 Capcom’s recent Resident Evil 25th anniversary celebrations got us thinking about the long-running survival horror series’ best moments, which, naturally, immediately set our skin crawling. There are tons of games, but just one iconic moment to choose. What stands out to you? Let us know in the comments below.
 Things don't end well for Steve. Sam Resident Evil is one of my all-time favourite franchises and picking just one highlight from a lifetime of fandom is incredibly hard. As such, I’ve settled on a bit of a cop out. I have fond memories of playing my older brother’s copies of the original trilogy, then commandeering RE4 to complete countless playthroughs. I was far too young, but it was almost unavoidable while sharing a bedroom with my years-older sibling and his teenage tastes. Although the series has gone somewhat off the rails at times, recently, Resident Evil is back at its best. RE7 and the upcoming Village (based on its playable demo) both offer a great new take on the franchise, though it’s reliving those old memories in the excellent remakes that’s most special to me. Resident Evil 2 (2019) is an exceptional remake of a classic entry. Yes, I’m choosing an entire game rather than a specific moment - there are too many highlights to pick between in that game alone! The introductory zombie in the petrol station, battling lickers inside the police department, evading the Tyrant’s constant pursuits. There’s never a dull moment during the perfectly-paced campaign.  Leon's first day at work is pretty rough, he even misses his own welcome party. Liam I have a complicated relationship with the Resident Evil series, so I have mixed feelings when it comes to celebrating its anniversary. The original game, which I first encountered around 7, absolutely terrified me and probably led to my irrational fear of zombie games. Having grown up in a Nintendo household, I thought I was safe from the series until RE2 somehow ended up on N64. Still not brave enough to play myself, but a little bit older and tad more curious, I would watch (from a safe distance, of course) as my older brother tackled Raccoon City’s zombie problem and almost, almost, found myself enjoying it. There were other missteps; a brief dabble with RE3 on a borrowed PlayStation, and years later I bought and quickly returned a copy Resident Evil 0 on GameCube after incorrectly thinking I had matured enough to brave its content. It wasn’t until Resident Evil 4 that I played and enjoyed a Resident Evil game. The focus on action over horror definitely helped, but it was the Chicago Typewriter unlock that made things really fun. Watching my brother blitz his way through enemies and bosses with the ridiculously overpowered submachine gun was both hugely entertaining and cathartic and is definitely my best memory of the series.  "Stranger, Stranger! Now that's a weapon." What's your favourite Resident Evil memory? Let us know below.
 With Microsoft beefing up framerates on some of the Bethesda games it’s adding to Game Pass, we’ve been thinking about the difference a good FPS can make. As the console experience continues to diverge, a reliable framerate is harder to come by than you might expect – sometimes even if you have been lucky enough to get your hands on a PS5 or Xbox Series X|S. We’ve got a few ideas, but what game would you like to revisit with a lightning-fast framerate? Let us know in the comments.
