Bigger And Better - Resident Evil 2 Retrospective (1/2)
The perfect sequel and the foundation of a franchise
Resident Evil 2 is one of the defining games of the PlayStation library and helps form the lineup of what I would consider to be gaming’s single strongest year ever: 1998. RE2 accompanied Ocarina of Time, Metal Gear Solid, the Western launch of Pokémon Red and Blue, Sonic Adventure, Half Life, Banjo-Kazooie and countless other classics to make this particular 12 months unbelievably good for gamers.
It’s also pretty universally considered the best of the original Resident Evil trilogy, the perfect sequel, a flawless escalation of the story and gameplay of RE1… and this is my first time playing it, full stop. I don’t mean I’ve never played it start to finish like Nemesis I mean, I’ve never touched this one.
I know I know, the jeering is well-deserved, especially when I call myself a massive Resident Evil fan but once again, unless you’re playing on PlayStation 5 which seems to have every notable PS1 game ever on hand, or you grew up around RE2, then the chances of you playing this today instead of its remake which goes on sale practically every month is very slim.
But this week, it’s time to change that. Join me for part 2 of this series as I take a look back on the original Resident Evil 2 and the profound, industry-wide influence of its 2019 remake.
Background
Resident Evil 1 was a stunning critical success.
At the time, it was the PlayStation’s best-selling video game and performed fantastic internationally too, which wasn’t a given for Japanese games back in the 1990’s, with the promise of great financial gain, the nearby Raccoon City already teased in the original entry and fans eager for another romp, Capcom got to work on RE2 about a month after the first’s launch.
If you know anything about classic Resident Evil behind the scenes then you know that the first 4 games in this series saw notoriously chaotic development cycles and Resident Evil 2 might take the cake for the most erratic.
RE2 was built by a team composed of a little over half of the developers that created the original and a large influx of newer employees as well. Shinji Mikami initially stayed on as the game’s producer and with a large degree of influence but following frequent creative clashes and his meddling to get more developers to see things his way, Mikami would assume the role of overseer, only playing a build of the game each month and offering critiques.
Then 28 year old Hideki Kamiya was put in charge of what was to be Capcom’s biggest release of the year and a hotly anticipated sequel.
The early development of Resident Evil 2 did not go particularly well. Mikami was continually dissatisfied with what he played, from what I’ve heard the team weren’t particularly happy with how the game was going either and it became clear that the planned release date of May 1997 was no longer realistic, so while encouraging his team: believing that RE2 had the bones of a good game and that Kamiya should stay where he was, Shinji Mikami ordered the roughly 75% complete original build of Resident Evil 2 scrapped and for its stronger assets to be retained and the scenario redone from the ground up.
This game is known today as Resident Evil 1.5 and you can actually download and play it. The general consensus is, just as Mikami said, it’s a pretty bland experience.
With a new Resident Evil 2 came new problems.
Shinji Mikami, seemingly allergic to money, wanted the immensely popular series to end there at number 2 while supervisor Yoshiki Okamoto envisioned Resident Evil as a sprawling IP or Metaseries a bit like James Bond where many self-contained yet thematically linked stories could be told. That second idea will sound familiar to modern RE fans… because that’s exactly what the series is today.
To cut a very long story short, Resident Evil 2’s new scenario, written by screenwriter Noboru Sugimura was instrumental in saving the project.
A conscious effort to bring the narrative and presentation in line with Hollywood gave the game a solid, innovative focus and finally, after an apology included with the Resident Evil Director’s Cut and almost a whole year of extra development time, RE2 arrived in early 1998 on the original PlayStation, selling faster than both Final Fantasy 7 and Super Mario 64. It was ported to DOS and basically every contemporary machine besides the Saturn, which was dead by then and soon to be replaced by the Dreamcast.
Version Rundown
I desperately wanted to play the Nintendo 64 version of Resident Evil 2 for this episode, it has a randomizer, was an insane technical achievement and came with some really quirky options to play with but loose copies were sold out and boxed copies…
Well, let’s just say the price is a bit steep. I can’t really afford to wait the 5+ days Ebay would take, I’m trying to get these reviews out quickly.
Now, I’ve been looking for an opportunity to pay some kind of tribute to the recently-turned 30 year old PlayStation, it was an immensely important milestone in the history of gaming and a console I have a great respect for; I’ve criticised it a lot for sure but what some people (and by some people, I mean the strawman opponents in my head, nobody reading) don’t seem to get is that you can critique something savagely and still really like it.
