lots of story campaigns and hopefully starting tie this series together a bit. But my first question is, where the fuck is Claire? After they tried to turn Jill Valentine into Nina Williams from Tekken I am terrified to find out what happened to one of my favorite protagonists in the series. You know what? Nevermind, I'd rather just imagine her chilling on her couch watching tv then have her get dragged in this mess again (the writing, not the situation).

Which one is Jill again? I can't fucking tell anymore.
Get a new character archetype, gaming industry.

So to keep this as brief as I can I won't go through every chapter, just shit that really stood out to me. To start off, You get to choose which of the two characters you can play as in the campaign which I thought was a nice gesture. But also before you start the game, you can choose to turn off the online settings and play offline with an AI partner, which I couldn't do fast enough. You all  by now should know my feelings on Online multiple player communities, but if you don't here's the cliff notes: Fuck multiplayer up the ass with a salt covered wicker dildo.

Leon's chapter starts off incredibly sluggishly. After cinematic you are treated to slowly walking a survivor through darkened abandoned corridors. I almost would have looked past how slow the segment took to do if they were trying to set a legitimate horror pace. But no, right after the appearance of the first zombie all sense of pacing is thrown right out the goddamn window with a stream of nonstop zombies. Cool, but not Resident Evil.

The J'avo are a billion times more annoying the Palagas were.

I picked up the game with relative ease, the controls all felt pretty familiar. I just had to get used to the little quirks to navigate the menu as you can't really pause the action to browse your inventory. I was fighting I noticed that it wasn't using the laser sighting system I remembered from Resident Evil 4 or 5. It was using the recital system. That alone didn't bother me, but the recoil of gunshots was ridiculously off. Every two shots you were completely off target. In addition to that, there's no guarantee you can hit the head shot because the red dot in your recital doesn't hold still either. It was fucking annoying.

But moving on a little father in the level I reached a quick time event where I had to outrun an explosion. I died on it multiple times because up until this point, you had to mash a button to escape these. In Resident Evil 6 you have to just hold the button down and the "hey idiot" indication at the bottom did not really clarify that. By putting up instructions, I thought it was giving me different controls. Highly frustrating.

Then I was struck with a realization, and sour one at that. I was not playing Resident Evil. Sure, the box said Resident Evil 6 on it, and it had characters from the series. But nothing about this game felt like the formers of the franchise. Even with Resident Evil 4's overhauling, it still sort of felt like an RE game with the tank style controls, and core concepts still in place. With this kind of game mechanics, this game could have just as easily been "Uncharted 4: Drake and friends fight a bunch of zombies" and it would have been just as relevant and more tolerable.

Boss Fights can get a little clusterfucky at best.

But don't get me wrong, there isn't really anything wrong with these mechanics. Its why it felt so familar when I played it. But when I shill out 60 bucks to play the new Resident Evil, I expect to be treated to a new fucking Resident Evil. If I wanted to play a generic 3rd person shooter I could have picked up almost ANY fucking game on the shelf. Its so cookie cutter in its overall design I'm left with this complete disappointment that I've been ripped off.

Anyways, back to the game. I usually like to take a few lines to talk about the score or the music. But as is with pretty much every Resident Evil game, the music is completely unimpressive. None of it memorable, none of it lasting. Score fits great for each scene as they come, but none of them leave a lasting impression.

All of the campaigns in the game tell a different story, but nearly all of them follow the exact same format in have very similar puzzles. A massive indiscretion of this is ALL of them have a section where you have to escape like 3 unkillable enemies while trying to find 3 separate keys to unlock a door. The setting is different, but every character has to do it, and they are all chased by the same type of monster at the time. Its incredibly lazy.

Sherry has no idea what she's doing.

While I'm on the subject of unkillable monsters, this is something else they abuse this time around. Ok, so Resident Evil likes to have that one boss that's just menacing and non-stop.  Resident Evil 2 had the Tyrant and he'd appear in various rooms as your progressed in the game.  Resident Evil 3 had the Nemesis who would hound you for a few rooms at a time and was a thorn in your side nearly the whole game. Resident Evil 4 and 5 had difficult enemy types that would reoccur often. All of these are fine.

