Retronauts - Retronauts Episode 225: Resident Evil 4

Episode Date: June 10, 2019

Resident Evil 4 has quietly been one of the most influential games of the past 20 years, and now that a shiny new port is available on the Nintendo Switch, there's never been a better time to dig into the game that redefined the third-person shooter genre. Capcom took an incredible risk by throwing out nearly everything that defined the series for its fourth iteration, and even though it took four attempts to get things right, Resident Evil 4 remains an intensely playable experience nearly 15 years later. On this episode, join Bob Mackey, Jeremy Parish, and Zachary Ryan as the crew dives into the action game that reshaped "survival horror."

This week on Retronauts. Ah, an awesome choice, stranger. for this one, Bob Mackie, and today's topic is Resident Evil 4, which is quickly approaching its 15th birthday, which is even scarier than the game itself. Before I go on any further, who is here with me today in the room? Right across to me as always, who is it? Am I, Jeremy Parrish? Does a guy in a car piss in the woods? That's right. It's true. They do out here. Things are wild and crazy. And we have a very new guest to Retronauts. For the first-time guest, who are you? I'm Zachary Ryan from Ubisoft News, and I'm currently

playing on a chainsaw controller, so. And you might know Zachary from IGN? Yeah, formerly of. You spent about five years there? Yeah, just about five years. You're at ubiquitous software. That's right. That's what I call it.

Yeah, that's what I call it too, much to my coworker's sugar in. That's the official name. Yeah. But today we're talking about Resident Evil 4. It's something I've wanted to do for a while, but it never felt quite old enough. But now we are doing episodes about things that are even newer than this game. And it is, it's quietly a very old game, even though going back to it now, it still feels fairly modern.

It can't be old because I was in the games press when this came out, and I'm still young. God damn it. Jeremy, you are young at hearts. But so in case you want to know, our history with Resident Evil on the podcast, so way back in 2016, I did a podcast that covered Resident Evil 1, 2, and 3, way too ambitious for one podcast, but I did it, and it was Resident Evil's 20th birthday way back then. Now, Resident Evil 4 is almost 15, and it's an important enough game to get its own episode.

Although, now that we are doing more episodes about individual games, I think I'll eventually circle back. For a Resident Evil remake? Yes, I'll remake those episodes, higher definition. It'll be scarier, better lighting, and so on. And on Switch. Oh, yeah, it's on Switch. So, yeah, another important thing is that Resident Evil... I mean, our podcast remake will be on Switch.

Switch needs some sort of app that's beyond YouTube. YouTube is the only multimedia app on Switch now? Those bastards. Or is a Hulu. Hulu's on there as well. Okay. How come Retronauts isn't on Hulu, damn it? Okay, so we need to put our podcast on YouTube and then you can use them on Switch.

Easy. It'll happen. It'll happen. But my crazy theory for Resident Evil 4 is like I really feel I want anyone in this room to disagree with me if they don't like this whole concept of coming up with. But I think quietly it is up there with games like Mario 64 in Occurion of Time for essentially taking what came before and redefining what was then a burgeoning genre. So there were 3D action adventure games before Zelda and Mario, but it sort of was like, no, no, this is how you do it. And then everything copied.

And I think Resident Evil 4 is the same thing for third-person shooters. There are a lot of third-person shooters before this game, and they're not very fun now. Resident Evil 4 is very fun now. And things would improve on this formula like Dead Space and further Resident Evil games. But I really think it defined what a third-person shooter could be and should be. And that was sort of the most notable genre of gaming until we are now in the Schluter slash Battle Royale realm era of gaming. Take us back to RE4, please.

Yes, yes. I've had enough Schloters. But Zachary and Jeremy, what do you think of this grand philosophy I have about Resident Evil 4? Do you think it's that important? I'm indifferent to Resident Evil 4 as a person playing video games, but I'm not going to argue against what you just said. I think it's a monumentally important game. Interesting. Yeah, I agree with you as well.

I think that it's wild that we don't hear Resident Evil 4 talked about more often in the same breath as Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time in that it's a blueprint for so many games that came after it, especially things like Stop and Pop and, you know, things like that. Like, it's wild to look back at it now and see how forward-thinking it was 15 years ago. Yeah, and I guess we'll talk about our experience with the game throughout the podcast, but I recently replayed a bit of it for the podcast. pretty long game, so I didn't have time to play all of it again for the podcast. But Zachary, I know you, I've been following your Twitter, and I know you've been doing your homework because you've been posting a lot about playing the game. What is your experience playing this game in 2019? I can talk a bit about mine, but you just play through the entire game. Yeah, so I downloaded it on my switch the day that it came out and just kind of blasted through it. Full disclosure,

I've played this game so many times. I know it like the back of my hand. It's one of my favorite games ever. So it was easy for me to just kind of storm through the whole game in the time, you know, between the release and the recording of this podcast. So yeah, I played at top to bottom and it turns out I still love it. I'm the same way. And we'll talk more about the design later, but I feel like it is, if it's not there, it's approaching being what I consider a perfect game. It's just like there are almost too many ideas in this game. And they could have easily made this like two different games with how many ideas and set pieces and just different modes there but I am still impressed by how well this game came together despite the many, many, many problems that had during development, which I guess we can get into right now.

So I want to talk about the pre-production of Resident Evil 4 because on the record, it has one of the most troubled production cycles. I'm sure there are even worse production cycles for some games that are not publicly talked about or that we don't know about yet, but Capcom was very open with just how troublesome the development of this game was. because the Resident Evil 4 went through so many different versions that had eventually spawned basically two other different games. Yeah, the development of this game goes all the way back to 98. That's right, yeah.

They first started talking about Resident Evil 4 as, you know, the next iteration in the franchise, sort of borne out of the idea that the reception to Resident Evil 3, the sales for Resident Evil 3 and remake were a little lower than they had wanted. They wanted to kind of reinvent the wheel with Resident Evil 4. but I think it's one of the first times I've encountered development hell in a game like the way that movies are trapped in pre-production forever

I feel like Resident Evil 4 was sort of in that same space Yeah, the version that was going to start in a cage is really wild I would play that game Yeah, it is a game that had troubled development And that's not like it was a new thing for the Resident Evil series I mean Resident Evil 2 famously stumbled And that game came out like a year and a half After the first Resident Evil

So even though that was, you know, mired in a bit of trouble and kind of went through a reboot in development, it still, you know, wasn't that long a depth cycle, whereas this was what? Seven years? Yeah, I think 98 was when they announced this. The Residential 4 will be on PlayStation 2. Right. And then late 2004, sorry, early 2005 is when the game actually came out. So what is that? 98 to 6 years?

six and a half year, something like that. So pretty close to what you estimated, Jeremy. But I want to talk about, like, the state of Resident Evil before Resident Evil launched. So Survival Horror was essentially redefined by Resident Evil. Of course, there were existing things like Alone in the Dark and a few other things like that, like Dr. Houser. You can look those up. They're very shaky attempts at that same sort of game. Dr. Houser?

Is that about Dugie? No, no, it's not. It's sort of like a Japanese rip-off of Alone in the Dark, but it's very much. like in the same sort of pre-rendered camera angle kind of style. I think someone mentioned that recently somewhere and yeah, okay. There are interesting YouTube let's plays of it, but yeah, there were existing, again, there were existing games

before Resident Evil sort of redefined survival horror, but it did. From 96 until 2001 mainly, that was the time survival horror had in the sun. That's when people were interested in it. Square Soft, they were considered the next big thing for just media

in general. They made their own Resident Evil with Parasite Eve and even Parasite Eve, too. Like, two more so than one. Definitely, yeah. One still was like, hey, it's an RPG, but two was like, hey, it's Resident Evil. It basically was just Resident Evil clone.

I mean, and there were Resident Evil clones. Fear Effect was probably the most elaborate one, I would say, it was like four discs or something. It was huge. Something like that. And even within Capcom, you had games like Dino Crisis. Yeah, yeah. They were very similar in mold.

Yeah, Shinji Makami went on to direct, he went from Resident Evil to Dino Crisis, just making a new survival horror series. When's Regina going to be in Smash? Oh, man. Well, they need to break back Dino Crisis first. I don't think they brought it. brought it back down from space yet.

That was the last one they made. Just like Mega Man. And Jason. Stuck in space. And Friday the 13th. Never go to space. Really? I didn't know that about space. Yeah, you'll never come back down from space if you take your franchise there.