My brutally yellowed PS1 even gets something of a shrine next to the Trinitron.
The PS1 is a little bit like a washed up action hero for me, it’s a bit embarrassing to see it keep trying when they bring out its titles again in the modern era (remember that shitty MediEvil Remaster?) and maybe a little fun to laugh at how dated it is but when you open up one of those gorgeous jewel CD cases, pop in a classic and play it on the appropriate kind of TV, it becomes very clear, very quickly why the PS1 so utterly destroyed its competition and why gamers of a certain age put it on a pedestal.
Frankly? Sony had serious balls and they were the only console manufacturer that didn’t make any stupid decisions or release a convoluted set of add-ons.
The PS1 is such a no-fuss console. When playing this library, you don’t have to worry abut RAM Expansions, controller accessories or swapping the Memory Pak in and out to save if you have the Rumble Pak; literally 1 game: Ape Escape required a DualShock controller instead of the original gamepad, so no need to purchase another pad if you didn’t want to either. Furthermore, the PS1 went all in on disc-based 3D gaming at a time when Nintendo stubbornly clung to the horrendously poor storage of a cartridge and the Saturn was pretty clearly engineered to excel at 2D more.
Sony’s PlayStation might have been the weakest console of its generation on paper but the machine’s architecture, comparative ease to program on and gargantuan install base made it every developer’s favourite and allowed it to boast the most technically impressive titles; this library is one of the largest ever at over 4000 games, that’s more than double the Saturn library and more than twenty times the size of the N64’s.
I’ve gotten pretty far off topic but my point is, this is one of the essential retro consoles and if you buy just one console from the early 3D era, even if I prefer the Nintendo 64, you should make it this one.
Now, back to Resident Evil 2.
Listen, I know they’re more fragile than the Soviet Union in December 1991 but I love the jewel cases of these early 3D consoles: both the blue, PAL Dreamcast ones and these PlayStation cases, they are so compact and aesthetic, the box art really gets to shine.
I’d describe the PlayStation 1 version of Resident Evil 2 as the baseline experience. It doesn’t have any extra content or high resolution backgrounds like on Dreamcast or DOS or the improved 3D models and music of the Nintendo 64 which aren’t possible on the weaker hardware but what’s here is the cheapest, most accessible version of the game outside of emulation or maybe GOG; it was only £25 complete in box, you can find it basically anywhere and apart from some long loading times, there is nothing ‘wrong’ with this version per-se.
If you’re playing on PS5 then I have to guess this is the version you’ll be experiencing too.
If you’re looking for a more authentic experience, I’m not sure if the emulator has this option but I recommend putting on scanlines in a CRT filter (I did it, I said the thing!) they are very noticeable on a real PS1 and give the game a really pleasant look, at least to me.
The canon version of Resident Evil 2 is Claire scenario A followed by Leon scenario B, so that’s the route I’ll be taking, on the PS1, this game is 2 discs and to play Claire first, you have to put in the Claire disc and vice versa for Leon.
Rotten Arm Of The Law
Resident Evil 2 kicks off about 2 months after the end of the first game in late September of 1998, the surviving members of S.T.A.R.S: Brad Vickers, Jill Valentine, Barry Burton, Chris Redfield and Rebecca Chambers returned home to Raccoon City to ridicule and mockery; most of the city is employed by Umbrella and its institutions have fallen foul of some pretty endemic corruption, so the team are laughed at for their nonsense story and quietly vanish from the public eye, not before gathering some pretty damning evidence against their own constabulary, which is of course, haphazardly scattered around on readable notes.
In the early hours of the 29th of September, one Claire Redfield is driving into town. Unable to contact her brother Chris, she’s heading for the Raccoon Police Department to pay him a visit in the office, as you can probably imagine, unbeknownst to Claire, shit has hit the fan in the city.
Resident Evil 2 has 4 scenarios across 2 campaign routes, if I covered every version of events we’d be here all week so I’m going to stick with that Claire A - Leon B canon path.
I’m sure Mr. Kennedy (no, not that one) needs no introduction given his enduring popularity, iconic status and the fact that 90% of the world’s population has played Resident Evil 4 but if you need a quick refresher then this is Leon’s first day on the job and according to the manual, he’s so damn late because he got drunk the previous night after a breakup… that explains the sad boy haircut.
