With a groan, it rises. The first Resident Evil is a piece of horror game history, and it has just come shambling back to PC after a long time putrefying. Ye olde games shoppe, GOG.com is selling the 1996 survival horror classic as a digital download, so you don't have to go rummaging through eBay auctions to find an original physical copy anymore. It's going for £9/$10. But the smile-raiser is the revelation that its sequels, Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, will also be getting reanimated in their original polygonal glory.
]]>The original Resident Evil might be returning to PC - and soon! - if recent signs hold true. An age rating for the 1996 survival-horror classic was recently confirmed by European suitability judges PEGI, hinting at an impending (re-)release for the almost three-decade-old zombie game.
]]>Deep in my heart I know that Hall of Fame-type accolades are largely just a way of dressing up a way of marketing your awards show/museum/whatever, but I also like to occasionally cast away the cynic in me and imagine a world in which this industry’s most important games and creators are rightly recognised, celebrated and preserved rather than being locked away in the vault of billion-dollar companies and left to rot. Imagine!
]]>Just over a year ago, Shinji Mikami - he of directing the original Resident Evil and Resident Evil 4 fame - was confirmed to be leaving Tango Gameworks, the studio that he had co-founded over a decade earlier to create a modern successor to his survival-horror classics, The Evil Within.
]]>Surprise, surprise: Capcom are working on another Resident Evil remake in their successful series of ground-up rebuilds for the survival-horror franchise. As for whether we’ll barrel straight into Resident Evil 5 from this year’s RE4 Remake or jump back to Zero or even, uh, sideways to Code Veronica? They won’t say - yet.
]]>It’s officially the spooky season now, so that makes it a highly appropriate juncture for some survival horror. Good job that Capcom have announced they’re streaming a Resident Evil showcase this Thursday, October 20th, then. They’ve even roped in Resident Evil Village’s Merchant to narrate the trailer for it. Watch below for a quick look at what’s coming up in the showcase stream.
]]>Netflix have announced that they're not ordering a second season of their live action Resident Evil adaptation. As reported by Deadline, the critically maligned series failed to find much of an audience since being released on July 14th.
]]>With the Netflix Resident Evil series going down like a blood-filled lead balloon, you may be thinking it's high time you revisited the Resident Evil games to wipe the show from your memory banks. Handily, Humble have a pretty good Resident Evil bundle going on right now, which nets you 10 Resident Evil games - including the excellent Resident Evil 2 Remake and Resident Evil 7 - for a very agreeable £24.70. It runs from now until August 24th, and is raising money in support of charity Direct Relief and their efforts to help the people of Ukraine.
]]>The Umbrella Corporation’s favourite stooge Albert Wesker is back again, and he’s bursting into multiplayer survival horror Dead By Daylight as a new killer, The Mastermind. Wesker’s arrival is the second time Resident Evil has crossed over into DBD, but the upcoming Project W event will revamp the Raccoon Police Department map and bring along familiar Resi characters Rebecca Chambers and Ada Wong as playable survivors. Barricade yourself inside the police station of your mind and watch the trailer below.
]]>The showrunner of Netflix’s new Resident Evil TV series really wants to fit Resident Evil Village's most famous big bad, Lady Dimitrescu, on the small screen. In an interview, Andrew Dabb mentioned that he hopes to delve deeper into the voluminous bosom of Resident Evil lore for any future seasons. Watch a clip from the new series below and marvel at some dubious Scottish accents.
]]>Capcom’s survival horror granddaddy of a series Resident Evil is hitting the small screen today, with the arrival of Netflix’s live-action TV adaptation. It’s not spoiling anything to say that Albert Wesker is back, but this time he’s bringing his family along for those bioweapon hijinks he’s known for. It wouldn’t be Resi without some zombie dogs jumping through windows either, as you’ll see in the trailer below.
]]>Listen. Outside your window, the chill wind chuckles in raspy glee at autumn’s death rattle. The branches of dying trees rake their gnarled fingers against the glass. You are spooked. You turn to the warm glow of your monitor for comfort. Instead, you find the most terrifying thing imaginable: an unpopular opinion about a videogame. On the internet, no less. You blink and rub your eyes in disbelief. Still, the words remain. Stark. Unforgiving. Undeniably spicy: “Resident Evil Village was disappointing and its success does not bode well for the future of survival horror.”
You go to type a comment but, uh, your fingers are gone, or something. Just hear me out.
]]>I'm not sure it's possible for my expectations to be lower than they are for any given Resident Evil movie project, but the subtitle "Welcome To Raccoon City" might just have lowered them further. Thankfully I've just watched the first official trailer, and hey, this looks fun! This looks competent.