Leprechaun went there. Jason went there. Mega Man went there. But, okay, so survival horror had a good five years to shine. But by the time it was beginning to be a little stale, the newest thing at the time and the hottest thing at the time were the burgeoning open world genre games like Grand Theft Auto. Like, by 2001, when Survival Horror was five years old, that's when Grand The Thought III hit, and that's when everybody wanted to copy that, and that's when that was the bleeding

edge of technology, not the cinematic stuff that Survival Horror was doing, but the more gameplay-focused things that Granta Thotto were doing. Of course, there were cinematics in those games, but it was more about giving you a big sandbox than sort of simulating a movie experience. And the other big game at the time was Halo. So these things were very different than the Resident Evil formats, and basically Resident Evil had to catch up because certain trademark aspects of the series that were sort of born from technological limitations were now being surpassed by new technologies where you can understand why you were looking at a bunch of blurry JPEGs in Resident Evil 1 and 2 and 3 because it's like, well, my PlayStation can't generate

an entire city, but now that it can, there's no excuse for Resident Evil to be stuck in the past like this. And even games like Code Veronica, which was on the Dreamcast and was a fully polygonal Resident Evil, that still had camera angles. Yeah, that was kind of like what squared did with Final Fantasy, with Final Fantasy 10, where they went fully polygonal, but they were like kind of baby stepping. Yeah. Right. And still had like fixed camera angles. Yeah. And that game is still a series of hallways as well, you know, like, whereas previous Final Fantasy games had at least the option to go into an overall explore. Yeah, they had such complicated over or like stage setups that you had to have a little finger say,

oh, here's an exit, by the way. By this time, Resident Evil was sort of stale. I mean, the Resident Evil movie came out in 2002, which is just kind of confusing. Like, as a fan of the series, I don't think any fan of the series likes that movie. It's totally off-brand. It's off-tone.

It's fun in a campy way. It's fun to go back to now, because it is Paul Thomas Anderson. Wait, is that the name of the director? There's two Paul Andersons. Paul Anderson is the... There's Paul T. Anderson and Paul W.S. Anderson. So Paul W.

No, Paul W. W.S. Anderson is the bad one, but he's bad in a fun way. There's a part in four that actually reminded me of something in the Resident Evil film and what's when Leon is jumping through a series of lasers. Yeah, they're a whole, like, laser hallway in the first movie. They do reference to the movie, but I think that's the most relevant Resident Evil was in the early 2000s was that Mia Jovovich movie, but the series was sort of flagging the RE remake was very good. The first game remake was very good, but did not move anything sales-wise,

with zero, unfortunately. And, you know, the spinoffs were just kind of tarnishing the brand. So they basically needed a full restart, like a full refresh to say, you know, no, we're still relevant. We were Bleeding Edge before we can be Bleeding Edge again. And Ari goes through lulls like this more than once. Like I think there was a post-R-E-6 lull like where Capcom was like, what do we do with this series? And once you punch a boulder, there's no going back.

Yes. Yes. They put out like that weird umbrella chronicle. game. Yeah, there were two of them. Yeah. There was a Raccoon City. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. The Revelation's spinoffs. There's like so many spin-offs in this series. The Revelations ones were actually pretty good. Yeah, they are. It was still like them making the same game and the same mold like they were doing with RE1. And now we were in the post-law area where there was a first-person game and they went

back to the old style with new, sort of a new execution with the R.E2 remake. But these lulls are pretty, you know, they're pretty regular for the series. But Capcom somehow always finds a way out of it. them. And that's what they were doing with this first lull. So I want to go through the troubled development of the game because it's really fascinating and so much came out of this. And I'm surprised that Capcom didn't just like wash their hands of Resident Evil entirely. They believed in this franchise so much and they knew they needed a new big game. So it basically went through three scrap prototypes for becoming the RE4 we know and love. And the first version

was directed by Hideki Kamiya, who was the director of RE2. Of course, now he's a platinum games and he basically wanted this version to be a cool and stylish action game and I think if you're listening you probably know that this eventually became double-may-cry like McCami who was the Resident Evil godfather looked at what Kamia was doing and said this is not Resident Evil it's too something else it's too Matrixe it's too cool it's too stylish you can make this a different thing and he had that power to sort of change the game so that's exactly what happened with the first version of Resident Evil it became Devil May Cry and if you play that game it is very different than the other Delphemy Crys it is like for most of the

the game, you are in a mansion, you are opening doors, you are backtracking. I kind of like it the most because of how weird it is. It's halfway between what Devil May Cry would be and what Resident Evil was. Yeah, you can definitely feel Resident Evil DNA in that game in the way that it was originally planned to be a Resident Evil game. But I think what ended up happening was that it was so far removed that they said, you can't call this a Resident Evil game. It is too different, despite the fact that they were out to recreate or reimagine what Resident Evil could be. But yeah, I do think that it definitely holds its own as a standalone series based on what Resident Evil was before it. Yeah, and I think Capcom would just completely scrap a lot of versions of games,

but I think they had invested too much in this to get rid of it entirely. I was reading about they were flying people to Spain to take pictures of things and doing more research location like that. And also I assume that it just played so well because Kamiya at that point was sort of developing that sort of stylish action genre. he would go on to move on to platinum. And I think, like, they were just saying, well, this game is too fun to just get rid of entirely,

so they turn it into something else. Well, I think it's interesting, too, and I know we'll talk about this probably a little bit later here, but despite the fact that it had so many developmental hiccups, they spun out two games, one of which is like a really successful franchise, and the other of which is like this sort of under the table kind of hit that nobody really talks about anymore.

But I just think it's fascinating that so many ideas were thrown against the wall that they eventually had enough to, you know, put out two full games in the time of this development. Yeah, it was interesting to see how much kind of wasn't wasted with this. And even the scrapped ideas for RE4 kind of found their way into the final game in certain ways, in certain, like in the setting of certain levels. So that was the first version of the game. It was supposed to start a guy named Tony. I think Dante is much cooler, so thankfully they went with Dante.

But that became Delve May Cry, and the newest one came out this year, and it's still a very good series, even though Kamiya has left. it a long time ago. Like, he was last there. I mean, I think he just directed the first one, and that was it. Yeah. That was it for him. So, second version, this began development in 2001 and was announced in 2002 as part

of the Capcom 5. Who remembers this? I sure do. It was going to save the GameCube. Free the Capcom 5. And now all about one of these games have been ported everywhere else. Well, some of the Capcom 5 never happened, period. Just one game.

Oh, I thought it was two. Dead Phoenix was the one. So in case you don't remember, the Capcom 5 were, exclusive GameCube games, exclusive is in quotes because these all went to the PS2 eventually, except for one. So, Beautiful Joe, Killer 7, there's a PC port of that that's very good, by the way. PN.O3, that's the one that actually stayed on the GameCube. I think it's because nobody wanted to play in anywhere else.

And Dead Phoenix and Resident Evil 4. Those are the five Capcom exclusive games. Go back to our GameCube podcast. It might surprise you to learn just how big of a failure GameCube was. It was a colossal failure. I think these would have been GameCube exclusive if GameCube had been a hit. And there would have been the cachet. But, I mean, you said earlier, like, you know, trying to figure out why people don't talk about this game in the same reverential tones as Mario 64.

And I think it's because it was on GameCube and people just, you know, kind of dismissed GameCube or don't really have that much respect for it. Like, the only game I really ever hear a talk about, talked about in venerating tones that started on GameCube was Metroid Prime. Like, people still think of that really highly. but can you think of any other GameCube, you know, games that originated on GameCube that command, like, huge mindshare, and people are like, oh, yeah, that's so amazing. Like, people respect games on GameCube, but none of them really have that sort of like, wow, Grand Theft Auto 3 kind of element to them. I wish that it was the Wind Waker, but not everybody likes the Wind Waker as much as I do.

It is great, but I think you're right, Jeremy, because by the time this did go other places, like I got a PS2 port maybe like 18 months later, but that's... that time everyone had played it, so it wasn't like a big deal. They announced that PlayStation port before the game shipped on GameCube. Really? Yeah, which is like such an undercut to the idea that, like, here they had been promoting this as this exclusive thing. And McCommia famously said that if it showed up anywhere else that he would cut his head off.

Yeah, yeah. And then before the GameCube game even came out, they were like, and also it's coming to PlayStation 2. Yeah. Do we know that Kami is really still alive, and that's not just like a fake Kamiya on Twitter? I mean, it could be. Yeah. I mean, so, yeah, this began development in 2001.

And that, I guess, before the GameCube launched, so maybe they didn't know, I mean, they couldn't possibly have known the GameCube would be that much of a failure. But, yeah, I can see why they would just be like, oh, yeah, just so you know PS2 people, you know, the leading platform, this will also be on PS2. I think it's totally, like, you can totally see how it went down, right?

Like, they're already reimagining this franchise that has been Capcom's, like, biggest thing thus far. And now they're going to put it on a system, like, as they're watching, it's not selling. people aren't interested in it. It doesn't have a ton of games. So they're probably freaking out during development. Like, not only are we making this highly risky game,

but we're also putting it on a system that, like, nobody's really interested in. We better figure out a better way to make some money off of this. Yeah, and then Nintendo fans could feel good about themselves because most people consider the GameCube version of Resident Evil 4 superior to the PlayStation 2 version. So they could still be like, oh, yeah, I got the right one.

I was going to say that. And I think the future ports are not based on the GameCube version. I was reading a bit about it. Like, the GameCube version has a certain lighting system that is not used in other versions and also a particle system because the game was designed to be a graphical showcase for the GameCube

and I remember playing the demo at an EB Games that's how old this game is. I was playing it at EB Games and it was one of those moments you look back on a laugh where you say to yourself nothing can look better than this and I'm playing it now

and I'll tell you things look better than it now but for I would say a good decade or so possibly a little bit less than that it was like one of the best looking games you could play Resident Evil 4 Yeah absolutely. So the second version was developed

as part of the Capcom 5 deal, not for PS2 but for the GameCube. And it was known as the Fog slash Mist version or Castle version and was directed by a man named Hiroshi Shibata. He was a Capcom staffer who previously had just been an artist up to that point, but he wanted to be a lead designer on Okami, Bayneta, and Wonderful 101, and he would eventually be a lead designer on the final version of RE4. So very talented dude, and this was his version of the game. So this game would involve Leon, the star of RE4, of course,

He would be infiltrating Umbrella founder Oswald Spencer's European Castle as part of a larger assault on umbrella. And there were brief mentions of a sub-scenario featuring a girl and a dog character working together that just was a very, very minor footnotes in the development of this game. And so this project was scrapped to do the many development problems, the one on the record. And I'm sure there were many problems beyond this. But a lot of the game was going to be based around this black fog enemy that would chase you or appear in certain places. and using the current technology and the GameCube hardware, they really just couldn't make it work. Although I have to imagine there are probably many problems on top of that they don't want to cite.