Resident Evil 2’s shift to a Hollywood-esque presentation and some really great voice talent makes it much, much easier to take this one seriously. Paul Haddad (who I’ll be dedicating an entire section to later) as Leon is convincing as an inexperienced yet confident police officer, he has no idea what’s going on or why but was more than happy to bump off the undead to rescue Claire. Leon is a bit naïve but he’s got heart.
Claire Redfield was voiced by Alyson Court both here and in Code Veronica as well as in some other RE spin-offs, I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that for me? Court’s is THE voice of Claire Redfield, there can be no substitute. Claire in RE2 is a little more maternal than Jill Valentine was in the first game but also a little less skittish, you get the impression she’s a little more mature than Jill was and that Chris maybe told her about the Mansion, her biker getup gives her a bit of a tomboy-ish edge too.
I have to say I absolutely adore the opening section of RE2, much more than its remake. In 2019’s RE2, you spend all of 30 seconds on the Raccoon City streets but in this game it’s a decent 5-10 minute stretch of gameplay.
The moment you gain control of either Leon or Claire you’re plunged into absolute carnage; no still, abandoned Main Hall this time, you’re on the streets: you’re outside that imagined hellscape beyond the interior you could never go in the first game. Outside means unsafe.
Worse yet? The streets are in ruins and the legions of the dead are shambling towards you.
I love the battered ‘No Trucks’ sign next to the exploded truck, it isn’t often you see (intentional) comedy in early Resident Evil.
The mad scramble to the Raccoon City Police Department takes Claire or Leon through streets engulfed with flames, a gun shop that folds under the horde’s relentless assault, ruined back alleys and around the front of the RPD Building where the undead are already wandering the courtyard. It’s brilliant.
Resident Evil 2 concerns itself much less with teaching the player than the first game, instead, it gives us what we all came here for: what we were all wanting when we slapped that disc in the PS1’s tray and hit power. It’s the sequel, the gameplay needs no introduction, the zombies don’t need a dramatic reveal, this is a game made for fans of the original.
In the modern era where franchises chase exponential growth and the nebulous idea of the ‘new player’ I love it that this game was unapologetically made for fans of the first. Old sequels were like this and I miss that.
Ultimately, no matter which character you picked, you will eventually find your way to the RPD Building: this game’s Mansion equivalent, where after a quick conversation with a wounded cop, you’ll unlock the Main Hall’s doors and then the game will truly begin.
There’s no Bravo Team to hunt for or mission to accomplish, the aim is simple: get out of the city and avoid the streets while doing it.
Resident Evil 2’s opening, the boarded up windows in the initial corridors and the first couple of notes you find give it a much less isolated horror and more of a post-apocalyptic survival feel; Capcom didn’t seek to create a scenario with a bigger, better, scarier building than the Spencer Mansion, rather, something with its own distinct appeal.
The overarching feeling I got while playing the original game was loneliness. Liminal hallways and barren corridors, devoid even of music made the silence deafening and isolation crushing whereas in the sequel, the focus is on the futility of it all: the windows have all been broken into, the barricades are bloodstained where people died in spite of them and every room has been abandoned for mere hours as law and order fled for escape and safety… and found neither.
In general, the dated, 1998-standard horror here was more effective than I imagined it’d be, some of the soundtracks and accompanying areas like the Parking Garage gave a genuine sense of foreboding and since I play in the dark with headphones, every jump scare caused my skeleton to make an escape attempt out of my skin; classic Resident Evil games are a nightmare for arachnophobes too, if you’re the type of person that can’t handle a big spider on-screen, skip this game.
Leaps And Bounds
If there’s one thing you’ve likely noticed already, it’s that Resident Evil 2 blows its predecessor out of the water graphically. Without a doubt, of the PlayStation 1 games I’ve played, this one is the most visually impressive.
Of course, on a CRT and coming out of a PlayStation the backgrounds aren’t quite this crisp but the scanlines give them a wonderful look regardless and if you want to achieve something close on classic hardware, you could always play the Dreamcast version through a VGA cable on an old PC monitor, or sell a kidney for Gamecube component cables.
Besides the visuals, the zombies have received a serious upgrade too and I’m not just talking about textures and models.
