Resident Evil

Visiting the original mansion again for the first time in this millennium, it’s an interesting exercise in how much I’ve forgotten, how much I’ve remembered, and how much comes back to me when I’m there.

On one hand, after do many years it’s kind of hard to remember which door leads to zombie ridden stairways and which leads to almost becoming a Jill Sandwich in the name of acquiring a shotgun. Honestly, I don’t remember that horrible joke at all even though I still remember the distinction of Jill gets rescued from becoming a human pancake by Barry, while Chris has to bugger about looking for a broken shotgun in order to win.

Access to guides that have been around for years, and I can’t even remember the name of it, but there’s a wiki somewhere that goes into posting the maps and details (I’ve probably written about that here, regarding the RE2 remake); certainly make for a good augment to the old ‘what order should I?’ problem but not so much the minute directions.

The mansion has always been a hard place to navigate because of its size. It’s pretty easy to remember the general flow, especially easily reached locations like the hallway you meet Cerberus or the balcony where you acquire the grenade launcher. But smaller details like which door in the upstairs east hallway leads to the knights puzzle or what’s at the end of the ground floor dining room hallway, is a bit harder to remember.

This is kinda nice. Like one how it’s easy to remember there’s little point to grabbing the wooden emblem, but hard to remember when it’s time to bring it to the piano room. Couldn’t remember where the knight puzzle was but on the flip side once finding it, I did remember to avoid the poison gas on the first go, lol.

Some parts are a lot harder to remember than others. For example, I have pretty much no real recollection of the layout of the guard house. Just old mental images of things like pool tables and giant spiders.

But unlike the “Huh, what the frell is this?” feeling the GameCube remake always gave me, the GOG’ified PC edition is more like an old stomping ground. If one filled with zombies and horrors that want to decapitate you, lol.

Over the years, I’ve generally considered GOG a good thing but haven’t cared terribly much given my focus elsewhere. But much to my pleasure, it turns out they have a real nice treat that I never expected to find: Resident Evil.

While I appreciated the HD version of the remake, I also didn’t enjoy my childhood memories being made useless by the fact that it was built from the GameCube remake rather than one of the original PlayStation releases. Meanwhile, the version recently released on GOG looks like it’s a fairly vanilla build of the PC release of Resident Evil rolled up for modern machines without extra hackwittery.

I haven’t really played the original since the 1990s and the original PlayStation. Within moments of launching the game, I felt like a proper trip backdown memory lane — in just about every way, it’s how I remember it from almost 30 years ago.