But that's the one thing that is cited on the record. Yeah, I mean, those black fogg enemies sound like Eco, which works on PS2 early on. The fog is more complicated. Oh, I see. Swirls. It's really wild because the sub-scenario, the girl and her dog, were spun out later in Haunting Ground. Yeah, yeah. Another kind of survival horror-ish game.

on the PlayStation 2, and the Black Fog went on to star in The Hit Show Lost. So a lot of big successes coming out of that. That was a secret villain of lost. They couldn't get the chain sound on GameCube. Right. It was funny because around that time, so yeah, Haunting Ground was a 2005.

It came out like the next year, or the same year as RE4. And in that same year, or around the same time, there was Rule of Rose. So there were two survival horror games with a girl and a dog, and neither one of them sold anything.

But it was like a very weird time to have both those games at the same time. But I believe in the final version of R.E.4 does reference most of the Capcom 5. Killer 7 is referenced as one of the guns, I believe, and the regenerators are the smiles from Killer 7. And I believe the dog you free in the beginning of the game is the same dog as the dog from Haunting Ground, or it's sort of a reference to haunting ground, or the scenario that they lost. So I've never played all the way through Resident Naval 4. Does the dog reappear? Yes. Yes, but only once. Sort of famously.

Okay, that's fine. It's like Chekhov's dog. There's a boss fight if you free the dog at the beginning of Resident Evil for it. There's a boss fight later, I know, criminals. It's like the Bioshock infinite choice. It's like, why would you make the other choice? Right. The dog shows up to help you distract an enemy later in the game, and Leon famously says, hey, it's that dog. Yeah. It's like, oh, okay. It's the one dog he knows about. Yes, this game is very shlocky, and I like it. So, yeah, so that game, that version is the castle version or the fog slash miss version. And there is, I believe, one trailer online for it. That's not a gameplay trailer. But what had the most gameplay footage was something

called the Hookman version. And I didn't realize this before this podcast, but it was inspired by a scene in a movie I don't remember at all. The movie Lost Souls by a Winona Ryder and Ethan Hawk movie, I think. It was definitely during the lulls in their careers. Yes. I saw this movie in the notes for this episode and went and watched the trailer. And that looks like a very bad film. The only thing I know about it is like I was like, what is this movie. I was seeing movies and I had no idea what it even was. And all I read about it was, yeah, Winona Ryder did not do PR for this movie. So not a good movie, but there was one scene in it where, according to the director of this version of RE4, Winona Ryder was, she found herself

in the derelict house with a deranged killer inside, sort of like a dilapidated house. And the idea for this game was sort of like, you know, what if it's just you versus one thing? Kind of nemesis-y, but not really. So the story, this game, didn't not have a story behind it, just sort of an E3 demo and a gameplay concept. Like in the fog in the missed version of this game, Leon is infected with a virus, and that actually happens in the final version of the game. But in this version, this virus makes him hallucinates. And when you hallucinate in this game, everything turns blue. There's more of a psychological angle, like dolls come to life and things like that. So it's a little more silent hilly

than the final version of our game. It sounds eternal darkness-ish. Yeah, kind of, yeah. It plays, watching footage of this, like it looks like it plays fewer tricks on the player itself. Like, certain things will trigger these hallucinations in Leon, and the whole room will go blue and change. And it's all, like, according to some videos that I watch it, it's all based on player interaction, like how the player chooses to play the game, changes the setup of the game itself. Yeah. Yeah. And so that's why eventually this version was scrapped because they were having to build multiple assets for every room, for every area.

like they had to build dual assets for everything and the rendering and man hours that it took were just making the game go bankrupt. That's the opposite of how most video game design works. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly why it was scrapping. It's a really cool idea, but if you think about the amount of just different variations on rooms they'd have to make

and how long you could sustain that for one game, I can see why they wanted to scrap it. I believe Mikami himself stepped in and said, we can't do this. It's too expensive. If you watch video of this, it really does look like Silent Hill. You can really see the Silent Hill influence.

It looks cool. I think it was a playable demo. There's just a few rooms and it actually reuses assets from the castle version. And in case you haven't played RE4, one level is a European castle. So I have to wonder,

like, how many of these assets are from those early versions of this game? So I assume they didn't throw everything away, although the psychological angle is obviously not part of RE4. There's a lot of footage of this online. And it's been online for quite some time. So they're pretty public with this version of the game.

You can see a lot of gameplay footage of this. And it looks pretty interesting. And I like to see this play out in a future game, but they kind of don't like to do the psychological aspect. And it feels more like a PT style experience, more like a VR style experience nowadays, now that we have that technology. But there's actually one more version of RE4 that is just a footnote in all this research. We'll get to the actual game very soon, I promise. But apparently there was another version that was planned after all these versions were scrapped. Makami was like, let's go back

to the roots of just basic zombies. But there's no more information about this. I guess it didn't get too far off the ground in terms of planning or like development because there's like no screenshots or movies or anything. So I think it was just like him out of desperation saying let's just do zombies again, regular zombies in 3D and see what happens there. But finally, the fourth version is the version that we know. Mikami, after sort of being producer on all the other versions just basically said, let me do it. He took over as director and he basically wanted to revamp the series completely after playing Resident Evil Zero. He's like, we can't make another one like this. Nobody like this. Nobody is into this old style. He directed the RE remake, and it's an excellent game, but no one really cared anymore. And people appreciate it more now, but at that point, it was like another one of these, like another one of these games with pre-render camera angles and inventory management and so on. But he basically wanted to surprise people with a new setting, no umbrella corporation, new enemies, and an overall cooler atmosphere. And that's exactly what he did with this game. It is a very, very, very different. than the old RE's in a way that made a lot of fans actually pretty angry about it, I would say.

So in case you need to know about Shinji Makami, brief or fresher, we talk a lot about him in the first Resident Evil podcast. So he started at Capcom in 1990 with a Game Boy Quiz game. Notably, he directed a lot of Disney games, which is strange if you think about his pedigree now where he's mostly known for survival horror. So he directed the only good Roger Rabbit game, the one for Gameboy. He directed the S&S Aladdin, the best Aladdin.

The subject is closed. And also Goof Troop for S&S. And then he would do things like Resident Evil, Dino Crisis, P.N.O.3. He left Capcom after directing the very odd and now finally appreciated Godhands, which people just did not know what to do with at the time. But it's like, it's a very bizarre, super customizable brawler that is kind of slight, but is very, very interesting. And it scored very, very low at the time. Well, from some outlets, not all. Yes, yes.

I don't want to bring up a famous meme. No names. But there is a famous meme about comparing that game's review score to a score for Imagine Babies. But I find that disingenuous. His last things that he's done are reviewing Vanquish for Platinum games and The Evil Within for Bethesda. And he still works at Bethesda to this day. And Evil Within, too, don't sleep on it. He did not direct it, but it's so good.

It's so, so good. Vanquish is awesome. I love Vanquish. Yes, it's really good. And I liked Evil Within enough. I didn't play the sequel, but to me, the Evil Within just felt like a more polished version of Resident Evil 4. It's very similar in the way that it's like similar camera and similar style gameplay. And it's even more unforgiving, I will say.

That's one thing I fought my way to it. At a certain point during that game, I was beating it out of spite, which has never good. But at a certain point, it's like, no, I will not stop at level 8 out of 10. I will finish this game. But the second game is really, really good. So Resident Evil 4 time, folks, we're on to the main topic, the main game. And this game came out on January 11, 2005 for GameCube. and it's been ported everywhere since

and I brought up at the beginning of the show there's a recent switchport that's recent as of this podcast publishing. Zach, you played this. I have not played this switchport. I think Jeremy, you played the switch port. How does it play? Like, how does it control?

It's R4. It looks good. It looks like R84, so it's dated. But, you know, looking back in time 15 years, you can say, oh, God, this would have been amazing. I was a little surprised. You know, I played the game multiple times closer to when it was released,

But going back to it for the first time in 10 years, I was a little surprised at how just brown everything is. Everything is brown. It's very brown. It's very much of that era where it's just like, what is a color? What is saturation? It's all grays and browns.

And that being said, I do think it looks surprisingly good. You know, they've upresded, obviously, for the PlayStation 4 releases and stuff, and that's something that kind of carries over to the Switch version. And the Switch version looks great. It plays exactly the same as you'd expect. And the only qualms that I have with the Switch version, the latest version, is that they don't include any of the motion control stuff from Wii, which is a bummer. I did play through the Wii.