But Resident Evil 6, the bosses just don't fucking die. Period. Every single time a character would say "we got him!" or "It's finally dead" only to open one door and have that same mother fucker right back on your ass. It happens on nearly every significant boss in the game.  Even more frustrating is they keep mixing up what it takes to kill said bosses. Sometimes you just need to last a timer. Sometimes you need do enough damage. Sometimes you have just empty all of your ammo to trigger the end sequence. It makes it nearly impossible to ration your ammo properly and proves to be constant headache.

Ustanak is RE6's knock off version of the Nemesis. A tough kill,
 but not nearly the menace the Nemesis was.

I also love how true to the series it tried to be in this installment. Having to do such classic Resident Evil moments like Metal Gear Solid style stealth sections, an Ace Combat style dogfight, or trying to outrun an avalanche on snow mobiles. Wait, no. I'm thinking of other games, none of this shit happened in other Resident Evil games. SO WHY THE FUCK ARE THEY IN THIS ONE? I suppose for story, thematic, and theatrics they fit cohesively, but again: Its not fucking Resident Evil!

"Ok fuck this. If your going to force me to do stealth you can at least give me a chance."

So after all this ranting, you can basically assume I hate this game, right? Well not so fast. The game is loaded with flaws, but I'm not so quick to dismiss it, there are a handful of things that I like. By the game being kind of cookie cutter in its design, it was very easy to acclimated to the controls. Each of the campaigns had something I liked. Leon's story was best, Chris had the best boss fights, Jake had the best characters.

They brought back the Mercenaries mode, which was probably one of my favorite things in the franchise. I loved it in Resident Evil 3 and 4. Even with all my gripes about how this version of the game plays differently, when that clock is ticking on the top of the screen and I'm scrambling to find the best spot to hole up and shoot, all of the complaints are immediately forgotten and I work on boosting that score. It can be done two player as well, which I'm actually interested in trying.

They also have something called agent hunt, where you get to play as the crappy weaker monsters and try to take down someone actually trying to complete the story mode. This to me is a great concept because it really ups the challenge of the game, or allows you to just ruin somebody's day. It was very satisfying to watch some asshat have to waste both his first aid sprays because I keep tackling him with a zombie dog.

And graphically the game has never looked better. All of the characters (except for Chris's massive muscle tone) are life like and believable. Although, someone at Capcom must really be an ass man, because whenever you have to crawl through a duct or something the cam zooms in so far up ass of the player I'm actually afraid we'll need to wipe brown off the lens (When playing Sherry, That ain't so bad. When playing Leon.... Uh, not so much.).

I'm sure we all had this moment when playing Sherry or Ada.

Lastly, I paid the extra 20 bucks for the Anthology edition, so my copy of the game came with the codes to download the first 5 games, which does include the gold edition of 5 and HD version of 4. Which personally I thought was an awesome deal, since now I don't have to dig out the gamecube if I wanted to play RE4 again. I would have liked it have Code Veronica as well, but that one appears on the Xbox version.  Can't get greedy I guess. Still a great deal.

So I guess after all of this the real question is "How do I rate this?" I guess the best way to do this is to be as lukewarm as my feelings. The game is Average, cookie cutter, run of the mill. Doesn't deserve the hideous reviews its gotten but doesn't deserve the great ones either.

If you are looking to continue on with the Resident Evil mytho's baffling storyline they by all means pick it up. If you are looking for another shooter to kill your time until the next stupid Medal of Halo: Advanced Duty Black Cocks 3 comes out then I suppose you could do worse than Resident Evil 6. But don't expect this game to really wow you in any sense of the word.

But if you are fan of Resident Evil.  And I mean REALLY a fan of the series, you may wanna sit this one out. Much like the Resident Evil movie they seemed to think it was totally ok to just come up with a generic 3rd person shooter, and just tossed in the Resident Evil characters and that was good enough. Guess what, it's not. Somewhere along the way this franchise lost its spark, and with the constant middle finger Capcom keeps throwing to its customer base? I don't think they care to find it.

