Games 1/9/08: Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia
Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles
For: Nintendo Wii
From: Capcom
ESRB Rating: Mature (blood and gore, violence)
Few developers love revisiting their recent past quite like Capcom, which has released portions of its “Resident Evil” catalog on just about any system that will have it.
Capcom returns to the well once again with “The Umbrella Chronicles,” but it’s a pretty inspired trip this time around. Rather than repackage outdated “RE” gameplay onto yet another system, “Chronicles” functions as a series retrospective, revisiting pretty much every major pre-”Resident Evil 4″ storyline through the fresh eyes of an entirely different genre. Instead of creeping through corridors in the third person, you’re shooting your way through them in an environment more befitting of a first-person arcade light gun game.
In providing some new takes on some old storylines, Capcom also manages to freshen up the notion of what a good on-rails shooter is capable of achieving.
“Chronicles” mostly plays as one would expect it to, leaving you responsible for your gun’s aiming reticule while it handles your character’s movements. The surrounding storyline is full of series mythology, but the chief gameplay objective — shoot everything that moves and stay alive — is pretty straightforward.
Where things get interesting is when Capcom incorporates traditional “RE” hallmarks in new ways. You’ll still collect herbs to heal yourself, but you have to grab them quickly before they leave your line of sight. Familiar boss characters return, but with new patterns and weaknesses. Branching paths still sit waiting to be discovered, and the game perfectly replicates the sense of dread that comes with turning an uncharted corner.
Best of all, “Chronicles” doesn’t stick you with a single weapon throughout the whole game. Your handgun contains unlimited ammo and the knife is handy for close-quarters combat, but the upgradeable machine guns, shotguns and grenade launchers you occasionally find pack a much deadlier punch. As with any good “RE” game, ammo management plays a crucial part in staying healthy.
None of this is to suggest “Chronicles” is vastly more complex than it ever purports to be, and there’s nothing here that will make you love on-rails shooters if you don’t at least like them already. But Capcom gets a ton of mileage out of a really cool idea, and it produces a fun piece of fan service in doing so. Arcade shooter fans — particularly those who can take advantage of the two-player co-op mode — are encouraged to give this one a look.
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Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia
Reviewed for: Xbox 360
Coming Soon for: Playstation 3
From: Artificial Studios/SouthPeak Interactive
ESRB Rating: Teen (blood, mild language, mild suggestive themes, tobacco reference, violence)
The era of the downloadable patch is fully upon console gamers, with developers regularly putting less-than-perfect games on the shelf and relying on the convenience of users’ Internet connections to fix problems that reveal themselves after a game has entered the wild. For the most part, these patches fix problems relating to online play or some other feature that can’t always be effectively stress-tested before release.
“Monster Madness: Battle for Suburbia” is another story entirely, and it raises an interesting question: Do games deserve a second chance at acceptance if they completely blow their first?
Conceptually, “Suburbia” hasn’t changed. It’s still a cross between a overhead shooter and dungeon crawler, starring you as one of four kids who have to fend off a hometown invasion by a horde of deranged monsters. The things that initially made the game appealing — lots of melee weapons, plenty of guns to build and upgrade, a cartoony graphical style and some fun level and creature designs — are still there.
What no longer remains is a ludicrous control scheme that required you to press L3 to jump instead of A or B, which puzzlingly were used for weapon switching. That change alone makes “Suburbia” a better game, but it’s one of many. Other fixes include a new camera angle, significantly more sensible (and snappier) player movement controls, interface improvements, weapon tweaks, and a ton of fixes to the game’s multiplayer component.
The laundry list of fixes, combined with a price drop that has sent the game into $20 country in some stores, makes “Suburbia” appealing all over again for those tempted but disappointed by it in the first place.
Unfortunately, a better game still doesn’t translate into a particularly good one. “Suburbia” is fun in spurts because of all it purports to be and because of how different it is than most every other Xbox 360 game. But there likely is no way for a simple patch to alleviate some of the remaining issues, which range from serious framerate dips to all manner of cheap-death syndrome.
In fact, the unpatched game’s worst problem — an inconsistent and unforgiving checkpoint system — also is the patched game’s biggest spoiler. Nothing ruins fun quite like barely reaching a checkpoint with only a sliver of health remaining, dying shortly after, and having to respawn ad nauseam with that same useless sliver of health backing you up.