So I played this game through three times, GameCube Wii and Xbox 360, and I'm in the middle of the playthrough on the PlayStation 4. The Wii version is the most user-friendly. It's also the easiest because the aiming is so much better. Yeah, they don't simulate. So when you're aiming with the control stick in the game, it sort of simulates Leon, like, kind of like not holding the gunstress. But in the Wii, you're just controlling the pointer with your hand. So as straight as you can hold your hand is as straight as the aim will be. So it's actually makes the game fairly easy and very, very intuitive in a way that cuts down on the difficulty.

But I was going to ask about the motion controls because I believe even in the Wii version, you would just, you would swipe your Wii moat to do the knife instead of holding on a different button and the attack button. Right. Yeah. Yeah, the Wii version is interesting. But this game is available for almost everything. Like you name a system in the past, I don't know how many. years. Everything since GameCube, like GameCube, PS2, Wii. I don't think it was. No, it wasn't. That's the one

thing it missed was Wii U, but almost everything. It's not on portable systems besides Switch. It was never on Vita or 3DS. Correct. But you can play mercenaries on 3DS. Oh, well, it's all the same. Yes, yes. Good enough. Pay 40 bucks for a side game. I reviewed that game for one up, by the way. Did not like it that much? Did you give it a lower score than Imagine Babies? On my scale, yes. On my personal scale. Bob scale runs from one to Imagine Babes. Imagine Babes is the peak of gaming excellence.

Nothing can beat it. I'm a huge fan of that series. But before we get to the game itself, I do want to talk about the bit of gatekeeping that happened around its release. RE4, people are always trying to exclude certain games based on criteria that they find would keep it out of the group. So I think we're over the fact that, like, people say, you know, Yoshi's. Island is not a Mario game. It's sort of like saying Chicago-style pizza isn't pizza. I don't get that either. It's pizza. No, it's cassero. No, it's pizza. But there was a lot of stink over this game where people didn't like how it deviated from Resident Evil. Were any of you

around to experiences, I definitely did online where people were very, very grumpy about how this is an action game. But with a lot of restrictions that other action games don't have. But I just noticed at the time a lot of drama about this rebooting Resident Evil. a way that was very different than older games. I wasn't, maybe I just wasn't reading online reviews and things like that around this time, but I wasn't privy to this sort of blowback about Resident Evil 4. When I saw this in your notes, it actually surprised me because as far as I was concerned, I was just excited to be getting a new Resident Evil game,

and I liked the idea that it was a little more action-oriented and a little less plotting. And if people were upset about how action-oriented this one was, how did they feel about five and six, which are just full-blown action games. They probably just stop playing video games entirely. I'm hanging it up. Yeah, I guess I didn't engage in those conversations, not being someone who really follows Resident Evil. My perception was entirely that everyone loved RE4.

I mean, maybe my perception is colored by the fact that my main exposure to RE4 was the fact that I sat at a cubicle with Matt Leone, who reviewed it for one-up, and I saw most of the game as he played it, and he was incredibly enthusiastic about it, as much as Matt ever is enthusiastic about anything, but he just, like, unequivocally loved it and was very, very positive about it.

And so that was the lens through which I experienced the game. Okay. Someone else's love for it. I just was reading a lot of forums at the time, so people were getting super rowdy about it. But I think by the time it came out and people had played it, they settled down. But I think previews and the demo,

they were just like, this is not the RE that I know. But ultimately it was for the best. And again, I don't think anyone believes this now, but RE has taken so many different forms. that I think there's no one defined version of the game or one defined interpretation of the game. Before we go on to describe how the game works, I want to talk about just how it broke from tradition

because it does this in a lot of ways where I feel like Capcom is willing to do this a lot of the time. So like with Monster Hunter World, what impressed me about that game, that's one of my favorite games of the past decade, is that they just were willing to throw a lot of things out. Just like, you know what, no one likes this, let's get rid of it. They don't care about tradition.

They don't care about, you know, the hardcore fans are like, this is an outdated system or this is a cumbersome system, let's get rid of it. And that's what they did exactly with RE4. So some things that they got rid of. So number one, there's no pre-rendered camera angles. And the camera is behind the main character, but slightly offset. So very rarely do you actually need to control the camera in this game. Yeah.

It's snapped to Leon's back. You can wiggle it left and right, but I never found myself babysitting the camera like I do in a lot of third-person games, which is pretty impressive for a game of this vintage. My complaint about the camera in this game is that the panning is so abrupt. I find it really hard to play third-person action games that have such a sensitive camera. It needs a different movement curve, and there's no way to adjust that. So I find it really difficult to play because just the quick, abrupt movement is so disorienting. Yeah, I guess they were still figuring out camera systems at that time.

But the fact that there's a lot of thought put into it, like it is pretty tight on Leon to make it so the game is still surprising. you still can be surprised by things sneaking up on you. And also, he is slightly offset, so the camera is not directly behind him, which I think no game was really doing. And that sort of, basically just made the rule, like this is where the camera goes for a third-person action game. There wouldn't be a Gears of War without, or Mass Effect.

Or Tomb Raider or... Dead Space. God of War. Yeah. So many games. That was the hardest part for me coming back to this game was, I immediately wanted to use the right stick to control the camera. Yeah, yeah.

And the camera just goes squirly if you're trying to use the right stick when you're not aiming. And it took me until I got probably through the village area of this replay to just stop using the right stick entirely until I brought my gun out. Yeah, the camera is so attached to Leon. It's sort of like if you imagine it just sort of like attached to his back. So it's like if you move the right stick, it just sort of like pans around him. It's not like you're moving to the left and right of him. It's just like very stuck to him. And this game even has like if you don't like the way the camera was in this game, Jeremy, you probably never did the quick turn in this game where you can just spin around instantly and it is very disorienting.

but it's super necessary to survive in this game. And that's adapted from older games. So even though the camera angles are different, you're still sort of doing tank controls in a way. That didn't even occur to me until this most recent play-through because I think you're caught up in the idea of like, this is an entirely new way of playing Resident Evil games, but you press forward to go forward,

you turn left and right, and you walk straight backwards. It's definitely tank controls. Yeah, but I mean, tank controls work when the camera is centered on the character. When it's frustrating and seems unnatural is when the camera is detached and fixed. And so pressing forward is not necessarily pressing forward into the screen.

But in RA4, when you press forward, you're always moving forward into the screen. So it's very intuitive. And yeah, so even though they changed the, you know, or they kept, the camera or the motion control is the same, it feels different just because of the different orientation to the camera. So it's a different experience.

Yeah, I think I had that revelation when I was playing it through the, like, the second or third time, like, oh, these are tank controls. Like, I can't turn on a dime like Mario, which is why that quick turn is necessary to just turn around instantly. Yeah. Instead of, like, doing like a kind of like a NASCAR loop around enemies. But yeah, it's interesting that they made that work. And a lot of this game is still built around those limitations. And I think that's an intentional choice. Like, this is not a super mobile character.

And we'll get into more of, like, the shooting and how there's a lot of like, you know, intentionality, just how slow everything is and how just how focused everything is. But another thing that's different is unlike past RE games, because we are dealing with new levels of technology, the environments are much larger, and for the most part, they're outdoors. I mean, there are places where you're like inside of cabins and inside of castles and installations, but there are a lot of fairly big for their time outdoor environments that are essentially like big rooms of the skybox, but they were very, very large for the time. And another thing I like about this game is that one of the common, like, every web comic had about like 50% of their jokes were Resident Evil jokes about. puzzles, like, oh, you didn't get the right key or you didn't move the statue. In this game, they said, you know what? Screw puzzles. No more puzzles. If there's a broken, if there's a lock, shoot the lock off. Some stuff is gated by items, like, oh, you need this crest to get through this door. But most of the time, like, the puzzles, if they're not fairly obvious, they will be

if you look at them for more than a second. It's just like, oh, I move this crate here or I shoot this thing here. Most of the time, the puzzles are solved by shooting a thing. Right. For the most part. So yeah, they got rid of all of the, you know, the many keys you would need in a Resident Evil game and the many different like amounts of backtracking you would have to do in these games. Yeah, to me, that feels like, you know, as an outsider to Resident Evil, it feels like one of the biggest real changes to Resident Evil because so much of the early games were couched in the concepts of adventure games, of like graphical adventures, you know, scum type games or Sierra type games. It's a different look and format, obviously,

and there's more combat, but it really was kind of cut from that stamp, basically, and then adapted. And this takes it much further away from, you know, the Sierra Mold and puts it much more in the action genre. And the few puzzles that are there are not obtuse, right? Like, they make sense. Yeah, yeah. With the exception, there's a couple of things, like finding the chimera plates in the mansion or the castle to get through, you know, one door or whatever. But for the most part, it's the puzzles are there, not necessarily to stop the player from moving forward, but just as a distraction for, you know, a brief distraction, right?

Yeah, here's one thing to do that's not fighting an enemy. Just here's a slower thing to do. And yeah, most of the puzzles are sort of like the play school, like, stick the square thing into the square hole, basically. Just here's something else to do. And it's done very well. And this is an action-focused game. I'm glad there wasn't, like, you know, go to the inventory, open the book or figure out the riddle or whatever. Like, it's very, very straightforward.