Oh yeah, and the Bowgun still sucks bag of dicks.

Persona 3 FES (PS2): The fascination continues...

So as you read a few months ago, I fell completely in love with the Persona universe when I started playing Persona 4 Arena. Playing through the story really got me into the characters and I wanted to know more about it. As I played that I downloaded and watched the Persona 4 anime as well. A fun but somewhat cut down recap of the events of Persona 4 with some characters from 3 spruced in there. But as I watched it, I reflected on that I never actually finished Persona 3. The game had a crazy difficulty spike and because of it I set the game down and never finished it. But with this re-invigoration of mine with the Persona series I decided to dust off the ole PS2 and give it one more go.

PERSONA 3: FES (PS2)

You take the role of Insert Name (in my case Akira Mizaki since this takes place in Japan), a 16ish year old transfer student to Gekkoukan High who has lost his parents. While your are traveling via train, the animation cuts to a young girl holding a gun to her head, breathing heavy and trying to pull the trigger.  Exasperatedly she drops the gun and buries her face in her knees. Upon transferring in and coming into the dorm where you will be staying, you are greeted by a young boy in striped pajama's and he makes you sign a contract stating you will take responsibility for your actions.

After signing the contract you come across the same girl from the scene transition, and is in panic wanting to know why you are there. As she goes to pull the gun, another student named Mitsuru Kurijo stops her and informs her that you'll be here for a bit, and introduces you to her as Yukari Takeba. Cooler heads prevail and you all crash for the night.

The next few days you begin adjusting to school life until one evening there is seemingly a monster attack, as a large beast is chasing another dorm student. Yukari takes you to the roof to escape where you are cornered by the beast. And in a desperation move, she goes to use the gun she has but drops it as she brings it to her head. The protagonists picks it up with eyes dilated and holds it to his own head and pulls the trigger, unleashing a monster that lays waste to the one that was attacking you. 

You come to find out that you were actually being watched by this dorm, as they are actually a task force called SEES who assembled to fight these monsters called shadows, who only appear in a hidden hour that takes place between midnight and 12:01am called the Dark Hour. Only a select few can fight in this hour, and they implore you for your help to fight the monsters and end the Dark Hour by investigating a massive tower that appears during it.

Sorry that was a bit a mouthful. The game is essentially a blend of a Dungeon Crawler, JRPG, and High School simulation. During the day you have to attend school, keep your grades up, join clubs and maintain relationships. All of these social ties affect your ability to create Personas, which affect you characters statistics and what spells they can use. As you level you can create new Personas by mixing the ones you have together to create better stronger ones, and in some cases transfer abilities from one to the others. 

At nights you can explore the Tartarus, the mysterious tower that appears where their school is every night during the Dark Hour. An apparent nest of shadows, the goal is to go in and push upwards as best you can before the night of a full moon. In the tower you can grind for experience, items, money, or new personas. But you don't want to stay in for too long, your character can become exhausted or sick, which will effect your ability to perform during the day. So the whole game you have to strike a balance between all of these things in an attempt to maintain pace with everything.

While dealing with maintaining friendships in the game can be kind of tedious at times, many of the characters have some very funny dialogs about them when you hang out. Some of them have problems you need to help them through to help strengthen the bond, but you need to know their personality quirks to get the best results to evolve the relationship. My two favorites were Kirijo and Maya. Kirijo is funny because she's the rich heiress to massive conglomerate, so she is positively baffled at how to eat at a fast food restaurant since the food is so cheap and there is no silverware. Maya is a player you meet in an online game who just speaks in excessive l33t, and while those are funny, the best is the payoff at the end when you finally meet face to face. Its not often during a game I actually find myself laughing out loud, but it was totally worth it.

So if you haven't been able to tell up to this point, the game is directed to a very niche audience. I love the idea in concept, but some of its execution falls a little bit flat. For one thing, you actually have to pay attention to the lectures in school. Because getting good grades raises your academics and charm, which you need to befriend certain characters and make certain persona types stronger. Some of the lectures are fucking long and boring (just like in real high school!) and a lot of the time you don't even get a hint to the question before you have to guess at it.

