Resident Evil 4

 

    As you might've already read, I didn't like Red Steel much, but truth be told, I've never been that into shooters at any point. There have been exceptions, but I can never quite get used to how much around you that you need to keep track of, not to mention that very few of them keep my interest in terms of aesthetics either. Far more than that, though, I'm especially not into horror. The closest I've gotten to enjoying anything of the sort is if it has a comedic or parodic side to it, as pure horror is completely out of my usual wheelhouse. So when I say that Resident Evil 4, a third-person shooter and survival horror game, is one of the best games I've ever played, that's how you know there's something truly special going on here.
    Of course, I say that it's a horror game, when most of the time the game is moreso just horror-themed. You play as Leon S. Kennedy, a guy with one of the most 2000's haircuts I've ever seen, asked to locate Ashley Graham, the president's daughter, after she gets kidnapped. He stumbles into a small remote farmland somewhere in Europe, where he's immediately chased down by angry locals, all infected with a mind control parasite that makes them loyal to an evil cult. After that, the mission becomes simple: are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president's daughter? It's by no means a complex plot, but it makes it so things are easy to understand even for someone unfamiliar with the series like myself, and it's the presentation that really sells it, going for the deliberate feel of a campy B movie.
    See, there's something of an art to being deliberately camp, one that most attempting it fail to register. Most just go for the sarcastic and eye-rolling dialogue approach, which just ends up feeling incredibly patronizing and boring. Resident Evil 4, by contrast, shows the correct approach in leaning into its own silliness as hard as you possibly could. Everything from Ashley and her scream queen antics, to the merchant that seemingly exists everywhere and laughs at you for almost no reason, to a tiny Napoleon that rules over a fortress; no matter how crazy it gets, it's all held together with complete emotional sincerity. It actively revels in throwing you strange curveballs and quotable lines that make for something instantly memorable, and I guarantee you'll hear at least something you'll want to repeat to your friends to the point of their aggravation.
    What truly makes this game one of the best I've experienced, however, is how refined the core gameplay loop is, to the point it almost feels unreal. It takes on a level-by-level structure, each having you go through phases of either killing enemies, collecting and purchasing items, and eventually fighting bosses, with the occasional very light puzzle solving sprinkled in. The game utilizes an over-the-shoulder perspective, zooming in and locking you in place whenever you aim, thus letting you aim at specific body parts. Not being able to move while aiming sounds like a negative, but the game is very much designed around it, and the sheer depth of variety in combat options is insane. You can go for headshots that have a chance of killing them instantly, or you can kneecap enemies to stagger them, or you can go up and karate kick a group of enemies; I haven't even listed all the options just on a control level, and that combined with the sheer amount of weapon variety is utterly staggering. It makes it so you'll be able to find a combination of tactics that works for you, while still keeping the game's challenge level consistent.
    On that note, the level design in the game is absolutely fantastic. The environments remind me a lot of the first Quake game, with lots of winding caves, murky forests and giant castle interiors with impossible architecture. It manages to feel grand in scope while still keeping a tight linear structure, with just the right escalation of enemy difficulty and resource management. Almost every level has its own unique set piece to call its own, whether it be one of the many boss fights that almost all feel like they could have been the final boss, or something that changes up the gameplay entirely without ever losing its action focus. There's one fight early on where you're being dragged along on a boat by a sea monster and have to throw giant hooks at it, with the sea monster never being brought up before or after, and it somehow feels totally in line with everything else. Heck, even the inventory management is fun, having you play a miniature puzzle game to make sure everything fits within the case you carry around, with every item taking up a different amount of space.
    Of course, the game does have issues, but I have to emphasize that absolutely none of them are dealbreakers and don't take away from the game as a whole. It's mostly small annoyances, like the occasional quick-time event that jumps out from nowhere, Ashley's AI occasionally being lacking when it comes to getting out of harm's way, and some of the later enemies being on the health sponge side of things. They're troublesome in the moment, but are more often than not trivialized by the game's generous checkpoint system, so it's nothing that bad. Also, compared to the sheer creativity of the levels in most of the chapters, the final chapter mostly being set in a laboratory and military base does feel a bit lacking, and I think could have been trimmed down a tad.
    Overall, however, Resident Evil 4 is an exemplar in pure game design mastery, and I can easily see how it's gone down as an all-time classic. The fact that most seventh-gen games outside the Wii were dead set on copying this game's design choices, and that the over-the-shoulder camera perspective is still the standard for action games to this day, goes to show how far reaching this game's influence was. However, none of its copycats can quite capture the sheer polish of its mechanics, nor have the guts to mimic its overtly silly and campy vibe. Just go play it if you haven't already; it's been ported to seemingly everything by this point, so you really have no excuse not to give it a try by now if you haven't.