They exist, but they don't break the overall momentum. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, that's a very good point. Another thing that's different about this game is that I can see this being a big shock for Resident Evil fans, is that these levels are broken down into just sort of like arcade-style numbers. Like, this is level 1-1. Now you're on level 1-2. There is a score at the end. You can see your accuracy at the end.

And you can backtrack in this game, but there's really no points. When you have access to an entire area, you can easily go back to other areas. But outside of getting things you missed, there's really no point. point to doing that at all. And other R.E. games are so focused on visiting the same rooms again and finding the ideal path to backtrack that the fact that this game has no backtracking, basically, it's kind of shocking considering what came before it. There are only a couple of areas in this game that reroute you through different paths that lead you back to the same areas, the same save points, the same merchants, things like that. And on this last playthrough, and forgive me,

I know I'm going to say it, but on this last playthrough, I was kind of struck by how similar it is to like Dark Souls where you'll go through this whole arc and move all the way around this one area and then come back and be at the same save point. But that only happens two or three times in the whole game. Dark Souls comparisons are legal on this podcast. They're completely safe to make. Everybody has to take a shot every time

Dark Souls is mentioned. There's a recent people reference it. It's a good game. And it does a lot of things right. But no, I will allow it. So other things that are different about this game compared to other Resident Evil games is that in previous games, you were not expected to kill every enemy In fact, it was like, basically you would go into every game thinking, okay, which enemies do I need to eliminate?

Which ones are the most potentially dangerous? I will eliminate them and run past the ones that are sort of in more open areas where they can't grab me. And in this game, it's like, no, for the most part, although you can't run past enemies in areas to get to the next one, you are encouraged to kill them all. And you are generally given just enough ammo to do so. Like, the AI is pretty flexible in giving you what you need. although my first time replaying this game on the PS4 I did have to restart a little bit of the ways in

because I screwed myself out of having no ammo and I was like oh my God I didn't know the game would do this to me but it did but for the most part you have to play skillfully but you are encouraged to kill all the enemies in every area to get treasure to get more ammo to get herbs and things like that because they do drop items

and that is super different than past R.E. games Yeah something I do really appreciate about this game is that the very first enemy you face I mean, they make a point of saying, not a zombie if you examine the corpse after you kill him, but even the way he acts, like he comes at you slowly, but he dodges your shots. Like if you go for a headshot and you don't immediately fire, then he ducks out of the way. Yeah, yeah. And you've wasted a shot.

And you're like, oh, the zombies didn't used to do that. They would just like walk at you until you headshot at them. So what struck me about this game on my latest playthrough is the lack of traditional Resident Evil puzzles is sort of made up for by the puzzling that happens while you're taking out hordes of enemies. Like the way that you use each weapon, the way that you switch between different methods of attacking these different types of enemies,

is a puzzle in and of itself. And it was so rewarding to go through this latest time and be like, okay, great, I'm going to approach an area and pick off who I can with a rifle, and then if a gang of them come at me at the same time, I switch to my shotgun, gun, and then if I have the time, I can take out enemies by shooting them in the leg and then swiping them with my knife, which conserves ammo, and then you grab all the gold and

stuff afterwards and upgrade your weapons so that that loop the next time, you're more efficient, right? And that gameplay loop is what makes this game so, so brilliant. That's a really great point, because in my notes, I call this the thinking person shooter because not even like five and six, five and six took a major step down in that element of the game where you're right, a lot of this game is just like making a lot of tactical decisions. on the fly and thankfully you can sort of pause and I think the fact that you go into your menu to switch weapons is just reinforcing the idea of like no stop and think about what you're going to do like do you want to use a shotgun to take out this group of enemies do you want to

save the shotgun to take out one strong enemy like there are so many decisions to make and so many things to consider given like what weapons you have and the amount of ammo you have for them and what enemies you're facing there are just so many decisions to make it can be a little overwhelming which is why I think the action is kind of slow paced yeah but the power curve is really great. Yeah. Like as you're increasing your weapons accuracy and reload speeds and things like that, firepower,

you can really feel it from upgrade to upgrade. What took five bullets before now takes two. And that sort of player feedback is like so important to the overall experience. And there's a point midway through the game where you can sell the weapons that you've upgraded at a supremely high price and then use

that gold to buy upgraded versions of those weapons like the riot gun and the semi-automatic rifle. And that's an even bigger jump in the way that you feel about how you're taking on enemies. Yeah, that's another big change for this game. So there is an economy in this game. There are treasures to find. There's a merchant.

There's equipment to upgrade. Of course, other games had weapons in them. You were killing zombies, but you were not really upgrading them outside of maybe like, oh, this ammo is better for this gun, but I still won't have that much of it. But in this game, it's very satisfying to, you know, make your weapons better, get new weapons and play around with them. And it is super great to finally, you know, upgrade your gun to, you know, upgrade your gun to will like, oh, this guy's head exploded in one hit now instead of like three before.

And my pro tip for you guys out there is upgrade your ammo capacity when your gun is unloaded because it will fill your ammo capacity. Ooh, that's a good one. Yes. Yeah, my pro tip was going to be, especially early on in the game, aim for the legs, you know, do two shots to each enemy's legs, and then typically you can knock them down to where they're on their knees and give them a good, like, ninja kick and then follow that up with slashing with a knife. And you'll have more pistol ammo than you know.

what to do with by the time you get to the second area. Yeah, this is not exactly like a physics model for this game or like there's no like ragdoll physics, but the enemy modeling in terms of like where you hit them is very complex for this era where, of course, like in past our games, like, yes, you want a headshot in this game. Yes, headshots do the most damage. But if you want to conserve ammo, you want to get them into like a stumbling state. You can do that by shooting them while they're about to throw something or shooting them in

their leg and then you can run up and then the game will give you an option to do a melee attack. And that melee attack will hit a group of enemies often. So it's a great way to conserve ammo, but it actually will take longer to defeat the enemy. So again, this game has a lot to think about. You're not just spraying bullets into stupid enemies, you know, there's a lot going on here. No, they saved that for five and six. Exactly, exactly.

It's like, no, we'll make the game much stupider after McCami leaves. Some other stuff, before we take our break, I want to go over some other changes that are way different than past R. Arie games. Something that is a huge change is that there are no limited saves. In fact, playing this game in 2005, I was surprised by how generous this checkpoint system was. I felt like it was the most generous checkpoint system of any game I had played up until that point, because if you die on a screen, you are basically revived on that screen after the game over screen or whatever, but you revived there basically in the state that you entered that screen on. So you don't ever waste that much time by dying, which this game, I think, really wants you to not be discouraged by having to replay a lot like past games would have you do. But really, they want you to prototype different solutions as much as possible to make the most of the game.

and that forgiving system is a huge change for RE4. Yeah, and I think it's designed in a way, I mean, maybe I'm just bad at video games, but I think it's designed in a way that you're kind of supposed to die a lot because you have to figure out the best tactics, the best way to move around the area is the best way to take out those enemies to conserve ammo, to find all the items, and then to get to the next area in the most efficient route. Yeah, and I'll bring it up later in the podcast, but one of the areas, like one of the first challenging areas of the game, I think it's designed, like, you will die 20 times.

Like, you must learn how to play this game. You must learn how all the weapons work. You must learn how to evade. And actually, one of the newer systems in this game that's different from the old games is that, like, because you're not just skating around on JPEGs of, you know, buildings and mansions, you can, you know, lock yourself in cabins. You can barricade yourself inside. You can jump through windows. Like, the territory has a lot to do with how you encounter enemies. You can get the advantage of them by climbing up a ladder and firing at them as they try to climb up to get you.

Like, that's one more thing to keep into mind when you're making all these decisions during your combat. Like, where am I? Where are the enemies? Where can I go? Is there a place where I can get the advantage on them? Is there a place where I can jump down on them? Again, a lot more to think about when fighting enemies in this game. And in general, like, I think past RE games were about dread. And this game is more about tension. You are very much empowered, but you never know when you're going to run out of what next. It's like, what will I run out of next? When will I find my next case of bullets? When will I find my next case of shotgun bullets? You will usually always be able to overcome. adversity, but what is left after you overcome that adversity is really up to the games, how forgiving it is to you. It's just like, what will the game give me now? It's tough. In the last third, you know, for as much ammo as they throw at you in the first two-thirds of the game, in the last third, it's almost backwards, where ammo gets very, very scarce, but health items are everywhere. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and the AI is fairly complex. People have taken it apart, but it does sort of, it has a dynamic difficulty where if you're doing well, the game will get

harder. But if you're doing poorly, the game will get easier. And it often gives you things you need more of. But again, like I said before, the first is the first time this happened to be, but I did screw myself out of progress by just kind of being wasteful with my ammo. So this game really wants you to learn how to play it well. And my last thing I'll talk about before the break is there are still core ideas carried over. So even though we talked about 10 things that are way different from past Resident Evil's. Number one, this game is all about conservation and resource management. It's not quite as intense as past Resident Evil's, but you still have to use items in ammo. wisely. Like, we talked about all of the ideas, we talked about all of the decisions you have to make when fighting enemies. And that goes into, there are only so many bullets that you're going to have. I mean, there's not a fixed amount in the game, but you never know when you'll get your next supply of bullets. So this game, you never feel really flush because as soon as you feel like, oh, I have

all the bullets I need, you encounter like 30 enemies and now you have like maybe five for each gun. But, yeah. There are definitely areas that are meant just to thin out your ammunition, right? there are definitely parts of this game where they just send hordes of enemies into you because they're like, okay, by this point, you should have 50 shotgun shells. Well, guess what? We're going to take all of those away for the next area. I guess hand in hand with what you're talking about, about tension versus, what did you say?