For a start, you can get rooms packed with the undead now and yet the humble PlayStation maintains a stable framerate, this is a far cry from the first game where the most you ever found was 4 in 1 room: the Lab’s main corridor, the developers struggled to make it work back then so those zombies had to be nude. This is why discourse about hardware and specs is often so useless, the right team with the right talent will make it work and the deeper we get into a generation, the better people understand how to push a machine to its limits; the N64 version of this game fits on 1 cartridge and has better models and music, pure wizardry.
The biggest improvement though is in the way zombies behave. In Resident Evil 1, it was very easy to slip past once you worked out the pattern: get their attention, wait for a few seconds for them to turn into a wall, then sprint through the gap they.
No chance of doing that in the RPD.
Zombies lunge and swing for you as you sprint past, sometimes diving in their attempt to catch you, they crawl and grasp at your feet, lurch back as you pump them full of rounds only to keep on going when you think they’re going to fall, I found the animations to be pretty incredible for a game on this system.
Just like RE2 Remake, the best strategy here is to pop a few rounds in them and run for it, ammo is more scarce in this game and the undead take some serious punishment before they go down for good.
Now I’ve reawakened the childhood trauma of 80’s kids, let’s talk about the Lickers.
Bluntly? I don’t like them.
One of RE2’s more iconic additions to the Resident Evil franchise, the Lickers are an enemy type that can attack from range with a long tongue, hang from ceilings and are completely blind, relying on sound and touch to locate the player.
I’m not sure if there’s some hidden mechanic I’m not aware of or if I was doing something completely wrong but I found that no matter how slowly I walked and even if I stopped moving while the Licker sat up to listen closer, I’d get caught no matter what and damaged, this got so annoying that towards the end of the RPD section of the game, I just decided to kill every Licker I saw and take the ammo hit on the chin.
Resident Evil 2 is a much more difficult game than the first, to the point where I’m fairly certain I exhausted every herb in the station in scenario A and found myself resetting the game to last save a couple of times in order to make some of my journeys again but less sloppy; if you’re not experienced with this franchise, don’t start here.
I’ve speedrun RE2 Remake in less than 2 hours and 20 minutes without using item boxes on Hardcore, believe me when I tell you this one is no joke until you get the flow of the game.
Despite my struggle, I do feel that Resident Evil 2 is, broadly speaking, a better balanced experience than the original. Handgun ammo might be more scarce and herbs might be rarer but Ink Ribbons are more common and the RPD has several save rooms in convenient locations, so you’re never far from a quick breather. Additionally, Resident Evil 2 gives you more tools to go on the offense with, including a couple of high damage but limited use weapons.
I felt like a bit of an idiot for not using my weapons more by the time I got to the lab because I was swimming in grenade launcher shells and limited use weapons at 50% or more ammo because as usual, I do my best to not kill anything in these games. If you’re going to play RE2 then please, if a room has zombies that keep tagging you, or is completely full of shamblers then just take them out, eating all the RPD’s herbs isn’t worth it when Capcom gives you the tools to kick some serious ass. When you absolutely must kill, there is often ammo around the corner to compensate for it.
I got to play the late game like Doom at least.
Back to the presentation now and every Resident Evil fan knows that this is the most iconic soundtrack in the franchise. Even if you’ve never played RE2 or watched any content on these games, I guarantee you’ve heard some of the music from this game in passing.
Resident Evil 2’s save room theme is one of my absolute favourites, it’s moody and futile, yet also soothing, it’s the hopelessness of the fight along with the inevitability that sooner or later, you’re going to have to walk out that door and keep on moving.
It seems to be mandated under YouTube guidelines that every Resident Evil retrospective or lore video contains Ada’s Theme and there’s a good reason why: it’s fantastic. The piano in RE2 is such a highlight of the soundscape and there’s something inherently feminine sounding about this song. (I’m not a music critic, I don’t really have a clue what I’m talking about, just trying to articulate why I enjoy these songs.)
The Main Hall Theme almost sounds like the soundtrack for an ice level with that specific kind of ‘chime’ sound, I’m not sure what (synthesised) instrument that would be but I like it a lot; the Main Hall is cold, imposing and eerily clean and abandoned when the rest of the RPD is in ruins.
The original game had some great music too but Resident Evil 2’s tunes are on a whole other level.