Wii Zapper + Link's Crossbow Training

 

    So I've been wanting to get around to playing The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, as it was pretty much the biggest launch title for the Wii that wasn't Wii Sports, but I've always had a bit of trouble getting into Zelda games. It's the same problem I have playing RPGs, where I'll play one for a few hours, really like what I play, forget to play it for a month, and then try to jump back in wondering what the heck I was doing before never playing it again. As such, I probably won't be reviewing Twilight Princess for a while, but then I realized I could play something Zelda-related that I actually could finish and would be funnier to write about. As such, I sat down to play Link's Crossbow Training, and then after roughly an hour passed, I stood up again because I had finished it.
    The game is a pack-in for and made to sell people on the Wii Zapper, the first of many, many, many plastic shells for the Wii Remote that try to make things more immersive. Of course, when thinking of those, most people's minds go to the completely useless ones made by other companies that only changed its aesthetics, so the Wii Remote can kinda look like a tennis racket or golf club or something. Nintendo's own shells were never that impractical, as they always changed the grip of the controller in some way to make things more comfortable for specific games. The whole premise of the Wii Zapper, then, is to make things more ideal for playing shooters of most any kind, but personally, the end result is very, very mixed.
    The initial setup process to get the Wii Remote and Nunchuk correctly attached is unusually complicated, especially compared to other Wii accessories. You have to pretty much dismantle the entire thing to slide them in, unplugging and re-plugging the Nunchuk so that the wire can be stored in the back cover, and it's incredibly temperamental trying to get everything to stay in its proper place. Once everything's attached, actually holding it does kinda feel more gun-like, but also not. The trigger feels appropriate and has a good click to it, but something about the way it's stuck together with the double grips makes it feel downright goofy to hold. Having the Nunchuk attached means you have to move both it and the Wii Remote around to aim and shoot, and while I was able to get used to it, I still say that only having to move the Wii Remote feels better.
    But that's just the accessory itself, it of course also comes with Link's Crossbow Training. It's ostensibly an asset flip of Twilight Princess, taking the environments and enemies from that game and rearranging them all to fit a high score based third person shooter. It's an incredibly bizarre concept; for something like this, I'd imagine something like Metroid or Star Fox would be better suited to gunplay, since placing Zelda into a shooter results in a lot of strange concessions having to be made. Sure, Link shooting things instead of using his sword can be hastily justified with it being a crossbow, but then in some levels, you can gain power-ups like a fully-automatic crossbow, and I'd like to ask the dev team how much sense that makes. Those notes of weirdness combined with the asset re-use makes it feel only one step removed from those fan-made mods where they give Mario a shotgun or something, and it results in the game being unintentionally darkly hilarious, watching the grand mythic hero of Hyrule decide to just shoot down everything in his path.
    The game is all around fine for what it is, even though it's incredibly short. There are nine stages, each with three short sub-stages, and each have you doing something different. Sometimes you break targets, sometimes you defend against enemy hordes, and sometimes you gain full control of Link to kill a certain number of enemies. The game's length means you're mostly just gonna be going for high scores were you to play it for any longer, and fair's fair, the game does have a pretty addictive combo system that rewards methodical and accurate shots. However, the fact that it took me five paragraphs to even talk about the actual gameplay says a lot about its brevity, I feel.
    So far, this is the one pack-in game I've played for the Wii that feels the most like a pack-in. It doesn't really have the infinite replayability of the others I've talked about, although the fact that it came with an accessory makes me wanna treat it a bit kinder than I did other games with a lackluster amount of content, like Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree. However, the quality of that accessory itself is debatable, as even playing the game completely designed around it, I found the Wii Zapper to be okay, but not great. The fact I never knew anyone that actually owned this thing back in the day speaks to how it never really caught on, but compared to the aforementioned completely useless accessories, the Wii Zapper proved to be only semi-useless.