Dread, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, in this game, it's paced extremely well when I was playing through it again and also scrubbing through a let's play. It was sort of like it knows when to give you quiet moments, like especially after like you take out a horde of enemies. Now it's time to explore the area get all the treasure. Sometimes you're just in a bunch of rooms with no enemies, and that's just a time to cool down. Like, it's never overwhelming you with constant waves and just giving you more ammo on top of that. It's just like, no, here's a slower section. Now here's a faster section. I think they're very, very good at, you know, pacing the game out well to not overwhelm you. And some things that are carried over from past Resident Evil games, also one of the things that

people complained about at the time was that you can't move and shoot at the same time. But the game is designed around that. And I'll talk more about. that later, but that is another limitation. So even though this is an action game, it's an action game that is built around limitation, which I think the later versions of this game sort of lost. Like, they lost the idea of basing this around limitations, which made it more fun. And that's basically it for now. I mean, we'll come back after the break, talk about the actual game itself and how it plays, but we spent basically an hour talking about the state of Resident Evil and how much they threw away to make this game and how this game essentially

saved the series. And when we come back from our break, we'll talk about Resident Evil 4 and how it plays. I don't know. I don't know. I'm going to be able to be. I'm not. I'm going to be on. I'm not. I'm not.

And we're going to be able to find out of the same. We're going to be able to be. So we're back, and we talked a lot about the history of Resident Evil up to the point of Resident Evil 4 and how it broke from tradition. But now I want to talk about how it plays. It's very, very playable now, but it plays very differently from the action third-person shooter that you might know today. Like, if we're used to, I guess the most modern style of third-person shooter is what, like Uncharted or Tomb Raider or something like that? Yeah, even God of War is a little bit like a third-person shooter. For sure, yeah, with the same, like, where the cameras and everything like that.

But it is very different than those games intentionally. because the game is built around all these limitations. And one of those things that we talked about earlier is that you can't move and shoot at the same time. Of course, future games would change this, but I would say this game is the word I want to use is modular. I use that in my notes. In that Leon has a move mode and a shoot mode.

This is a very mechanical game the way things break down. Like there's a move mode and a shoot mode and they're mutually exclusive and it's not easy. It's not like super fast to switch between them. So a lot of your thinking is, okay, move, I got to move to this location, I got to spin around, and then I can shoot. It's not just like I can run and shoot guys as I'm running.

And the entire game is built around a lot of basically tactical retreats, like attacking and then making a tactical retreat and making sure that you can escape and making sure that no one else can come from where you're retreating to or come to where you're retreating to and then seeing if you can destroy enemies from there. Yeah, I think modal design was something you still saw a lot of in Japanese games at that point.

Metal Gear Solid 3 came out pretty much at the same, time as this game. And that is very much a modal game where you have like sneaking mode, you have like sneaking mode, you have like first person aiming mode, you have, you know, CQC mode. Like Snake is constantly changing his mode in that game and using, you know, different control schemes based on the context of the moment. And it's not like, you know, the Zelda Aquarina of Time contextual A button. It's like the whole goddamn controller changes wildly depending on what you are doing at the moment and how you've switched snakes mode.

That's a really good comparison. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, it was also like of late 2004 vintage. And I remember I was replaying MetalGersault three, four retronauts a few years ago and it disturbed me that I couldn't go behind snakes back for a third person shooting mode. Like they added that to Peacewalker

because of things like Resident Evil 4. This is the standard now. When you shoot an enemy from the third person, your camera has to go behind the back of the character. That's entirely how four and five play. Yeah. Yeah. So, yes, this game is very modal, and it's designed around this limitation.

There's no cover. In a way, there's no cover. There's, like, a cover system in this game briefly, but it's very bad. It's towards the end of the game when enemies start having guns, and that's when I'm like, this game goes on a little too long. But that's the only minor imperfection, and it doesn't ruin the game, but you're like, this wasn't developed enough, like this cover system. But this game is not relying upon a cover system.

So you're not doing the same thing you do over and over in things like Mass Effect or Gears of War. you have to think on your feet a little more than that and just finding the new cover to jump behind. And we went over a few things before, but again, if you're used to things like uncharted and Tomb Raider where you're very empowered, this game is all about giving you a lot of options, but a lot to think about with those options

where, again, you can't move and you can't shoot at the same time. You have to know where you're shooting at the enemy and you basically need to make a lot of decisions when you're making these attacks. And there's a lot to take in at once, and I like that RE4 is very confident about its design without being punishing. So this game begins, you fight one enemy,

and then you essentially go down like an outdoor hallway where you fight like, oh, here's a grouping of two enemies, here's a grouping of three enemies, but you have a lot of time to run away from them. You can basically like run to the beginning of the level and wait for them to approach you. Yeah. You definitely have enough ammo to destroy them.

But then, like, basically the second screen that you're on is one of like, I think, the best level set pieces of a game ever in terms of how it's designed in terms of its purpose. And so after that basically hallway of, you know, a few enemies, you're in the set piece where you fight probably, I would guess, like between 30 to 40 enemies and groups of 8 to 10 at a time. And I, like you said, Zach, this game wants you to die. This game wants you to learn through dying very much like Dark Souls.

I said it. I said it. So it's safe now. So very much like Dark Souls. And that I think, especially for this part of the game, And it's, I like how confident it is up front where it's like, I think maybe you can talk about, like, what your experience was, Zach. When I first play this part of RE4, I think I died maybe 20 times. Yeah. Or at least a dozen times.

Did you make it this far, Jeremy? Did you beat this section of the game? No. So I didn't have long to play when I was trying it out yesterday. I just wanted to get a feel for it. And I kept making really stupid mistakes. Like I rescued the dog and then I was kind of like poking around the area and stepped into the trap. And I was like, you moron.

And then I came across those strings of dynamite on trees. I was like, well, I need to be careful of this. So I started to walk through. And then I thought, well, I should backtrack. So I tried to back up. And for some reason, Leon, like, turned as I backed up and backed into another one of those strings. I was like, what did you just do, you moron? So at that point, I was like, you know what?

I'm too tired to play this game. And then here we are. Yes, this is a very difficult part. But in my first play-through of this game, I died a bunch. But, like, every time I died, I learned something new. It's like, oh, I can go in this building. Oh, this building has the second floor. I can push a set of dressers in front of the door.

Oh, enemies will, I can funnel them this way. Like, every time you die, you learn a new thing. And this game is teaching you a lot of lessons up front that you need to learn to play the rest of the game. It's almost like a tower defense game. I would say that I haven't played this part myself, but this was my first Resident Evil experience. Resident Evil 4 was watching Matt Leone play this as he reviewed the game.

And it was just fascinating because it just kept going. Yeah. And he was just like constantly besieged and constantly scrambling and improvising. And then this is where the guys with the, like, the chainsaws or whatever come after you, right? Like, the big guys. Like, yeah, the first, in the first major set piece of the game, like, maybe 10 minutes in, they immediately give you the hardest enemy you'll ever fight up front. Like, here, this guy can kill you in one hit.

Figure it out. Yeah, he was doing really well. Then all of a sudden, this giant guy comes up. And so I'm seeing a lot of gameovers. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, Zach, you're saying? I think that the village, you know, there's no, like, traditional tutorial in Resident Evil 4.

they just kind of throw you into the world and occasionally they'll tell you like how something works but it's not they don't ramp you into the difficulty like some games would and uh the villages is such an interesting area because it does have multiple multiple houses that's tied in you know there's it teaches you how to use uh height to your advantage

it gives you uh the shotgun it gives you grenades and teaches you how to use those things and then like you're saying like it throws a one-hit kill into the mix just to kind of prove to you like, hey, this game's going to keep you on your toes. You need to move despite the fact that you're stationary when you're shooting.

You've got to figure out how to work around these environments and use the environment to your advantage to really come out on top of those encounters. Yeah, learning that guy can kill you in one hit is very important. It's like one of the first thing like, oh, my head is gone now. And also awful to watch. Yeah, yeah. That's still like one of the more shocking bits of gore in a video game,

the decamitation. I mean, the game throughout the whole experience is very gory. It's a really bloody and violent and also just like wet. Like everything is like slimy. Everything is rotting and drippy. It's a very moist game.

Yes. Sorry. Jeremy to shuddered. But yeah, like upon playing it again, I had like a newfound appreciation for that set piece because even having played the game three times, I did die a few times. Oh yeah.

