It was more than a year ago that I first heard the name Franz Ferdinand. I remember reading an article about the revival of Morrissey, which mentioned how upcoming bands were name-dropping him in interviews. One such band was the aforementioned band from Glasgow.
I heard their first track a few weeks later. I was amazed. Invigorated. Enthused. It had been a long time that I had heard something so akin to my musical tastes. These guys were something special. I became obsessed.
Tonight, I couldn't tell you the track's name without getting their album down from my CD tower. This is something I'm not prepared to do, because it would ruin my point. After spending the first half of 2004 raving about them, my interest wavered. As their post-Brit Award popularity peaked, I returned to my love of The Pixies. I've been listening to them ever since.
I was listening to them, in fact, when I decided to take a return trip to the Spanish countryside and write back about my experiences. After all, in a few short weeks legions of British tourists will pour all over it, demanding to know if the rumours about strange murderous villagers were true. I'd thought I'd give them the heads up, so I switched off the Hi-Fi, turned off the lights and set off.
Upon arriving I was immediately reminded by the beauty of it all; earlier in the month I spent a brief few days there and in the time I was away it had lost none of its aesthetic appeal. I was in an entrance to a castle that clearly was in a state of disrepair. Grass grew up from underneath cracked stone flooring and trees used crumbling walls for support. These clearly weren't intelligent beings; their attempts to find sunshine were futile, as night had closed in long ago.
More disturbing, however, was the girl. Just looking at her brought back all sorts of terrible memories of glancing at various women over the years, only to see their faces and realise each could be no more than sixteen. The line between acceptable and unacceptable sexual attraction has always been an anxiety with men and I was no exception. This was a real moral dilemma.
Then I realised I was paying more attention to this moral dilemma than I was to the murderous monks up ahead. I began to wonder why.
If these analogies are difficult to comprehend, then they reflect what I when through upon returning to Resident Evil 4. It was exactly how I’d left it, but the initial buzz I'd felt just wasn't there anymore. And to top it all off, I had no idea why.
That was until I realised why I cut my trip to Spain short the first time.
At first, it seemed too good to be true. I found myself quickly overwhelmed by hostile villagers who would follow me to the ends of the Earth just to see if my intestines really could be wrapped ten times around their church. Whilst not one of them was a match for my shotgun, their number and relentless pursuit threatened to turn me into a bullet blazing maniac. In Resident Evil 4, stress equals death. As of such, it takes great delight in pushing you as far as you can go. To use yet another analogy, Resident Evil 4 is to its own franchise what Aliens was to Alien.
Out with the haunted mansion and in with the rollercoaster ride.
And what a ride. It's been a while since I felt an adrenaline rush as powerful as the one I got from Resident Evil 4. So much so that I cursed at every beast I cut down. I stopped breathing every time I heard a chain saw. And starting yelping every time a bag-wearing psycho kicked open a door and sliced my face up with his blade. All the screaming and gesturing in the world couldn't vent this feeling. The only solution was more play. And this time, I'd know where the bastards were.
Therein lies the problem. It's fifteen minutes of fun on a loop. In the opening stretch of the game, this isn't a problem – the areas are varied enough to make each play a little different. But enter the castle and you're back in familiar territory; open the door, kill everyone inside, proceed to next room. If you die, no problem; brace for the sneak attack from the side and be ready to strike.
In a game that generates such real emotions – to villagers, to locations and of course to Ashley – the sudden switch from open-ended encounters to formulaic attacks is a real blow to its own head, especially on replay. The story of the game is yet another problem; it starts in the upper stretches of dramatic licence and steadily gets worse. In a game – and genre – that draws largely on emotional reactions, I found myself reacting as if I was watching a low-budget horror movie, questioning why the characters would even go further into the castle when they could just wait at the entrance for extraction. Of course, the game offers some frankly ludicrous reasons as to why we couldn’t do this, but at this stage in the history of videogame development, should our triple AAA games really include such flimsy plot lines? I think not.
Ultimately, this review comes across harsher than the actual score, largely because the score takes into account that first venture into the Spanish countryside. But like Franz Ferdinand, time is not kind to the game. On occasion, you'll go back and play the first few levels, just like last week I went back and listened to 'Michael.’ You might even dust of disk two and go through the game again from time to time. But the question is, if your Gamecube was a five-disk multi-changer, would Resident Evil have its own space? After returning from Spain and listening to Debaser, I think not.
Chris Hicks