This guy never shuts his fucking mouth. Just find a walkthrough with the answers.

Then when the school day actually ends, traveling from location to location can get a bit tedious. If I wanted to date Kirijo I would groan because that would mean I would have to walk all the way to the other side of the school. While the movement speed is fast there is at least 3 or 4 screen transitions. God forbid I needed to buy new equipment first because then I gotta walk my ass out of the school, ride to the mall, buy my shit, walk all the way back before I could go on my date. I can be tedious because its pointless walking. There is a place where you can jump right out of the school to the travel menu which is handy, but its only in one spot so that can be annoying.

The music has a handful of notable and catchy songs, and some of them are just awful. I am a big fan of the "Burn My Dread" song from the beginning of the game, its got a catchy kinda techno-y rap kinda thing going for it. But on the other hand, I would hate exploring the Tartarus because it has this dismally boring piano rhythm of like 3 to 5 notes. Make sure you have your own music on standby. Midway through the game you can change the dungeon BMG but none of the selections are all that spectacular.

I really like this f'n song.

The dungeon crawling is pretty well done. The map is constantly changing except for boss floors or section transition floors. You can travel as a team or split people up to fight shadows or look for treasures. Most of the time you will explore with the group because as I mentioned before, this game can have a huge difficulty spike and being caught alone if you are under leveled can be certain doom. Almost every level has an escape  which you can use to get out and recover your health and magic if you are out of items, but if you don't make it to the boss floors you have to do that same section you just completed over again (luckily, you don't have to beat the boss to escape down on their floors, so you should do so anyways to recover, save, THEN tackle the boss.)

I stuck with small swords, It was much easier to time preemptive strikes.

The combat follows the JRPG team leader format. You have full control of your character and you can give vague instructions to the rest of your team for how you would like them to perform. Players of the Pokemon series will feel right at home because it operates in the same way. Many of the shadows feature some form of weakness and if you can strike their weakness (or get a critical hit) you can knock them down and have an opportunity to attack again. If you can knock down all of the enemies, you can go in for a massive team bum rush for big damage.

But you need to be careful because your own persona's have strengths and weaknesses too, which means you do as well. So its important to get a feel for what kind of monsters you are facing on a floor and what abilities your teammates have so you don't wind up getting floored every turn and crushed. You can revive teammates but if the main character bites it, game over.

My big tip is this: early in the game, you can fuse a demon girl called Lilim. She is probably the best personas to fuse early because she really only has a weakness to Light magic (few enemies use light), and has the ability to have all 4 major elements at the same time. With the right type of stat boosting items (like things that raise strength, magic, and luck), she can end up being a persona you can ride for most of the game, I made it nearly to end with her because while the spells may not have had the same power by the end, they still knocked things down for a massive attack. Figure out how to make them and make sure the fusion gives her all 4 elements.

She doesn't have Bufu, but if she did instead of Marin or the Rak's
this would be one of the best 4-Elements Lilims you could make.

I had to tone down the difficultly in this game to get all the way through it. But in hindsight I am glad that I did. Yeah the game could get a little slow from time to time, especially when I was waiting for full moons to proceed with the game. But it has a likable cast and follows a pretty tried and true JRPG format that I had a good deal of fun with. Story featured some twists and turns and had some pretty interesting moments. I can see why this game didn't take the world by storm, but I can also see why the Persona series has the cult following it does.

Persona 3 FES also features a bonus chapter that extends upon the ending staring Aigis, but I only played it a little bit to set that aside to move on to Persona 4 (and it kind of makes the ending of game a punch in the crotch). If you are looking to give this a try, you can try to find it on the ps2, they updated the game slightly for the PSP release, and looks like it can also be found on the PlayStation store under PS2 Classics. I believe the PSP version has updated combat which borrows elements from Persona 4 and a female main character as well, to change your dating options. If the PSP game can be played on PS3? Get that one.

One thing I can definitely say about this series is this: If the game didn't have my interest before, it fucking has me now.

If only I grew up in Japan...
Maybe I coulda grew up as popular as I was in this....

Dead Trigger (Android): I got zombie in my front pocket for you.

