200X’s – Multiplayer Resident Evil 4.

Reminiscing about the last decade seems to be all the rage at the moment. Arguments aside about the real starting date of the 201X’s it seems like a nice time to recount a few memories that have stood out to me since the calendar flipped from 1999 to 2000. As such through the rest of January I am going to write a few reminiscent posts about events in gaming and gaming culture that have stood out for me over the last ten years.

My love of the Resident Evil games should come as no surprise if you have been reading DoFuss for any length of time. Horror games now form the backbone of many of my articles, but it was back in 1996 (when the original Resident Evil hit Playstation) that the seeds of my passion were sown. I played it exhaustively from spring to autumn uncovering every inch of the zombie-infested mansion, and enjoyed every moment.

The beginnings of my passion.

Eight years later the release of Resident Evil 4 was growing near. By this stage I had already moved to Japan. My game time had reduced dramatically, in favour of copious drinking, and the majority of my playtime limited to handhelds. Resident Evil 4 though had earned a special place in my calendar (even if I was upset about the change in camera perspective).

As fate would have it I didn’t have to wait for release day to get my first taste of the game. A visit to the bookstore on the twenty-ninth of October 2004 revealed a Famitsu Capcom special with a demo disk tucked away inside its pages. I bought the magazine, emailed my roommates, cancelled my drinking plans, and rushed home.

I still have the magazine.

Talking about the game at this point would be superfluous, suffice to say it reenergised my beloved franchise with fantastic new gameplay and looked better than I had ever expected while doing so. But this isn’t what stood out about this experience for me. My recollections of the demo don’t revolve around the offerings on the disk, they revolve around the excitement everyone in the small apartment felt for the game.

My flatmates and I played the game for weeks, constantly one upping each other’s scores. We worked out the most efficient ways to collect gold, where to stand, when to hole up, and when to run. We found every item, unlocked the hidden machine gun and wrung ever-single moment of entertainment out of the twenty minute demo, finding new ways to challenge each other daily.

It is undeniable that the game itself gave me a lot of enjoyment, but the greater experience came from the competition within the flat. Our working hours meant we could rarely play together but the asynchronous play of our artificial challenges meant we could all share in the experience.

Peculiarly it was one of my most treasured single player series fuelled what may have been one of my fondest multiplayer experiences of the last ten years. Sadly this decade has seen competitive and co-operative play move into the online space with many developers abandoning local multiplayer support. I could make a grand statement about this being the of an era, or bemoan the new generation of gamers for shunning local multiplayer, but the fact is as an adult I would have not time for it anyway.

As close to perfect as I could have hoped.

So it is that I will continue to live in blissful memories of the past and blame my life style for the loss of this facet of gaming. I just hope Nintendo to keep face-to-face gaming alive for the next generation of gamers, because it would be a shame to loose it and it doesn’t look like anyone else will.

The full game Resident Evil 4? It was incredible.