You do need to meet the game like halfway sort of. It's like these are the expectations of the game. Can you meet them? And this was just right. before game development would take a drastic turn in the beginning of the HD era where the mindset was like these games are too expensive to make so we cannot lose the player at any time. So like, RE5 has a version of this, but it's not nearly as good. And RE6 was definitely made in the sort of call of duty like game tube concept where you just are sent through a

tube from beginning to end without a lot of friction. So in RE6, I think it's like you spend like 20 minutes playing the game before you see your first zombie when you're playing like a Leon scenario. It's like, it's super cinematic in the way those HD games were at the time but this is at the time when it's like the game was very confident and I'll say it again, we gotta reference this game again, but Dark Souls was another turning

point. Yeah, yeah. But Dark Souls was the turning point to break free of that tradition where it's like we can challenge people again, but RE4 was made at a time when a game could still do that before he lost it for about five or six years and I really appreciate that going back to it now. But it also does

it also does some cheap things, though, You know, like, as forgiving as it is and as challenging as it is, there are some things where, like, it'll just kill you out of the blue for something that you really have no control over. You know, like, I was really frustrated in this last play-through. I did this whole big area and got to the very tail end of it, and then one of the enemies threw a stick of dynamite. Oh, yeah. It hit Ashley and killed her, and it's like, well, that wasn't my fault. Like, there's nothing I could have done it at that. So, you know, the next time you had to play through it, you know, to wait and tell her to wait and then move forward.

It's like, if you don't know that going into that first encounter, like, they're just asking you to die and do that whole area again. Sometimes there is a bit of that, like, oh, you should have seen this coming sort of thing. But I think thankfully, unlike past R.E. games, that you never have to play more than like five minutes of anything, which is nice. But yeah, the Dynamite guys, they do sneak up on you and I have died unfairly to them because you just could get, like, die in one hit after dynamite is thrown at you. But luckily, like, if you hit them while they're throwing it or while it's in their hand, you can just take out an entire group, which is really great, if you have good aim. I do want to talk about, like, more things about this game in terms of, like, just how much variety there is. And that's, I feel like at times, like, this is a very, very long game. And it feels like, okay, guys, settle down.

There's too many ideas. Like, you are wasting too many ideas just for the sake of one game. This could be a bunch of different games. But like how Leon, how you control them is modal, there are a ton of different modes and set pieces of this game. Like, I want to go through a few of them. So the different modes of this game, so the main mode you're in is, you know, you're fighting these tactical battles against swarms of enemies, finding the best location, making choices, managing your resource as well. You're also, at a certain point, given an escort mission to do.

And I have to credit this game with maybe the only tolerable escort mission in the history of gaming. Yeah. Because you can essentially just lock her in a dumpster while you fight enemies and then pull her out of the dumpster when you're safe. There are a few instances like that and you can tell Ashley to hide, you know, different areas or simply wait around a corner and then lead enemies away from her. and that takes away that idea of like there are also conversely there are also times where she will get kidnapped by enemies and you have to run back and figure out what's happening and how to take them out quickly so that she doesn't get carried off because that's an instant fail state as well so it's my second eco comparison of this podcast yeah but actually so they

they don't use her too much so like there's only a few parts of the game when she's with you yeah there's like three or four i'm glad that they didn't build the entire game around you being with Ashley because even though like she's easy to hide and she is like I think they make it impossible for you to kill her like when you know you can definitely kill her okay sucks yeah with like with grenades can you kill her you can kill her you can shoot her okay so usually ducks pretty fast but what happens is and this happened to me a couple times uh there are areas where you have to protect her while she's performing an action like you have to turn a crank or something yeah and so like kind of like the sequence in metal gear two you have a sniper rifle and you're taking

out enemies as they get closer to her, but if they get too close, they'll pick her up and throw her over their shoulder to carry her off. And if your aim isn't perfect, you'll hit Ashley and she'll just die. Yeah, that's one of the instances where she can die. Yeah, that's another sort of mode of the game where it's like those sniper sections. I believe there are two of them. One is she's like on a bridge and those cultists are trying to get her the other one. It's like she's being lowered down that elevator. Right? Yeah. So that's another one. One of the really good set pieces, my favorite part of the game is the cabin assault scene, which is like you are in a cabin. You have to defend yourself, survive waves of enemies as they enter from

the second and first floor. You are given all sorts of options and it is one of the best moments of this game for sure. Like just it's firing on all cylinders. It's super overwhelming, but it's just so, it's so satisfying when you can actually finish that part of the game. So this game, it's very much of its time. And because of that, there are QTEs. And they were new at the time. There's a full like Dragonslayer style QTE boss fight with one of the characters in the game Krauser. And that was pretty interesting for the time because that was just not being done. And in fact, a lot of the surprise of the game is just like, oh, this cutscene you're watching will have a QTE in it. And if you're not paying attention, you will die. We will kill you.

I completely forgot that that happens in cutscenes. I always do. And so like as I was replaying this game, I do what anybody does. Like anytime a cutscene starts, then casually will like take a look at my phone for a second and see it. Yeah, exactly. And inadvertently died at least two or three times that way where it was like, I was just not paying attention and you're supposed to mash, you know, L1 and R1 and you get killed by something. Yeah, yeah. Thankfully, they don't do that that often, but basically they try to shake things up with making an entire cutscene basically just sort of like a Dragonslayer style event.

There's a mine cart section that, again, it's like, well, you made a mine cart fun. I thought mine carts were old, but it's a fun mine cart level. There's a, I like how in the very end of the game, it's like, okay, now you're in a jet ski. Now you're on a crash bandicoat style jet ski level. evading things, and it's just like a very simple, like, 20-second scene, but they built an entire, like, jet ski mode for you to go through. And a lot more, like, this game is, it never wants you to get bored and never wants you to do the same things over and over again, even though the main mode is, you know, fighting storms of enemies. But it has so many ideas in it that when I go back to them, like, oh, yeah, this is in here.

Oh, oh, yeah, this is in here. Like, again, I think it's just the result of restarting this game four times, but they use, I think, every idea they come up with for this game. This last play-through, I do feel like it's sort of dragged on. The last area of the game specifically feels very long and like a little bit repetitive. And that could be a byproduct of just storming through the game in a week. Because, you know, when as a kid, I remember taking much longer to play all the way through. It's about, like, how long was your play-through, like 20 hours? Oh, no.

It took me about 13 hours. Okay, yeah, yeah. It is much longer than it needs to be, I think. I feel like the one part of the game that's, you know, unnecessary. right is the last part. But I think that's where certain ideas are in there that they don't develop very well, like a cover system and enemies that actually have guns, which just feels

kind of stupid in a lot of ways. But you're totally right about that. But this game does have a lot of settings. We talked about the last setting, which is the military base, but it uses a lot of the previous ideas. You have the European castle that was scrapped for one of the concepts of the game. You start in a creepy village. There's a mine section. There's a mountain section. There's

a science lab. It really does jump around a whole lot. Like, presumably when I started this game, I'm like, oh, you're just going to be in this weird village for the entire game, but no, like, they really toss you around in this weird, fake Spanish country. And they all speak Spanish, so. Yeah, you kill just an insane amount of old Spanish dudes in this game. Yeah.

And they, I think they were ahead of the curve. In the next generation of gaming, they had a lot of, like, commentary like, did you know you're killing people in this game? Don't you feel bad? In this game, they kind of do that at the end. They're ahead of the curve by, like, showing you scenes of the villagers being happy and living their lives. It's like, you killed all these people.

Now they're all dead. It's like, but they, they were kind of dead to begin with, right? Yeah, so the enemies in this game are the gonados, which means cattle. They are the all-purpose zombies of the game, and they're given just enough variations on them to make them all interesting. Like, some of them are just the grabby kind. Some of them have weapons. Some of them have weapons they can throw, and some of them have dynamite, and you want to prioritize the ones with dynamite, of course, and then throwing weapons, and then weapons, and then the grabby ones in that order.

Like, again, more decisions to make. It's not just the hordes of the same zombies attacking you. There's, like, enough variation of them. The game throws a curveball at you pretty early on when you're like, okay, I know when their heads explode, they're dead. But at a certain point in the game, really early on, like, yes, their heads explode, but then a parasite pops out of their head. And now there's a smaller thing to take out to actually kill them for good. Multiple versions of a parasite as the game goes on. You know, it grows into more dangerous versions of this parasite, which will kill you very quickly.

It can do a lot of damage to you, yeah. The first version has like a long, like, almost like xenomorph kind of tail that it can whip you with. and then there's a second version that will like barf on you and then the third version comes completely out of the body and we'll scramble after you. Yeah, it runs around, yeah.

And like playing the game, you think I'll avoid headshots to stop this from happening but no, like certain enemies once they take enough damage, their heads will pop and then the thing will come out of them. So you should still do headshots if you can,

but some enemies, they will explode with an alien parasite or sorry, not alien parasite, just the Las Plagas thing. Sorry, I'm suffering from Las Plagas right now in case you want to know. Other enemies in the game, we have Dr. Salvador

who is a chainsaw man who can kill you in one hit and then later there are two of these at once in the form of the Bella sisters so they are not afraid to shake things up but like I like this game

a lot for surprising you where it's like okay here is one really strong enemy now let's give you two of them they do that with the gigantes guys later in the game or it's like this is really hard it's like we thought that was hard

here's two of them at once but it also goes back to what I was talking about about the power curve in this game where early on those chainsaw enemies are so different to defeat that it when you hear the chainsaw coming from a ways off I got sweaty you know it's like oh yeah I got to fight one of these guys but later in the game when

multiple versions of those enemies show up or even the Los Hegantes battle where you fight two of them at a time you're so powered up by that point that you're you know kind of feeling okay about it like okay I know exactly how I need to take these enemies out and that hegante's battle is really interesting because you can completely eliminate one of them by dropping them into lava I always do that it's great it's really so I don't know how why you would couldn't do that because you waste so much ammo otherwise. So, yes, the chainsaw people, they take a lot of ammo to kill and sometimes they're optional,

but they drop a ton of great stuff usually. They're like a really good source of like super great treasure drops and things like that. One enemy I'm glad they don't use very often in this game are the wolves because like an NERRE game, dogs are the worst enemies ever. They're fast. They do a lot of damage and they're very hard to hit. I think they only show up in two areas. Yeah, yeah. I was so happy that they weren't a constant in this game because they're very hard.