Folie A Deux
Unlike the choice between Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine in RE1, the choice between Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield in the sequel is less about difficulty (which is now a selectable setting regardless of character) and more about who you prefer and which signature weapon you’d like: Claire’s devastating grenade launcher with its different ammo types and spread, or Leon’s potent shotgun which can cleave off the heads of 2, 3 or more zombies in a single blast.
Claire is still often considered the easier of the two but I’m going to go against the grain here and disagree.
Leon’s handgun is way better, holding more ammo and able to be upgraded to fire in 3 round bursts and for experienced RE players like myself, you can clear a whole horde of zombies in as little as 2 shots if you aim that boomstick properly. Sure, Claire gets the lockpick and thus easier access to some extra supplies, but these caches are few and far between.
If there is a health disparity between the two then I’m not noticing it because both characters are seriously tanky, likely a conscious choice given the much higher enemy counts. On average it’ll take you 2-3 hits to go down from Fine to Caution and maybe 7-8 overall to kill you, depending on enemy type and whether you were hit from behind or not.
In a few sections, you get to play as Sherry Birkin, a character I’ll be explaining more later. The 2019 remake of RE2 is sometimes savaged online by hardcore fans of the original for removing content and while there are areas where I agree this has been a net-negative, the brief Sherry sections in RE2 Classic were pretty dull to play, so I think the right choice was made.
One of Resident Evil 2’s greatest innovations is the zapping system: a mechanic where choices made in scenario A effect your second playthrough as the opposite character in scenario B. The most meaningful example of this is probably in the Parking Garage beneath the RPD, where you stumble across the Side Pack: extra storage space and a Submachine Gun, you’re encouraged to take one and leave the other for scenario B but you can actually take both if you’re really struggling or not planning to play the second run.
I love how this isn’t a forced, video-gamey choice. Choices are always more compelling when I have to deal with the consequences of my actions, not the consequences of the game developers pressing me into doing something.
I took the Submachine Gun as Claire and left the Side Pack for Leon’s B campaign.
Not The Same Same But Different
The biggest shock for me in playing classic Resident Evil 2 at last is just how different it is from its 2019 counterpart. If you’ve played RE2 2019, then you’ve not experienced this game, they are almost nothing alike despite sharing the same plot and locations.
That isn’t a comparison I make favourably, while some cuts are understandable, this classic vision of the RPD feels a lot more realised than its reimagining.
In classic Resident Evil 2, by the time I left the RPD, I truly felt like I’d exhausted every room and puzzle, picking the building clean whereas in Resident Evil 2 Remake, you experience most of the building on that initial medallion hunt and returning just doesn’t hit the same and can feel like you’re just sprinting through the same places again.
Classic RE2 has quite a few puzzles and item collections that were cut from the REmake. You spend about 60% of the game in the Police Station with no opportunity to return later so I have to imagine some of the changes made were to improve the pacing… but I prefer the game structure of the original, even after just an initial playthrough.
The hunt for the 3 stones as Claire to unlock the way out in Chief Irons’ office is like an echo of the medallion hunt in the first game, showing that even at the highest level, Umbrella’s tentacles of influence reach deep into Raccoon City.
The way RE2 Classic handled William Birkin was different too, I’m not sure which I prefer yet.
In classic RE2, Birkin is a kind of looming dread: a monster you’ll inevitably have to face leaving a trail of carnage throughout the whole game’s run time but you only ever see the man himself on a few occasions before you have 2 brief encounters as Claire where he succumbs to some flame grenade spam.
I’ll discuss RE2R’s William Birkin and the B scenario of RE2 in more depth tomorrow but the long and short of it is that he takes a much more active role in that game’s story and is a bit of a constant nuisance; I realise now why classic fans are so upset with the remake’s B scenario too, it is such a bloody nothingburger compared to this game.
The Beginning Of The End
Resident Evil 2 represents what is probably the most well-told and emotive storyline in the franchise. On the surface, it’s about the T-Virus being spread from sewer rats to the surface, William Birkin’s self-administering of the new, deadlier G-Virus (the Raccoon City outbreak did not originate with the Mansion outbreak, as is sometimes falsely stated) and the struggle to eradicate this new strain and escape the downfall of the city but beneath this basic premise, it’s actually quite character driven.
Put simply, the first game was about the mission: it was about rescuing Bravo Team, tracking down your missing partner and getting to the bottom of the outbreak. RE2 is a lot different, RE2 is about people, not events.
