You’ve all been spared. Consider yourselves lucky.
I didn’t manage to go outside and take half a billion pictures of the snow yesterday, and not entirely because I didn’t want to. I kinda did, even though the storm turned out to be more ‘average’ than ‘blizzard’. Instead, I stayed inside and played RE5.
This is a real first for me. I’ve never actually played any of the other REs — unless you count Umbrella Chronicles, which I’ve played often, and even on my own — so it took some getting used to. By the end, I still hadn’t figured out all the buttons.
Gremlin insists that I’m still better than the computer-controlled version of the character, but I doubt it. The computer controlled character didn’t inadvertently set herself on fire during that oh-so-Legend of Zelda mirror tilting bit with the amazing primitive lasers.
Yesterday kinda went like this: Gremlin woke up, came out here, and, instead of going directly to his office, sat down with me, handed me my Xbox controller, and declared that I was going to play co-op with him, since he stopped playing yesterday as soon as he’d gotten enough points to make one of his guns all infinite.
As a plan, it’s not all that complex. And, being a plan, it did not go at all accordingly.
It turns out that you can’t, in fact, cheat that way.
I spent most of the game running into walls, getting grabbed by not-zombies, and generally hoarding ammunition while Gremlin destroyed things with his infinite-ammo automatic magnum. That is, when I wasn’t confusing buttons and accidentally accessing my inventory, or making my character yell ‘come on’, or turning off my map when I didn’t mean to. Or accidentally aiming when I meant to push the button that shows me where the other player is.
…but I did figure out how to reload my gun without letting it get to zero. I think it’s Left-trigger and A.
It’s a very short game. Surprisingly short. And I don’t think that had a lot to do with the fact that we were playing on the easiest mode. Too short, really. Because I really, really didn’t want to find myself facing Wesker. I’d already seen that fight, and it didn’t look like anything I wanted to take part in.
Guess where I found myself? Yeah. Facing Wesker. With the fucking rocket launcher. Which, it turns out, I can reload all by myself.
We got through with a fairly minor number of deaths, all things considered. And I was able to upgrade the basic gun to infinite ammo. Now I just need to get enough points together to upgrade one of the automatics, and maybe the magnum. Then it’ll be fun. My accuracy will go to hell [as if it isn’t already there] but it’ll be fun.
I’m kinda glad they did it this way, even though it’s not really Survival Horror so much as ‘oh shit oh shit checkpoint where’s the fucking checkpoint’. It’s a lot of fun. I guess that’s what matters, right?
Eh, it could have been worse. I played the demo with a friend who doesn’t normally play this style of game…ever. We were in the Shanty town and I had sent him over to the other building to let me out. After he got past the horde, I told him to open the gate that had me locked in.
…
Well he got a little confused and wound up walking to the other gate. The one with the chainsaw Majini. All I remember after that was myself yelling “No, not that gate!” then some yelling from him, followed by a prompt “your partner is dead” message.
My first taste of this game was with the demo, which is why I didn’t jump right in with Gremlin from the beginning. I was the one killing us in that thing, more often than not. And that was just with Giant Fucking Axe Guy.
When it came to him this time around, and Chainsaw Guy, and pretty much every other big nasty…let’s just say that if there were an achievement for it, you’d find “Master of the Big Scaredy Run-away” listed among mine, right there with the one about fire and the one about exploding heads.