]]>Earlier this week the internet's friends at IGN provided the first look at some of the cast of the upcoming Resident Evil: Welcome To Raccoon City film. These images have been much discussed in the intervening days based on how much the cast look like/have the correct haircuts of the original video game cast, but I'm here to give the definitive verdict: I think they look pretty good and their hair is lovely, actually.
]]>Netflix are hot for video games lately, with their number of animated and live-action adaptations now into double digits. Their E3 stream today brought news of even more, including announcements of a Far Cry: Blood Dragon cartoon and casting for their live-action Resident Evil. It has Lance Reddick! But by and large, their stream was a weird shrug with so little information that all they had on one show was a logo. But hey, here's what they had on Cuphead, Castlevania, Splinter Cell, League Of Legends, and others.
]]>Videogames are television now. But while everything from Splinter Cell to Fallout is gunning for streaming gold following The Witcher's Cavill-shaped successes, Resident Evil probably makes more sense than most. With a long run of live-action films behind it, the horror series is now getting a Netflix original series, one that follows the plucky Wesker kids as they uncover the no-good rotten antics their dear old dad Albert's been up to. Probably.
]]>Listen, never mind that sharks are not the mindlessly violent animals we’ve been trained to fear, and simply additional victims of mankind’s global vertebrate binge. Dismiss, please, the ongoing cultural rehabilitation of this toothy swimmer, who is statistically quite poor at killing humans. Ignore also their adorable habit of falling asleep when you hold them upside-down. Forget it, forget it all. No more lovey-dovey thoughts for these wondrous aquatic beings, more maligned than malignant. This is a list about videogame sharks. And videogame sharks are the baddies. Here are the 9 deadliest sharks in PC games.
]]>There's a lot about Resident Evil that is laughably bad and has always been that way. "Master of unlocking." "Almost a Jill Sandwich." But there's a ton that's been updated since its early polygonal days on the PlayStation. Its current remastered version on Steam is the best way to play it. I still haven't finished it.
]]>Kicking off Tokyo Game Show this week, Capcom released a nearly-three-minute gameplay video for its asymmetrical team-based Resident Evil spin-off Project Resistance. And it turns out it's essentially an escape room challenge gone awry. Mind you, I've never personally done an escape room challenge but I'm pretty sure laying bear traps on the floor is frowned upon by the better business bureau.
]]>Don't be scared. It's OK. I've got you. Hold my hand. Tighter. Come on. We can do this together. You and me. Lets... Steam Chart.
]]>Resident Evil HD Remaster is a three-year-old shine-job of a 17-year-old remake of a 23-year-old console game that I’d have little problem believing was a modern release if those corridor dogs weren’t seared into my memory and stained into my underoos. That those corridor dogs are stained into our collective underoos (the vast interconnected underoo network that binds us all) suggests that Resident Evil is best remembered as a scripted spookfest: a one-and-done ghost train ride.
You’d be wrong, though, to make that hypothetical assumption I just invented to give my next point gravitas, you big wrong strawberry.
]]>Do you want to see more of Resident Evil 2’s floppy-haired Leon as he runs away from zombies? Of course you do. After a few years of waiting, Capcom’s gory remake finally made the rounds at E3 this year, and gosh does it look flashy. This isn’t a 20-year-old game with a fresh coat of paint, but rather a proper remake. Point your eyes at the new trailer, below.
]]>Capcom's fancy remake of Resident Evil 2 will launch on January 25th, 2019, they announced tonight. The horrors of Raccoon City are looking fancier than ever in the first trailers and screenshots - do remember that this is a full remake built on the Resident Evil 7 engine, not like most of Capcom's recent halfhearted 'HD' re-releases of other games in the survival horror series. Capcom say they've made a few tweaks here and there, but by and large it's still good ol' RE2, only now with shinier guts. That's not me talking; Capcom specifically boast about a "horrifyingly realistic wet gore effect" for zombs. Good. Great. Lovely. See it here in the trailers.
]]>Devil May Cry is finally on PC in an HD collection that brings together the first three games into a magical hack-and-slash adventure that allows the player to take some revenge on some utterly bizarre demons. These three Playstation 2 originals first got the HD treatment in a bundle back in 2012, so sure, 2018 is an appropriate time for PC owners to finally have access. The question is: what is that HD treatment worth to us now?
]]>Humble is back with a brand new bundle - the Humble Capcom X Sega X Atlus Bundle which, for some reason, groups together those three publishers for one big bundle that offers you the chance to pick up games featuring blue hedgehogs, robot arms with stories to tell, FMV silliness, and a mall full of zombies, among other things.
