The Geek Life Notblog

So it seems Matt, Rob, Jess and I are going to New York Comic Con this year! We’ll be there Friday and Saturday (well I’ll probably just be there Friday – I’m po’, okay?!) – that’s Feb. 6th and 7th at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan. We’ll be strutting around, showing off our snazzy T-shirts and hats to everyone, spreading the word of Mastergeek Theater. Keep a look out for us!

Meanwhile, the Resident Evil 5 demo is now up on Xbox Live. I’ve been playing it since December and found it rather enjoyable. It’s like Resident Evil 4 but with a lot more enemies! Unfortunately, the Internets seem to disagree, and I see where they’re coming from at a certain angle, especially after playing Gears of War 2. The common complaints for RE5 include clunky tank-like controls, tight level design that inhibits movement further, and crappy partner AI.

I agree the controls are stuck in the past. They haven’t changed much at all from Resident Evil 4, a game released four years ago. Since then we’ve had Gears of War, Dead Space and a host of other games inspired by Resident Evil 4 that featured easy and intuitive control. In RE5 you can’t strafe, shoot from the hip, dodge or do anything to defend yourself. I suppose that’s where some of the challenge comes in, and I suppose that could be a very poor design decision. The challenge should not come from crappy controls. Nevertheless, I don’t find the old RE4-style controls that much of a problem. I’m used to them.

The level design, at least what we’ve seen so far in the Assembly and Shanty Town portions of the demo, does seem too cramped. The village in RE4 gave you plenty of space to move around. The Assembly looks haphazard in the way it’s organized, like there’s just random shit everywhere. Playing the demo I find myself just running up onto the roofs to jump around to make things easier.

The crappy partner AI… I saw no evidence of this while playing. I was impressed, actually. Sheva healed me, stayed out of the way and did all the little automatic things a good computer-controlled partner is supposed to do. Of course, the optimum way to play is with another human being. So, uh, find friends, complainers.

With only a little more than a month to go until Resident Evil 5’s release it looks like there’s very little chance for extra tweaking. The demo indicated, to me at least, that they’re on the right track with this game. However, I wouldn’t mind being wrong, I don’t want to pay full price for an extra-flawed game. Hopefully the video game review world doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to its appraisal. Given that it’s following up one of the best games ever made I guess it is inevitable it will fail in some ways.