Resident Evil: Director's Cut

"Slightly improved version of the classic"

For the uninitiated, Resident Evil is the classic game that made survival horror popular. This is the original with some neat extras thrown in.

It contains three modes. There's the standard mode, which is the original game. There's also an easy mode, which is the same thing with more ammo and health and fewer monsters. Finally, there's advanced/arrange mode, which rearranges all the stuff, changing the solutions to some of the puzzles. This is harder and you get a different outfit.

In all modes, you get the choice of playing as Chris Redfield or Jill Valentine, members of a special forces unit from a small Midwestern town sent to investigate some grisly murders. When approaching the mansion where they happened, your team is attacked by dogs and split up. You run into the mansion for protection. After that, you have to find your teammates, escape the house and figure out what's going on.

Jill and Chris aren't just different graphics that do the same thing either. They play differently and their games have different puzzles. Jill can pick simple locks and holds eight items, while Chris can only hold six and must use keys to open all the locks. He can absorb more damage than she can though.

Resident Evil is different from most Playstation titles in that it uses character-relative controls. Up on the D-pad moves your character forward, down moves them backward. Left and right turn them. This is familiar to fans of Tomb Raider, but could confuse a lot of people when they hit up and their character walks toward the side of the screen. However, I believe it's appropriate for this game, as the pre-rendered backgrounds force constant sudden angle changes. With camera-relative controls, you would change direction without warning.

The interface is pretty simple. You use the D-pad to move as described above. X-is the action button, used to look at things and open doors. If you hold down square while moving, you run. You hold down R1 to aim/ready your weapon. While holding it, you can tap L1 to change targets, X to fire or use the D-pad to change your aim. Start pauses the game and brings up your inventory. You use the D-pad to navigate, X to select something and triangle to cancel. It's all fairly intuitive and doesn't use a lot of buttons.

When you get too much to carry, there are magic boxes scattered around for you to put stuff into. Anything put in any of these boxes can be retrieved from any other. It makes no sense, but it's convenient.

Saving is accomplished using old typewriters. You need to have an ink ribbon in order to do this. An important part of the game is making sure to not save too much (or you'll run out of ribbons) or too little (or you'll die and have to redo an hour of play).

There are some puzzles to solve, but most are immediately obvious. The ones that aren't are pretty easy to figure out. Everything makes logical sense, so you won't be stuck trying every item in your inventory in the vain hope one of them will do something.

Overall, the main challenge here is inventory management and setting priorities. You've got to make sure not to use too much ammo or to carry too little. Especially early in the game, there will be more zombies than you have ammo to kill. You have to either stab them repeatedly with your knife while trying to avoid them or run past them. Both can be difficult.

The sound effects are great. Heavy footsteps, the foundation settling, the doors creaking and zombies chewing human flesh and most of the other classic sounds of horror are
represented here and represented well.

However, the music is a bit bland. I've heard the earlier director's cut, Saturn version and the original had better music but it was replaced for some reason. There are still a few gems like the song that plays over the credits, but most isn't very memorable.

The voice acting is the bad part. The game has some of the worst voice acting I've ever heard. I realize this was done on purpose to capture that B-movie feel, but it ended up considerably worse than it needed to be for that effect. It doesn't sound like it's being done by people who aren't great actors. It sounds like it's being done by people who are purposely doing a bad job. Barry's lines are especially offensive in this regard. In fact, only the first names of the actors are listed in the credits, and Capcom claims to have lost records of their full names. This was probably at the actors' request.

For a game first released in January of 1996, only about three and a half months after the Playstation was released in the US, this game looks pretty good. The trick is that it uses pre-rendered backgrounds. The background is just a picture, though you can move around in apparent 3D. If you go off the edge of the screen, it changes to another angle with a different background. The effect works well, and the backgrounds are always appropriately busy. They are a far cry from the often sparse true-3D games.

This opens up most of the system's power for the characters. Since there are never more than four or so characters on the screen, they are free to have fairly high polygon counts. The characters all look good, are well animated and easily distinguishable. Their joints are visible and their faces could stand some more detail, but hey, this is a first-generation game.

The downside of the mixed 2D/3D approach is that the difference between the two is obvious. Whenever there's an object that's supposed to be moved or picked up, it really stands out. The end effect is somewhat like Scooby Doo, where you knew that that oddly-colored section of the wall was going to move.

I have a few more complaints about this game that I haven't mentioned yet. The main one is that you can't skip the in engine cutscenes. While the pre-rendered and live-action ones can be skipped with a button-press, the conversations between characters are done in-game and can sometimes be fairly long. While this would be bad enough normally, the voice-acting makes it nearly unbearable. You can't just save after conversations either, because saves are a limited commodity.

The only other problem is that it's kind of short. On my first shot through, I completed the game with about five hours and fifteen minutes of gameplay. Someone who knew what they were doing would go much faster. However, with four endings for each character, an arrange mode, a ranking system and a few other ways to play the game differently, you could go through multiple times and still be having fun and discovering things.

Despite a few flaws, this game is one of the better games you'll find for Playstation. Since it's in the greatest hits collection, it provides one of the best fun to money ratios you can get. If you don't already have it, go get it.

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 02/15/01, Updated 02/15/01