 A BF3 mini revival ahead of the next Battlefield would be very cool. Sam | Deadly Premonition 2 Last year’s sequel to Deadly Premonition wasn’t particularly well received due to some social and technical mishaps. While updates have altered the offending scenes and (ever so slightly) improved the low frame-rate, FPS Boost would make for a great final push. The original Deadly Premonition is a glorious mess, and the sequel is no different. DP2: A Blessing in Disguise understandably wasn’t afforded as many free passes as its predecessor, however. Now an established cult classic franchise with the backing of Nintendo, a lot of players seemed to skip the Switch-based sequel on principle. Skateboarding around the fictional town of Le Carré, Louisiana is like watching a slideshow. Francis York Morgan is no Tony Hawk to begin with, but he moves at a crawl set to a music track that sounds as if the developers typed “radical” into a stock library. Now don’t get me wrong, I find that juxtaposition hysterical, but it immediately puts a lot of people off. Although FPS Boost is an Xbox feature, applying it to Deadly Premonition 2 would open the underrated title up to a whole new audience. Arguably, there’s far more value in that than refining games that already run at a steady 30 frames per second.  Even Francis got a headache from the dodgy framerate. James | Borderlands 3 While it only suffered a few performance issues, as I noted when I tackled Borderlands 3 for our review, they turned out to be consistent enough for me to put the game down and not jump back in. It’s difficult to get a consistent framerate in an open world of course, but there’s so much that draws me back to the colourful world of Pandora, and I think a framerate jump would do the trick. Mayhem might be Borderlands’ middle name – if it had one – but when you’ve got a bandit in your sights, or you’ve unlocked a mountain of loot, raining down around you from a felled boss, it brings the whole experience down if you encounter stuttering. There’s plenty of visual effects which would benefit from a more consistent FPS as well, since the technicolour wares of the various gun makes, as well as ammunition itself in some cases, tend to make a point of filling the screen with as many particles and visual noise as possible. Even better, some of the hard work has already been done to get the game spruced up for next (soon to be current) gen consoles, so there must be a way to crunch the data, or perhaps sacrifice some resolution, to give those on Xbox One and PS4 just as shiny an experience.  Rob | GoldenEye I'm sure you've all taken a sneak-peak at the recently leaked (def, eh?) Xbox remaster footage, yeah? If not, you really should: it'll have your nostalgia juices flowing in no time. As I've mentioned many times before, the N64 era was/still is my most memorable time in gaming. There were several reasons for that, but none drove my love for the platform more than GoldenEye. I have endless memories of all-night multiplayer sessions with friends; of the hours I ploughed into the incredibly challenging single-player campaign; and the cast of characters with those wondrous cardboard Brosnan/Bean/Coltrane faces. GoldenEye will forever be in my personal top-10 list, unquestionably. What was always questionable, mind, was the tendency for the action to dip into the 9-frames-per-year mould - Jungle, we're looking at you... The opportunity to play the game with remastered graphics and a stable 60 FPS - the original was around the 15/20 mark - would be a dream-y come true-y. Picture it now, chums: slip-sliding down from that infamous vent to bash the guard on the can in Facility; running from shotgun-wielding Cossacks in Statue; dying endlessly attempting to best 00 difficulty on Control; or the cat-and-mouse runaround of Cradle. That's just the single-player, too: imagine just how wonderful a consistent 60FPS online experience could be. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it'll ever be officially released. Boo Microsoft. Boo Nintendo. Boo MGM and the Broccoli's.  There were no images of the original GoldenEye on Gamespress, only the Daniel Craig remake. Boo Gamespress. What game would you like to see receive an FPS boost? Let us know below.
 With last week’s announcement of Aliens: Fireteam re-igniting our love for the co-operative shooter and more media being streamed into our eyes than you can shake a TV Licence at, we wondered what other shows or films might make for a half-decent game tie-in. It’s a delicate balance of course, as you need characters you can latch onto, but none that are clearly overpowered, since that would upset the team dynamic. Do you have any ideas? Leave them in the comments.
