Paying for Resident Evil 5 Versus Mode is stupid.

First they made us pay for costumes in Street Fighter IV; now, Capcom is making us fork over some dough for competitive multiplayer in Resident Evil 5.  They have multitudes and multitudes of excuses defenses for this: the time spent programming this mode, the extra burden on the servers, delivering it to the consumers–all of those things cost money, so they’re kindly passing the costs on to us.

Funny how Gears of War 2, Call of Duty 4, Call of Duty 5, Halo 3, Halo Wars, Killzone 2, Resistance 2, and a whole SLEW of other games come packaged with full online and offline offerings for both competitive and cooperative play.  It’s also funny how the publishers of those games don’t think that we should pay extra to make use of those modes, and it’s hilarious how the extra strain on their servers aren’t so overwhelming that the gamers have to shell out another $5 to play these modes.

Seriously Capcom: do you think that we’re all stupid?

I wasn’t excited about RE5 at all to begin with.  Judging from the demo, it seems to be a game that has a severe identity crisis.  Now it’s yet another way to rip gamers off.  Five bucks for a feature that the game could have easily shipped with?  Seriously?  This isn’t an expansion we’re talking about.  This isn’t extra levels or characters: this is versus mode.

While not as big a rip as the extra costumes for Street Fighter IV (I’m thoroughly convinced that crap is just paying to have an on-disc feature unlocked), it’s still a pretty big rip-off.  It’s like paying to play Slayer in Halo 3, or having to pay an additional subscription fee to access PvP realsm (or even instanced PvP) in World of Warcraft. Both of those sounds ridiculous; about as ridiculous as Capcom’s pyramid scheme.

Resident Evil 5 demo is awesomely underwhelming

I played Capcom’s demo for the highly anticipated Resident Evil 5.

Hey Capcom, there’s this new thing: it’s called dual analog control.  It lets gamers have their player-characters do really cool things, like move and shoot at the same time.  If you’re going to make a game that focuses on balls-out action, then you might want to set up the game mechanics for such a thing.

I’ve always enjoyed the Resident Evil games.  The first RE was one of the most-played games of my teens.  It captured my imagination and was my first real introduction to the horror genre in that I became interested in the tropes and conventions that inspired the game.  RE2 and RE3 were great games in their own right, but they abandoned the atmosphere and tone that made the first game so intriguing, trading scares for explosions and survival for action-heroism; what’s more, the traditional RE controls are not anywhere near appropriate for twitch combat.

RE4 finally hit a sweet spot of action and horror.  Sure, Leon Kennedy had a few moments composed entirely of implausible awesomenosity, but all-in-all the controls were revamped to accommodate the gun-slinging that Capcom seemed to want to cram down our throats and the game still had some legitimately tense, thrilling moments.  Plus, the spooky village and its crazed inhabitants more than made up for the lack of zombies.

RE5, so far, is a return to the summer-Hollywood-blockbuster goodness that was RE2 and 3–plus Chris Redfield has to stand perfectly still to aim and fire his weapons.  You think that would have been a design flaw of RE4 that was corrected, since it was so freakin’ obvious.  But no: you’ve got to plant your feet to shoot.  You’re a highly-trained police officer with a military background, but you can’t shoot on the run.

I hope the total package makes up for this (which I doubt will be fixed before the release) with the rest of the game, and I hope the tone of the inaugural entry is revisited (though I doubt that: in the demo alone there is enough ammo to stock a small paramilitary force, and illogically long streams of enemies).