So, the summer drought kicked my ass. I had nothing to review. Now we're are getting into the fall months and aside from one new title, I haven't had much to go on. And since I felt a blog post about the Library Science crap I am studying would not make for an interesting read, I thought I would talk about something that caught my eye.

If you are like me, you have been following the potential new system coming out called the Ouya. The open source android console. But in the video found on the Kickstarter and the Ouya site in the interface screen there is a option for something called Dead Trigger. I did a little digging and found that most of the options on that screen were just games currently on the android platform, and since I was clawing for something to do, a new zombie game seemed great. The screens shots seemed impressive but how would it hold up on my phone?

DEAD TRIGGER:(Android)

There's a story in the game. But to be honest, I haven't read a lick of it. Why would I? Who in this zombie pop culture world we live in would need me to recap the story in this one? I bet it goes something like this: "There was one zombie, now there is a lot of them. Now you have to shoot guns at them to survive, get supplies, and save people" We all caught up to speed? Great, because if on my phone and it's not an RPG, I really could give a damn less what the story is.

Dead Trigger is a first person shooter designed for the mobile phone platforms. It was primarily a Android game but I believe it is available for the Iphone now as well. This definitely lends to play easier on the larger phones such as my HTC One X, Samsung Galaxy S3, or the Iderp 5. You can also play it on  tablets pretty well, although using my dad's 10 inch tablet it was somewhat hard to control even with my massive hulk hands.

The controls of the game were actually fairly responsive and intuitive. The left lower corner of the screen functions as an analog pad and allows your character to move and strafe with fairly regular FPS controls. On the right side there are a series of buttons: Fire, Reload, Iron Sight. All of them respond rather easily and fluidly to a level I got comfortable with them with ease. The blank area above these buttons you can use to turn the camera which allows you to strafe and circle enemies. What is also handy is while you are holding down the fire button, you can make subtle turns from there as well, allowing you to make adjustments to your shots as you fire.

The graphics in this game are VERY impressive for a game designed for a mobile platform. I'd go as far to say that the graphics look almost on par if not better than how games looked on the original PlayStation, Or possibly the PlayStation 2. Actually, I'd definitely say PS2, zombies in Dead Trigger were easily much more detailed than the zombies that were found in Resident Evil: Code Veronica, (I know that was on Dreamcast first, but I'm using it as a frame of reference. I played it on PS2 first anyways). 

The music is really nothing to write home about, but I don't really expect mobile games to have an incredible score. Which is kind of disappointing when I reflect upon it. I can think of a number of SNES games that have amazing soundtracks and they were incredibly fulfilling to the point that they are permanently ingrained in my head. I understand you can't put chiptunes sets into non sprite games these days, but I think if you went a little longer than some droning music loops that are featured in many mobile games, they might be a more satisfying experience. Sorry, I'm getting off track.

Generally, the missions have been broken down into three main categories: Hunt, Survive, Retrieve. Up to where I have played, the goals are simple and not usually much variety to the rules. All of them involve gunning down zombies, just sometimes you have a set number to kill, number of minutes to wait, or go to point A and back to B. I haven't been playing many of the story missions yet though so perhaps that will change. 

You can earn money by going to the casino or ranking well on the missions and that allows you to buy upgrades at the shop. Not all the upgrades or weapons are available though because there are two forms of currency. Money you earn during the course of the game. Gold you can win at the casino, but the real way to get it is to pay real money for it or sign up for promotions or surveys. I'll pass, thank you very much.

While there does seem to be a constantly changing blend of zombies, I have yet to come across any boss fights yet, which is a little disappointing because every good zombie game needs boss fights. Perhaps there will be some as do more of the story missions, but so far? No sign of em.

While I am not much of a first person shooter type of guy, I am really getting into this game. Its not frustrating to play and it the levels are the perfect length for the mobile platform. Its something you can whip out and play with for a few minutes and be able to come back to it. Yes some of the levels get a bit repetitive but as I said I haven't been playing the story mode so much so that could change. The best part about it the game is free to download on both IOS and Android so if you've got a newer smartphone that has the power to run it, I would suggest giving it a download.