Head over to the main site and you can drop some money on the bundle, with some of the proceeds going to charity as well.
]]>Alec: Resident Evil 7 Biohazard Resident Evil 7 Biohazard Resident Evil 7 Biohazard Resident Evil 7 Biohazard Resident Evil 7 Biohazard Resident Evil 7 Biohazard [official site] is a new first person horror/action game that definitely has nothing whatsoever to do with anything else called Resident Evil, no siree. Definitely just some creepy people in a house. That’s all.
We’ve both played it now, Adam. Shall we throw all caution to the wind and go FULL SPOILERS as we discuss what works, what doesn't and how it does or does not tie into the rest of this stalwart survival horror series?
]]>An hour in to Resident Evil 7 [official site], lead character Ethan is having the worst day imaginable. Heading deep into the bayou to search for his missing wife, having received an email from her three years after her disappearance, he finds himself trapped in a horror house, taking part in a bizarre and brutal game of cat and mouse. He is the mouse and the various cats come in the form of local residents, The Baker Family. Ethan is your eyes, but it's the Bakers who are the stars of the show, and what a wonderful show it is.
Resident Evil 7 walks a difficult line. It's both a return to the series' horror house roots and a bold departure from the third-person puzzling and head-popping of the main entries in that series. It succeeds by delivering on both fronts, true to its origins but also eager to explore new ground.
]]>Resident Evil 7 shifting the core series into a first-person perspective is an interesting change, but what if it had been that way all along? One enterprising Evil Resident (as I imagine RE fans probably call themselves I guess) has whipped up a prototype of the first Resident Evil running in first-person, cutscenes and all. It is weird/cool to see something so very familiar from a new perspective. The prototype likely won't be completed or released publicly but here, have a look in these videos.
]]>The more I learn about Resident Evil 7 [official site], the less it sounds like a Resident Evil game. Sure, there will apparently be medicinal herbs and some kind of inventory management, and there will probably be puzzles involving coins or crystals standing in for keys, but the grimy first-person horrors of the demo do seem to be representative of the full game. As details emerge, including the video below, it looks more and more exciting, and it might be the scariest Resi game of the lot.
]]>Capcom have released some more “found footage” from the upcoming Resident Evil 7 [official site]. Their foray into first-person frights has seen a lot of comparisons to P.T. and with good reason. But this is a loyal sequel, the developers insist, or at least a story contained within the familiar universe of zombifying viruses, parasites and corporate nastymen. Come and see it after the jump.
]]>Resident Evil 7's [official site] demo, Beginning Hour, isn't available on PC but the final game will be in January 2017. I've played through the demo several times and have some doubts as to how it'd translate into a longer game, but I also think it's the most exciting thing to happen to the horror series since Resident Evil 4. The key to it all is found footage, an often maligned term thanks to the many movies that treat a handheld camera or webcam as a stand-in for a decent script. In Beginning Hour, however, VHS tapes hold the promise of something truly startling and sinister.
]]>"Capcom has heard fans’ masochistic cries for a Resident Evil game far more terrifying than anything that has come before it," said the publisher shortly after revealing Resident Evil 7 Biohazard [official site] during Sony's E3 press conference yesterday. In what is a pretty radical step for the series, it seems this one's fully first-person and "draws from the series’ roots of atmospheric survival horror," so say its creators. Having watched the first 20 minutes of the 'Beginning Hour' demo, courtesy of the folks over at GameSpot, I'm not entirely convinced by that last part. Have a look for yourself and I'll explain.
]]>Umbrella Corps sounds like the name of an English regiment in an WW2 spoof movie starring Adam Sandler. Under the leadership of Sir Lance Corporal Wilbert Bottombugle, the Umbrella Corps turn their noses up at Sandler until "that blasted Yank" saves the day by accidentally blowing up Oberleutnant Schnauzersniffer's sausage stash. The Queen awards him a medal, then squeezes his bum.
Not quite. Umbrella Corps [official site] is actually a competitive team-based shooter spin-off from Resident Evil. Capcom announced it today at the Tokyo Game Show, and are planning a 2016 release.
]]>Remember when I was like, "isn't it weird that a bunch of dudes on the Internet are having to remake Resident Evil 2 themselves instead of Capcom?"
The question was posed, the universe agreed, and so the cogwheels turned: Capcom's gonna make a nice lil' Resident Evil 2 remake for y'all to enjoy. Thanks, VideoGamer.com.
]]>Biohazard 0, a poem by Alice O'Connor age 31
Biohazard Do you cry, o hazard? They call you a 'Resident Evil' Those nasty people Then sneer that you're 'Zero' But o hazard look at you now: a hero You're being redone by Capcom who make Devil May Cry which has a character named Nero.