Leon’s campaign especially shows a satisfying arc for the character and sets up his persona in Resident Evil 4 (somewhat) convincingly.
His naïve, good cop, altruistic mindset gets him in trouble when he winds up trusting Ada Wong and the game doesn’t end with him receiving a medal, returning to the police force or a heroic quip about saving the day, it ends with a rejection of authority and jurisdiction: a declaration that he’s going to stop the shapeless multinational corporation that is Umbrella, the implication being that he’ll go above and beyond the law and his station to do so. Leon learns that a uniform and good intentions aren’t enough to do real good when bastard like Chief Irons are getting paid to turn a blind eye.
I don’t want to look too deep into a PS1 game’s plot when it’s ostensibly about zombies that eat people and a man with a giant eyeball for a shoulder but it’s worth considering too that the entire outbreak was caused by William Birkin’s ego, the virus didn’t just leak by accident for the plot, it was unleashed out of spite and a refusal to die uncredited for his work.
The Resident Evil franchise got stupid not long after Resident Evil 2, with Albert Wesker returning as a knock-off Agent Smith, an entire region of Spain being infested with brain worms and going primitive, kidnapping the US President’s daughter without the government, the police or NATO lifting a finger and instead sending one guy with a handgun; don’t even get me started on Resident Evil 5 and 6.
A few decades on now, with Resident Evil having jumped the shark so high it’s in orbit, I thoroughly appreciate how grounded and relatively sensible the first 3 games are.
Twisted DNA
I think it should be clear by now that I don’t disagree with the consensus on this one: Resident Evil 2 is better than its predecessor in virtually every conceivable metric, however, that doesn’t mean there aren’t issues.
For one, finding certain items seems to be about luck more than a keen eye. Sure, key items always emit a sparkle or are placed in clear view, so you don’t find the right room but miss the intended discovery, however, Ink Ribbons are miniscule so unless you have good eyesight, or pick up on the fact that the tiny speck next to each typewriter is a fresh supply, you’re going to suffer; certain ammo picks up too are obtained by randomly tapping X on certain lockers and cupboards, it doesn’t always feel fair.
The enemy numbers and encounters are mostly fair in Resident Evil 2, giving you enough ammo to not run around the game half dead but also not to be reckless, that being said, the RPD’s Eastern half was quite frustrating with the sheer number of enemies there are and how difficult they are to get past without losing either health or supplies.
The 2 rooms and 2 corridors I’ve highlighted are all absolutely infested and since these are relatively often travelled places, you will be either bleeding ammo or getting irritated at the sheer number of enemies and how hard it is to avoid some of them. The Evidence Room next to the Western Office is just a joke too, I almost burst out laughing at how absurdly bullshit it is in there: a tiny room with upwards of 6 zombies, you pay the toll in ammo or you get half-eaten.
Paul
It was a great pleasure in the first Resident Evil retrospective to talk about the group of obscure actors who portrayed S.T.A.R.S Team Alpha in the live action cutscenes and how they were embraced by the community decades later. Unfortunately, there won’t be such a happy section here.
In 2020, Paul Haddad: the original voice actor for Leon S. Kennedy was taken from us by throat cancer.
Throat cancer is a disease that often ruins your voice, it makes the throat sore, your ears ache and can cause a persistent cough, it’s painful to think that Paul may have lost the thing that made his career: his voice by the end but it’s okay because the sound of his voice is forever preserved and Paul’s impact on this franchise and its fans will never be forgotten.
Though he never reprised his role as Leon, Paul was the original, the template, the performance to which all others should aspire.
Rest in peace, Paul Haddad.
The Train Out
Resident Evil 2 is well-deserving of its classic status.
No matter what version of this excellent game you play: PlayStation, Dreamcast, DOS, GOG… okay, maybe not the Tiger Game.com port, you’re bound to have a fantastic time. RE2 leaves what made the original game so unique and beloved alone, instead forging its own path and using the same ingredients to create a wildly different, more tasty recipe; this ain’t the Jill Sandwich it’s a Claire… croissant?
There’s a reason I don’t do stand up.
Part of why I do this whole marathon each year is my love for the franchise but also because sitting in the dark, in front of the warm glow of a tube TV, controller in hand, with a nice beverage, playing Resident Evil is just the peak of gaming for me and now that I’ve added this long overdue addition to my collection, I’ll look forward to revisiting the original RPD for many more Octobers in future.
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