 There's a Starship Troopers RTS currently in development, but no co-op shooter. James | The Boys While the recent track record with superhero games isn’t great (Marvel’s Avengers left me a little lukewarm) there’s another way to go about it, enter The Boys. There’s still a hint of superhero magic, but not so much that you get overwhelmed by it, as in The Boys the superpowers are on the opposing team. Not to mention, they are actually a team, albeit a dysfunctional one (like most online co-op games I’ve played, honestly). The best co-op shooters manage to give the individual characters just enough character, without everyone wanting to be one. Take Karl Urban’s Billy Butcher, he might be a crack shot with a shotgun, but perhaps he lets his temper get the better of him now and again, making him unreliable, so using him is a bit of a gamble. There’s certainly some balance issues to bear in mind. A flat out fight between a ragged band of ne'er-do-wells with the odd baseball bat isn’t going to do much when there’s superpowers to contend with, so perhaps a bit of Hitman-inspired infiltration will be the name of the game. Imagine sneaking into Vought Tower and pulling off a synchronised attack...  Every fight's a boss fight when you're going up against superheroes. Sam | Creepshow There’s a definite trend for bringing back old horror franchises as multiplayer and/or co-op games right now. An ideal candidate to join the growing roster would be Creepshow, the 1980s anthology series recently revived by AMC streaming service Shudder. Every episode features two standalone, tongue-in-cheek tales of terror. Its constantly rotating cast, locations and antagonists would make for a completely bonkers and incredibly varied gaming experience spread across separate levels. One minute players would be battling suburban ghosts at Halloween, next werewolves and Nazis in occupied France, then shrinking down to battle murderous miniatures in a doll’s house. The madness wouldn’t end there, either, with regenerating aliens, trickster genies, a world-eating blob and more left to eliminate. It’d be an excellent candidate for DLC expansions, too. The developers could be endlessly creative and run with almost any idea they had. As levels would be standalone, there’d be no need to worry about how to sustain the seed of something special. Lots of promising plans end up on the cutting room floor because they don’t fit a conventional story arc, which wouldn’t be an issue here.  A miniature co-op shooter actually sounds quite fun. What franchise do you think would make a good co-op shooter? Let us know below.
 This week saw the return of State of Play, Sony’s digital showcase of trailers to tempt us to finally pick up a PS5 (if they were in stock at least). A few notable absences from games we’ve seen were Horizon Forbidden West and Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, with no sign of God of War: Ragnarok either, but we did get more from a few interesting titles. Here are a few of our favourites. Leave yours in the comments.
 Just remember: dodge, duck, dip, dive and dodge. Sam Like the recent Nintendo Direct, Sony’s latest State of Play had very few surprises. That isn’t inherently bad, but, if the YouTube live chat is anything to go by, it wasn’t received well on either occasion. There were updates on several promising games here, however. It was great to finally get a proper look at Returnal from Housemarque (Nex Machina), what with it set to launch next month and all. It looks to maintain the studio’s trademark addictive, arcade-style gameplay while upping the production value and injecting an intriguing story. Oddworld: Soulstorm is coming to PlayStation Plus on PS5 at launch, which is a nice surprise that should provide some potent nostalgia come April. Deathloop will follow in May, though, as great as the gameplay looks, I don’t really jive with the psychedelic aesthetic. Methinks I’ll probably wait on the inevitable Xbox Game Pass release. Probably… As someone that isn’t generally a JRPG fan, surprisingly, I enjoyed Final Fantasy VII Remake a lot. DLC and a free PS5 upgrade in June will do nicely, though its arrival on the eve of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (sadly absent from the showcase) is somewhat questionable.  Returnal's gameplay was one of the highlights of the show. James While Returnal also piqued my interest, the game I could see myself playing, and, crucially, finishing, from the showcase was Solar Ash. The focus on movement is particularly interesting. Moving continuously while navigating the usual ebbs and flows of a boss battle is a particularly interesting challenge. The gameplay we’ve seen so far has a few similarities to games like Sunset Overdrive and even Devil May Cry, as well as rhythm-based classics like Jet Set Radio. While only their second game, studio Heart Machine has an impressive track record thanks to the well-received Hyperlight Drifter, and the backing of publisher Annapurna Interactive should let the scope of Solar Ash extend beyond their indie debut. The death mechanic in Sifu, seems interesting - whenever your character dies they return older and slightly more skilled - though given my action game skills, there’s every chance the character might die of old age before I complete it. Elsewhere in recurring death mechanics, Deathloop continues to intrigue with a James Bond-inspired presentation. Whether it will move past the tried-and-tested gameplay formula Arkane is known for remains to be seen, since a lot of what’s been shown could definitely have been from a riff on their previous work.  Here's a screenshot of James' character after completing Sifu's tutorial. What was your highlight from the State of Play? Let us know below.
|
Read MoreCategories
All
Archives
November 2023
|
RSS Feed