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Okay, I’m registered. Now to start with some inspiration. Way back when Resident Evil 2 came out for the PS1, my friends and I loved it, and played it to death. There were two things that we were particularly fond of. First off, the voice “acting” was excellent. And by “excellent”, I mean perfect for the B-movie motif of a modern zombie movie (er… videogame with extensive cut scenes). The awkward pauses in dialog were further exacerbated by the long loading time for the PS1 to read the sound files off the disk. This, combined with the awkward hand-gesture animations made for some moments that would have made Ed Wood proud. For example the classic, “Stop!… don’t open… that door!” from from the first Resident Evil game. Or one of the initial exposition dialogs from the sequel:

Marvin:
About two months ago…there was this incident… involving zombies…
in a mansion… located in the outskirts of this city.
Chris… and the other STARS members discovered that…
…
…
(sinister voice) Umbrella…
was behind everything.
…
They risked their lives to reveal the truth.
But, no one… believed them.
Not long after that… (with emphasis) all this… started to happen.

But I digress… Our second favorite thing about the game was its constant confirmationitis.
“There is a key here, would you like to take it? (yes/no)”
“There is a lever here, would you like to use it? (yes/no)”
“There is a switch here, would you like to switch it? (yes/no)”

Based on this, we devised the obvious logical extension of the series. At the time, we called it “Resident Evil 3″, but actually “Resident Evil 0″ might have been more appropriate. Considering both those title have since been taken, and reconsidering our design of the game, I think this is probably the most apt title:

That screenshot is pretty much the entire extent of the game. Choosing “No” would send you to a Game Over screen. Choosing “Yes” would send you to an identical Game Over screen, which we called “the good ending”. Depending on how long you took to answer “Yes”, and how many times you had to switch the cursor between the two choices, the game awarded you a rank, from D to A. If you chose “Yes” really quickly… I’m talking within a matter of minutes, you’d attain the coveted ‘S’ rank. Achieving the S rank unlocked a bonus part of the game, which played exactly the same as the original, but the menu was blue instead of green. If you beat the “blue version” with an S rank, you unlock the “red version”, and so on…

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This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 4:41 am and is filed under Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.