Resident Evil

My roommates and I have been absorbed in the Resident Evil games for the past few weeks. I just finished Resident Evil 4 and have moved on to Zero, while one of my roommates is playing the remake of the original, and the other is struggling with Resident Evil 3: Nemesis.

The Resident Evil games are excellent. They are sometimes genuinely creepy and scary while at the same time being campy and overdone. And the storylines are pretty twisted, complicated, and intertwined (except for 4 where some characters from previous games all coincidentally happen to find themselves halfway around the world in a situation where a completely different town has been overrun by zombies).

It's a shame that the movies couldn't have been a better reflection of the games. First of all, they didn't seem as dark and grimy as the video games, or as nearly claustrophobic and lonely. And there were too many bullets and not enough puzzles. In the games again, except for RE4, in the games the player had to conserve ammo and solve lots of puzzles (that were surprisingly and intricately incorporated into seemingly normal mansions, laboratories, and police stations). But seeing as puzzles are interactive and movies are not, perhaps it's best they left this out. And while the movies had pretty good plot twists, it lacked suspense. This is not to say that these were bad movies, but they just weren't very reminiscent of the games.