]]>When Resident Evil Revelations 2 [official site] Episode One released without the local co-op feature that had been promised on the Steam Store page, I was outraged. So outraged that anyone in the same room might have heard a faint sigh if they'd been paying particularly close attention. It seems likely that Capcom were listening because they've added local co-op to the campaign and raid modes of the game, currently in the form of an open beta patch. For anyone who is still unhappy, "refunds are available through Steam".
]]>You wouldn't like our Adam when he's angry. You wouldn't like it because you can't tell he's angry. Capcom releasing Resident Evil 2 without local co-op support, despite publicly advertising the PC version of their latest zombie-botherer as having it, is the closest I've ever seen the lad to angry, and he was still as calm as Hindu cows. One day I hope we'll rile him proper. Except now he's even calmer, because Capcom have come out and apologised for their apparently "unintentional error."
]]>The Steam Store page for Resident Evil Revelations 2 [official site] has listed offline co-op as a feature since preorders began and continues to do so at the time of writing. But the game, now released, doesn't support local co-op and, according to a statement Capcom have made to VgG24/7, it probably never will.
The PC version of Resident Evil Revelations 2 supports a variety of customisable visual settings and resolutions. The decision to prioritise a single local screen was made to ensure a stable user experience across a variety of different PC settings and devices.
PCs have too many graphics to support splitscreen.
]]>Originally released in 1996 and remade in 2002, Resident Evil is one of the giants of survival horror. This new release is the first appearance of the remake on PC and it comes hot on the heels of director Shinji Mikami's return to survival horror. Far more than an object of historical curiosity, it's a smartly designed and claustrophobic masterpiece.
]]>The opening cinematic for Resident Evil Revelations 2 is below. Why am I posting an intro to a game that I'll almost certainly never play? I think it's because after watching it this morning, I moved from almost complete apathy to mild curiosity - I cannot imagine a single human being who would be the ideal target audience for this video. It suggests the game will contain all of the melodrama and convoluted corporate conspiracy nonsense that has accumulated on the series like barnacles on a hull, but will be entirely lacking in horror or humour. Unless you find the name 'Barry' particularly funny.
]]>Resident Evil's Spencer Mansion mansion is looking better than ever in a new 1080p 60fps trailer for the Resident Evil Remaster. It's come along way since is first appearance in 1996; other parts of Resident Evil haven't. After chatting with a prettier-than-ever Barry, passing through a prettier-than-ever door, and exploring prettier-than-ever corridors, the prettier-than-ever Jill gets bitten by a prettier-than-ever zombie she couldn't see because the fixed camera retreated back around a prettier-than-ever corner. Plus ça change and all that. But maybe I'm being a big grump; you'd want it to play the same, wouldn't you?
]]>Shinji Mikami, the director of The Evil Within (TEW), directed both Resident Evil and Resident Evil 4 when at Capcom. It was always clear from TEW's title that this in some way marked a return to those roots, but about halfway through I started thinking that someone at Capcom had really pissed Mikami off. This is not just a loose reinvention and homage to Resident Evil, but one that absolutely goes for the throat in the latter stages, offering up parallels so stark the comparison is direct rather than implied. So what's Shinji saying?
Click to once again enter the world of survival horror.
]]>Episodic gaming! Get the whole family in, crowding round the computer at 9 o'clock on a Monday night, excited to see how they'll resolve last week's cliffhanger. Did Wilfred...? And surely Fanny won't...? Who swiped the Super Shotgun anyway? Oh, if only! Often it's more like waiting for the next Only Fools And Horses Christmas Special, trying to remember if they were rich or poor last time, and who's even still alive. Did Del Boy survive that fall through the bar? Was it all a coma dream?
Resident Evil Revelations 2 will be properly TV-episodic. Capcom have announced that they'll release the spooky shooter in four weekly episodes in "early 2015", which is quite novel and exciting.
]]>If Capcom's announcement of Resident Evil Revelations 2 had included any useful or interesting information, I'd have told you about that. As all they offered was a teaser trailer and some artwork, let's talk about Troll 2. One of those so-bad-it's-good cult classics, the horror movie (not in any way a sequel to Troll) is about backwoods town Nilbog, whose residents are secretly goblins (not trolls). The goblins eat out-of-towners, of course, but are vegetarian so they magically turn people into plants then scoop up the goop. It made a serious point about vegetarianism, its director insists.
Based on the live-action trailer, the only rational assumption we can make is that Revelations 2 will do the same for fitness culture and those Fitbit wristband computer things.