Red Steel

 

    The mere concept of motion controls makes imaginations run wild, as pretty much any movement can be turned into a game in some way. Of course, some ideas end up being far more popular than others, and it didn't take long for people to look at the Wii Remote and go “could this be used to shoot things?” Some of the most common ideas tossed around for the controller from the moment it was unveiled were to either use it as a gun or use it as a sword, and with it the desire for more hardcore games on the Wii that would go with those ideas. In comes Ubisoft with Red Steel, a launch title that combined both ideas into a first person shooter, excitedly showing the game's possibilities with unintentionally hilarious trailers in hindsight. Of course, when the game came out, I'm pretty sure that's the moment where most interest in hardcore games for the Wii completely evaporated.
    You play as the rather generically named Scott, a pretty typical silent protagonist that lives in New York and works as a bodyguard for a Japanese woman named Miyu. One day, Miyu is kidnapped by a yakuza gang, and holds her for ransom in exchange for a sword from a rival yakuza gang, the also rather boringly named Katana-giri. The rival gang entrusts Scott with the sword because he shows great prowess with it or something, and he goes off to Tokyo in search of his girlfriend. If this plot is already hinging on the side of uncomfortable, don't worry, it gets worse. Every single Japanese character speaks with exaggerated stereotypical accents, and will randomly insert stock Japanese phrases into otherwise English sentences, like a middle schooler that just discovered what anime is. It's all just grossly dated in a way that isn't even worth dwelling on long; were it a film, it'd be a two dollar DVD at the bottom of a Wal-Mart bargain bin.
    So about the controls, since it's what the game was sold on most. Credit where credit is due, the shooting controls aren't actually that bad, and are mostly standard to how FPS games on the Wii would be controlled going forward. You use the Wii Remote and Nunchuk, using the analog stick on the Nunchuk for movement and the Wii Remote for pointing and shooting. To turn, you point the Wii Remote towards the edge of the screen you want to turn to, and you can perform auxiliary interactions with a simple flick of the Nunchuk. It's a setup that actually works rather well with an FPS, especially since it grants the unique advantage of being able to aim at targets without having to physically turn, like with a mouse and keyboard. To get one thing about the game clear straight away, the game is at its best when you're in smaller rooms with enemies close by, since you can find creative cover spots where you can pick off multiple enemies at the same time; it's in those moments where Red Steel becomes at least decent.
    Unfortunately, the game isn't at its best most of the time. The game as a whole is very drab and ugly-looking, with muddy desaturated textures and unimpressive character animations. Despite this, the framerate is constantly chugging trying to maintain it all, and in larger levels with more enemies, it can sometimes slip into single digits. This makes any more open area an absolute nightmare to deal with, as not only do you have a bunch of enemies all shooting at you, but the framerate makes it impossible to react with the speed necessary to counter it, if the enemies don't decide to just teleport behind you. When the game introduces sniping sections, it can become almost unplayable, as not only do you have to deal with the previous issues, but the enemies are placed way out in the distance, meaning you're often left sitting in one location for minutes on end trying to find the one single speck of pixels that keeps instantly killing you.
    Of course, that's not all that's offered on the one-way train to mediocrity station. Sometimes the game will randomly stop you from using your guns to have a one-on-one sword fight with someone. During these, you swing the Wii Remote to swing your sword, use the analog stick to dodge, and fling the Nunchuk to parry attacks. The game tries to introduce more complexity on top of it with special moves and maneuvers to use against stronger foes, but I found that simply flailing the sword randomly was the most effective strategy a lot of the time. When you defeat an enemy, it brings an element of moral choice to the game, as you can choose to either kill them or spare them, with sparing earning you “respects”, plural noun. From what I can tell, this respect system effects absolutely nothing, so it makes me question what the point of it even was.
    I think you get the point by now that Red Steel is simply a buggy, poorly-aged FPS that was clearly rushed to make it out in time for the Wii's launch. Even if they had had more time to fix up things like the framerate, it would probably still be a pretty sour experience on both a story and gameplay level. On that note, I should bring up the bug that made me stop playing; during one of the many combat encounters, one of the enemies clipped through the floor and remained there indefinitely, long after every other enemy was defeated. Something about this enemy must have been important, because not being able to kill them meant I couldn't progress any further, effectively softlocking my game. I guess he must have been desperate to escape from this game, and honestly, I can't blame him.