Kry Retro-Reviews: Resident Evil 4

Resident Evil 4 was ported to the Wii in June, 2007, which is the version I played through. It took me a while to try it out because of my distaste for the scariness of the original games. I finally got around to it, and was rewarded with a truly great gaming experience.

RE4 sets a great atmosphere; from the beginning, I was engrossed into the storyline and mystery of the Plagas virus. Despite this, towards the end the characters start to get a little silly, and the dialogue does occasionally get rather... unfortunate at times. The game was still pretty scary, but it is mainly an adrenaline based fear, though there were some genuinely scary parts. The graphics are certainly antiquated for an '07 release on Wii, but it doesn't detract much. It is still totally awesome when you blow a zombie's head off, especially after you start witnessing the insectoid appendages that sometimes sprout out after you do later in the game.

Speaking of decapitation, let's talk about the gameplay, which has much of that. The game has you killing zombies left and right from the get go, combat is completely engaging and fun (especially working in kicks and suplexes on stunned enemies), and the difficulty curve ramps up at a pretty fair rate. RE4 also made an excellent use out of the wiimote as a targeting reticule, the controls never felt clunky. I did enjoy the ability to customize your arsenal through the merchants, but disliked the tedium of inventory management that accompanied it. It's also a break in the action when you're pretty much pausing the game while zombies are in your face to peruse your inventory.

Review is a little short this time around mainly because there’s so little for me to criticize. My only complaints have been minor ones. The standard game is long, and it’s engrossing the entire way through. When that is finished, there are additional minigames that also hold one’s attention for a decently long time as well. RE4 is simply a great game, and I’m very much looking forward to playing RE5 next month to compare/contrast the two (and in the meantime, I’ve picked up Dead Space to keep me sated).

Kry Reviews: Left 4 Dead

Left 4 Dead was released 11/18/08 to critical acclaim. It continues Valve’s benchmark for top notch quality FPS games, but it does have a few problems that need addressing.

Let me start with addressing all that is good with Left 4 Dead, which is a lot. I absolutely loved the art style within Left 4 Dead; the grainy horror movie look really works well for the game. I’ve heard some complaints that the story in L4D’s too simple. I disagree, the simple story is sufficient for the atmosphere they are trying to set.

The co-op play is a blast, especially with 3 buddies (although the friendly AI isn’t bad). It’s great fun mowing down hordes of zombies, and your group really has to keep their wits about them. Your group gets separated and it isn’t long before you get gibbed. Also, the expert difficulty is seriously hard, and a tough goal to work towards for more dedicated zombie hunters.

Versus Mode is also great fun, and probably is the reason most people continue playing L4D once they beat the campaigns. Playing as a zombie is neat, however if the survivors are organized playing infected really requires supreme coordination. It has a few problems though. Only 2 of 4 maps are available for it, so the locales get stale very quickly. Also, Versus Mode also had a serious luck factor with the timing on tank spawning, which I believe was normalized with the recent patch. Although I saw nothing in the notes about having your tank randomly die (It’s happened to me a lot). Very frustrating, but I haven’t been online to test it for an even more annoying reason.

The server selecting system is Left 4 Dead’s biggest flaw, and a serious turn off. When you start a game you have the option of selecting a third-party dedicated server or hosting it yourself. I don’t want to run it off my machine so I choose a dedicated server to host my games. Night after night I’ll get stuck with laggy, high-ping servers (once even in Germany, serious WTF there), bugged servers, or I’ll just get dropped by them midgame. This makes me irate and has on more than one night ended my gaming early. Valve needs to implement a way to select servers or get better hosts because these server problems are killing the game for me. I doubt I will play L4D much more until I see some news about this.

Left 4 Dead is a good game overall. The first few nights playing it for me were just awesome. The server problems are very noticeable, almost immediately depending on your luck. Bottom line about L4D is this: If you have the patience to keep remaking games when you land on bad servers, you’ll have fun if/when you get into a good game.