]]>Has Resident Evil ever truly felt at home on PC? Not-zombie popper Resi 4, the high point of the series, showed up looking a bit peaky but, if memory serves, the ports of earlier games were acceptable. We never did see a port of the cleverly capitalised REmake of the first title though, which debuted on Gamecube back in the day. I played through the whole thing over a couple of days at the end of a university term, when almost everyone else had left the evil halls of residence. Expecting hokey dialogue and the occasional dog-scare, I didn't expect to be scared into submission before the end of the first night. I didn't expect Lisa Trevor.
The Resident Evil REmake might not be my favourite game in the series but it is the scariest. And it's finally coming to PC in a fancy REmastered edition.
]]>I watched this video for the The Evil Within and all I could think about was who signed the invoices for the components in the room of blades? After all, this is supposed to be a working care facility for people with severe mental disabilities, so there's going to be a paper trail. It's not a small machine: it is industrial-sized, and it spins on either side of a room, blades whirring as it slowly grinds victims. Is it a paper shredder? Who ordered it? And where did it come from? Is there an Evil Innovations catalogue, written by a biting staff writer, subbed by a production editor with a murky past before he hands it off to the dark art dept? And is it laid out in a Adobe InDesign (already pretty evil, tbh)?
]]>[coffin opens] Hello! Hello? Can you... no, obviously you can't. Someone has set the dry ice machine all the way up to nimbostratus. I clearly specified cirriform! Fine! We'll just let it clea - [sound of fan being switched on]. Really? This is amateur hour. Honestly... Well, at least I can read the autocue. Can they see me? Good. VELCOME! Aha-ha-ha-haaaa! Ha! Tis I, Plague Fearsome. I am your g[ho]u[l]ide on this DEADLY JOURNEY into the HEArT of HoRRor and broken k£yboard$. We have The Evil Within trailer for you. It puts "demon" in "demonstration", and the "er" in "trailer". For that is the noise I made when I watched this collection of eldritch cliches, this midnight gathering of unscary moments, this fleash video of awkward peril. Follow me as I drop to the paragraph below to escape its blunt and ticklish claws... [Wilhelm scream]
What do you keep your evil in, readers? Do you have demonic tupperware? Perhaps an armoire of awfulness? I have a drawer of despair that I open every now and then, just to make sure my pants are not being burned up next to my socks of suffering. Bethesda keep their new survival horror, The Evil Within, within the most evil box of all: IGN [Lightning, sound of booth babes screaming]. They have the 'exclusive' first look coming up next week, so all we're left with is a live-action trailer that shows us nothing of the game. Enjoy!
]]>Resident Evil's been expanding its increasingly action-oriented empire for years now, but - while the gesture's much-appreciated - it hasn't exactly seen many of its finest hours on PC. Resident Evil 4 was a brilliant scare-'em-up chainsawed in the clavicle by one of the worst ports ever, Resident Evil 5 was profoundly mediocre, Operation Raccoon City was execrable, and Resident Evil 6, well, it's not out yet. But cries of agony from consoletropolis' direction don't exactly bode well. So yes, the once-legendary survival-horror series is in a pretty bad place at the moment. But there is hope. Well, sorta. If nothing else, DICE at least saw Capcom saying the right things.
]]>When we asked Richard to take a look at Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, he started sniffling and claiming to have gone down with the T-Virus. Can this action-packed retelling of the series' early years be the cure to what ails him, or just one more headache?
]]>This feels like an inundation of Resident Evil footage but the trailer that is but two days old didn't contain any actual gameplay, and Capcom have decided to release a video today that is entirely made up of just such action, making it infinitely more interesting. Hectic monster-shooting, defending and escorting is on the cards. In fact, it looks far more hectic than just about anything else I've seen today, although, as always, I've been playing turn-based strategy games since I woke up so may not be the best gauge for hecticosity. Judge with your own eyes and mind.
]]>The first thing I like to do on a Tuesday morning is expose my ignorance to as many people as possible. Here's today's effort - I didn't know Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City (ReOrc) involved people killing other people as well as people killing zombies and mutants. Perhaps you didn't either. A new trailer shows that the mean nasties of the Umbrella Security Services will be using all kinds of fancy technowizardry to clean up the bio-contagion errors of their employers while a US Spec Ops team will be trying to expose the company's nefarious doings. The results of those nefarious doings, running the gamut from zombies to tyrants, will be making everyone's life miserable. Also, things explode a lot. Observe.
]]>Seeing as we're being all flippant and facetious today anyway, here's another game-mocking fun time. The kids' Resident Evil Activity Book. Includes fun puzzles for all the family, such as:
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