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Stanford STS 145 - Study Notes

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Resident Evil: A Survival Horror Game from Capcom Vincent Lo Bestsellers on a video game console tend to be born out of new genres, or at least radically different from all other games in the current market. From the fast-beyond-belief Sonic the Hedgehog on Sega Genesis, the globally phenomenal Street Fighter 2: The World Warriors on Super Nintendo, to the system-selling espionage game of Metal Gear Solid on Sony PlayStation, these video games all exhibit creative innovation from their respective designers that inspire awe from players worldwide. Resident Evil, a single-player PlayStation game developed and produced by Capcom in Japan, is no exception. Unlike most designed-in-Japan games that first get released in the land of the rising sun, Resident Evil was simultaneously released in March 1996 in both Japan and the US, and five months later in Europe. Created and produced by Shinji Mikami, it has sparked a series of sequels on PlayStation as well as other game platforms, including the PC, Nintendo 64 and Sega Dreamcast. Resident Evil is sold under the name of Bio Hazard in Japan; the name change is to give the game a darker and more menacing appeal in the US. In fact, its animated gore and violent content earned the game an ESRB (Entertainment Software Rating Board) rating of Mature for players of age 17 and up. The storyline involves the mass creation of bio-monsters by the biotech company Umbrella, and S.T.A.R.S., a SWAT team, is dispatched to investigate. Unfortunately, S.T.A.R.S. members are trapped in a mansion, and with the player’s help, have to figure out a way out to safety while fighting hordes of monsters lurking around. While Sony PlayStation enjoys a vast library of excellent games, certainly enough to secure its No. 1 position in the home consoles in its era, Sony lacks something that its competitors Nintendo and Sega have excelled for years—creating stellar first-party games that2brand loyalty on their respective video gamers. Sony, therefore, always has to rely on third-party software companies to come up with these so-called AAA titles. Resident Evil by Capcom is certainly one of these, and has without doubt helped sell many PlayStations. It combines strong elements of action, shooting, puzzle, and adventure, but it does not fit into any one of these genres. Capcom considers Resident Evil a genre-breaker, and coined the term survival horror to describe the game. Graphically what sets Resident Evil from other games is its use of prerendered background, each screen of which is realistically and beautifully drawn by the graphics artists. The player and all other characters and monsters are 3-D polygonal figures, who can roam around freely, as well as climb stairs and descend ladders. The prerendered background screens mean that the designers have absolute freedom to come up with innovative and interesting camera angles, which are fixed within any one screen. It is not difficult to imagine some of these angles are intended to induce feelings of claustrophobia in a small room, or impending doom right around an upcoming corner. The use of prerendered background translates to a massive amount of graphics data to be stored. Technologically speaking, Resident Evil is a game that truly takes advantage of the much expanded memory available for the CD medium. Resident Evil 2 did come out in the cartridge form for Nintendo 64 a few years later under the development of Angel Studios, but both the graphics and audio take an expected hit to be able to fit into the limited expensive space of ROM inside a cartridge. The control scheme is a little unconventional for an action/adventure game. Pressing right or left rotates the character in place, and up or down moves the character forward or backward. So pressing left, for example, will not move the character on screen to the left. This apparently frustrates many players who are not used to this control scheme, which is usually3reserved for first-person shooters. However, in later parts of the game, bio-monsters called hunters will chase the player down hallways and around corners at the same speed as the player can run. With the change of the camera angle at every new screen, this control scheme adopted by Resident Evil ensures that pushing up on the joypad always guarantees that one’s character will be running straight ahead between screens. All this chasing through the realistic-looking terrain, coupled with limited ammunition to prevent this game from turning into a huge shooting fest, is certain to give rise to many adrenaline rushes. In the audio department, the music complements the mood perfectly. Sometimes eerie, sometimes ominous, sometimes just plain silence except for the player’s own footsteps. Between gameplay, cut scenes are presented to further the storyline. Some of these scenes are prerendered FMV (Full-Motion Video), some use the in-game engine with polygonal characters, and the rest of them even employ live actors. Whether intentional or not, these cut scenes tend to be very campy filled with bad acting, exaggerated gestures, and poorly written dialogue. Interestingly, many people compare the experience of playing Resident Evil to watching a horror movie, albeit more like a B-movie. There are quite a few shocking moments, when monsters jump at you from nowhere in the midst of silence. The dialogue is laughably bad, and unless the designers intended to create this feel of a B-movie, it is obvious that the Japanese scriptwriters have a poor grasp of normal conversational English. The arguably most infamous line in PlayStation’s history comes from a character in the game called Barry who discovers a lockpick and decides to give it to the female protagonist because she is “the master of unlocking.” Curiously, the Japanese version also has the same voice-acting in English, accompanied by Japanese subtitles.4Capcom sprinkles the game with many goodies. Bosses are frightening huge, from a snake that meanders across an entire room, a highly intelligent plant that spreads its vines through the whole house, to the final well-animated boss Tyrant that towers over the player. During the game, the player assumes control of different S.T.A.R.S. team members to accomplish various missions. To increase the replay value, right before the game begins there are two characters to choose from, and their weapons and plots differ even though the terrain to navigate remains the


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Stanford STS 145 - Study Notes

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