Hoo boy, Tuesdays and Thursdays are lo-ong. As I write this, I'm in one of my four classes and I am having a hell of a time keeping my eyes open. Wanna hear about Resident Evil 4 and how I just barely finished it? You do? Okay. I'll tell you about my experience doing battle with Las Plagas.
So in this freaking sweet game, you play as a dude named Leon. Leon's pretty badass! He survived Resident Evil 2 and saw Raccoon City nuked by the American military as the T-Virus got totally out of control on his first day as a cop. Apparently, Leon is so impressed by the government's testosterone driven use of overkill that he decides to become a government security agent. A few years after the eradication of Raccoon City, Leon gets called to Europe to investigate the kidnapping of the U.S. president's daughter. At first, he thinks it's the work of an obscure Spanish death cult that harbors a secret terrorist agenda. And he's right! Except that the majority of the cult members have been enslaved by sentient parasites known only as.... Las Plagas. This means that once you figure out that shooting cultists in the head is the best way to kill them, the Plagas pop out of their bloody neck-stumps with tentacles and bones and try to eat your face.
Throughout his mission, Leon remains pretty dense as to what's really going on (he's just here to get the president's daughter and get out! What the hell are Las Plagas anyway? Who cares?) but he eventually figures it out when he gets injected with a Plaga of his very own. Once Leon starts to cough up blood and lose control of his will, he figures that something bigger is going down after all.
As the mystery unravels, it becomes revealed that a guy named Osmund Saddler is the leader of this cult (meaning he can control the Plagas themselves. He has this crazy staff that has eyes and tentacles that makes this possible), and his grand, malevolent plan involves injecting the president's daughter with a Plaga and sending her back home to infect the president and eventually....the world. As Leon's old friend/new nemesis Jack Krauser notes: "A conservative mind wouldn't understand the good that we're doing..." Sick burn, conservatives!
At this point, I imagine that many of you are saying to yourselves, "Alex, this game came out like, three years ago. How come you're just now getting around to finishing it?" Well, friend-o, I'll tell you. First, I didn't get a Gamecube for awhile. I purchased one for the express purpose of playing Resident Evil 4 because I played a demo whilst I was working at Gamestop. I played it pretty steadily, until I got to the freaking scary island facility and the freaking scary regenerators/iron maidens. Regenerators are genetically altered freaks of nature that can't be killed! That is, can't be killed until you get a thermal imaging scope for your sniper rifle. Then you have to shoot the Plagas that are responsible for growing back the creature's limbs after you blow them off with a shotgun.
So, I fought a couple of them, enduring their inhuman mouth-breathing and glowing red eyes for a pretty good amount of time. It was always such a relief when their metabolism sped up and caused them to implode. But there was this one encounter that scared me so bad that I peed a little in my pants and had to stop playing outright. I was faced with a regenerator, I accidentally shot its leg off, it slithered towards me like a giant snake, hopped up, and took a bite out of my shoulder! I couldn't handle the sheer shock of what happened, so I shut off my Gamecube and changed my pants. I didn't touch it again until it came out on the Wii, and decided to give it another go. I manned up, if you will, slaying all manner of Cronenbergian abominations until I stood face to face with Osmund "crazy legs" Saddler himself (well, it was face to face until his head blew up and turned into a scorpion made out of muscle and gravy). I blew his terrorist eyeball-mouth to kingdom come, rescued the president's daughter (on a jetski!), and blew up the island. It was awesome!
Resident Evil 5 is due out sometime next year, and I am stoked to once again play it, get too scared to finish it, and then come back years later for another attempt. It'll feature running zombies, a la 28 Days Later! F***k yeah!
5 comments:
I really do miss your blogs!
Don't stop.
I hope they make a new Eternal Darkness for the Wii. Reading about your RE4 experience reminded me of one night when I stayed up late playing Eternal Darkness and my sanity meter got low and weird shit started happening and then scary stuff started happening and then I peed my pants a little and had to turn my GameCube off.
Ahh, Resident Evil. There are so many awesome stories to be told about that game. On a fairly regular basis I would get really into playing it and become very absorbed in the material only to have something happen and a little switch in my head would flip causing me to scream, say "Nope. I can't deal with this," and then turn off the system. For the longest time I couldn't play for more than a half hour at a time. Which is funny cuz I would like to travel back in time and mock myself since I can now beat it in one sitting without ever feeling scared (well, at least outwardly scared). I guess that's what happens when you love a game enough to beat it like 6 times in a row. Keep going dude until you can buy the Chicago Typewriter and Infinite Rocket Launcher (in that order). Then you'll really feel like a man.
And Ryan. We should discuss Eternal Darkness scares. Once when I was playing late at night in the dark I had a stack of insanity effects build up at once which scared me so much I turned off the stood up, turned off the system, and sat in the living room with the lights on for about an hour while I repressed the memory. I'm not joking either. It took me months to piece together what exactly happened. It was glorious.
You should read this GameCube round up. It includes a review of RE4:
http://homepages.theonion.com/PersonalPages/jAnchower/hiscores.php
Plus there's lots of funny stuff, including my exact sentiments about Metroid Prime 2.
Post a Comment