They do a lot of things with these typical human enemies Like later in the game You see them in the form of zealots and soldiers But they're given more protective gear So the zealots will have wooden shields They'll have face masks And the soldiers will have You know, improved versions of those

So the game is always keeping on your toes It's like, okay, now you can't hit them in the head What are you going to do? And that extends to the garadors Which can only be hit in their back They're completely blind They have like these Wolverine claws And you essentially like

Any place that they're located There's something in there to distract them so you can shoot at their back, but still, it's very, very tense, and they can do a lot of damage to you at once. And one of the most tense parts of the games is when you're basically trapped in a cage with, what, two of them? Yeah, yeah, that is, that's crazy. So bosses are, I saw you comment on Twitter, Zach, that not all of these are great, and you're totally right about that, but the ones that are good are really good. So one of the first bosses is Del Lago, and I forgot there is a vehicle section in this game where you, you pilot a boat and

later use that boat to go between different islands to, like, you know, do treasure hunting and enemy killing and stuff. But Delago, first, you find him. It's like a fun set piece on the water where essentially you have to throw harpoons at him as he appears. It's just sort of like a water battle. It's not very hard, but it's a lot of fun. I do like that boss fight.

And it's not designed around any of the existing systems in the game. It has like a new system. Like, here's the boat's harpoon system. You're picking up spears and chucking them as he comes at you. Luckily, you have unlimited spears too, which that's one point in the game where your ammo is limitless. So Elhigante, he's a big beefy boy. He swings a log around.

Some of these bosses do have QTE sections where that's how you avoid an attack. Again, we are in this part of game development where this is still a popular idea. We also use QuickTime to defeat that boss where you'll shoot and shoot until a parasite will pop out of his back. And then you have to jump up and hack and slash with, you know, mash on Y or B. That's right. Yeah, you damage him until the point you can do that QTE attack. And yeah, that's right. So, yeah, a very fun boss fight.

You eventually fight two of them, but you can cheese that fight really easily. The Mendez fight is one I'm not a fan of. I never do that well. Anytime in the game where it's a boss fight against a humanoid thing that you're just, you know, kind of fighting in a small arena, it's not that great. Like, I just feel like it's just too easy to just waste a bunch of ammo and to be damaged without really understanding why or how to avoid it. But that's one of the boss fights. Another one I really like, we're talking about Snake Eater in that Jack Krauser is one of the villains that you fight in the game. There's a lot of villains in this game.

He is sort of the mercenary character. Which he, it's referenced that he has some sort of past with Leon, but this is after Resident Evil 2. Yeah. And so like, there's no explanation to who that character is or what their past story is unless I've just missed it. But like, he's just there to be menacing. And he's like this big hulking, like, scarred up dude.

I'm sure they referenced it in future games, but I was looking at the wiki for him. I'm like, who is he? And then there's like an entire backstory about him. and who he worked with. I'm like, Leon is like 20 years old. How does he have this much of a backstory with this guy? But so you fight him for the first time in this QTE boss battle.

And, you know, it's okay. It's like a Dragon Slayer kind of thing. But the second time you fight him, it reminds me a bit of like a sort of pared-down version of the end fight in Snake Eater, where it's like you have a very large area and one guy is hunting you. That's my favorite boss fight in the game.

And it's really cool. And you think that's like, oh, I have all these guns. But the secret is the knife does the most damage to him because he's like a melee fighter. He wants to slash at you and shoot at you. But I think that's the one time in the game when fighting against a humanoid enemy works because he's not always there on the screen for you to shoot at. He's not just a bullet sponge. So some of the other boss fights in this game, I don't care for the Salazar fight when he turns into that giant creature. That's usually

when I use the rocket launcher. So one of the cool things in this game is like you're giving a rocket launcher is basically the get out of boss free weapon where it's like, do you want to not fight this boss? Well, if you hit it with a rocket launcher once, the cutscene where the boss dies will just start. And that's it. It's great. Yeah, but it's another one of those where it's just like, well, I don't know why I'm being hits. I don't know how to avoid these attacks. And he's just a giant, like, ammo sponge. It also, the way that that fight is structured, so you have to fight them on this platform that goes around a semicircle room.

And in order to dodge one of his attacks, you have to jump off to a lower level. And every time that happens, and it happens a lot, you jump off, run all the way back to the ladder, climb up the ladder, get back to the center of the encounter. that you can shoot him accurately, and then you do it all over again. Yeah. It's one of those things that if it only took four or five hits, four or five rounds, it would be one thing. But it's like 10 to 12 rounds that you have to do this over and over again. Yeah, it's really tedious.

By the end of that boss fight, it's just like, I just want this to end. Like, it's not a tough fight. It's just annoying. Yeah, that's when I always use my rocket launcher against that guy. And there's other stuff in the game I want to go over before we wrap up here. I do want to talk about I did not ever get around to playing these, even though I played this game a billion times. is that I believe these were added

with the PlayStation 2 version, although there might have been one in the GameCube version. There are bonus missions with Ada that use different, they use the same resources, I think. Correct. But she's sort of like a weaker character, but with some different abilities. Have you played any of these, Zach?

I kind of skip them. I did forever ago, but I haven't on this latest play-through. I'm kind of interested in going back, but the thing that's a bummer about them is that it doesn't really tell a different story where some of the other Resident Evil bonus missions will tell a story from a different perspective

or something like that. Even like the Tofu missions or the hunk missions, they'll say like, okay, this is what the objective is. But with Ada, Ada's missions, it's just go in and kill a bunch of stuff, you know. Yeah, it's like, it's not really telling a different story. It's like, oh, wow, you were killing things.

Ada was killing things too. Also, yeah. And it's so interesting. But yeah, but one thing this game, pioneer that was carried on to all of the games after that. Well, to be fair, I think it first appeared in RE3, but mercenaries mode is when it really took full form in this game and that is sort of like they were so confident in the action of this

game that they essentially built an arcade style mini game around it and they were so confident in that they eventually released it as just a standalone 3DS game which is uh it was asking a lot for 40 bucks but i assume it's like three dollars so play it there but um that is a really cool mode and it's been a very fun feature in all of the rest of the games and um i don't know if they've done that for the re2 remake because it plays very differently but it was in five and six they of mercenaries in five and six, and they, they, uh, they really get a lot of mileage out of that for the game. But yeah, there's a lot of bonus stuff in the game. I did want to talk a bit about five and six because I was so excited for five because I love four. And, uh, I did play through

it. I did enjoy it, but I felt like it was a little too safe and it didn't follow a lot of the same rules. And, uh, it wasn't very challenging. And six was even worse in that respect. And it was even more of a quote unquote cinematic game that was more about a, you know, guided experience and challenging you in any way. What were your opinions on those games, Zach, five and six? I never played six. You are smart. Don't ever play six.

I mean, just the lead up to it and the fact that five was such a disappointment. Coming from being a diehard Resident Evil fan playing all those games up to that point, Five was such a letdown, both in terms of the story and the fact that it just felt like a lesser version of Resident Evil 4. it's actually a better game if you play at co-op. Yeah, co-op is interesting. It's more fun to couch co-op with somebody that you can split that screen and do, you know, attack from both sides of every area.

And it's more fun that way. And some of those encounters are built for co-op experience. Five is fine. Six, I never played, so. Yeah, six, it has its fans out there, but I feel like it was at a real turning point for game design when we started turning away from the very guided cinematic experience. and it was that, and it just felt like a step down even more from five.

Of course, this style did recover eventually, I mean, because of RE7 and RE2, but I wanted to ask you, Zach, like, do you think that there is a way to return to this RE4 kind of interpretation? Like, when I was playing through this game again, it's been long enough. I honestly thought, like, they can do a full-on RE2 style remake with RE4. Oh, yeah. And just make it a little more modernized and improve the lighting and stuff a little more in the graphics, of course, but this could be an extremely playable game today, and I think

it would be an excellent idea. What do you think about returning to the RE4 form, not even in a remake, just like what would you think about another action Ari game? Yeah, I mean, I'm all for it. I actually feel like Resident Evil 2 is Resident Evil 2 remade in a style that's closer to Resident Evil 4 because it is very similar in terms of like the third person perspective and you've got, you know, like it's not a fixed camera and it feels a lot like Resident Evil 4 to me. And so that in and of itself makes me feel like there's definite room for this to come back. I mean, plus the fact that games, aforementioned games that we talked about today, like Tomb Raider and God of War are phenomenal games built in the same style.

Yeah, I like that they remade, too, with sort of the same movement as four and the same sort of gunplay. But it is still in the same fashion of, like, tactically eliminating enemies. The world has persistence where it's like, if I kill the zombie here, he won't be here when I come back. Instead of, like, I'm going to shoot everything on the screen and get the little treasure chest that they drop. Yeah. So, like, I wonder, I really want to see a return to RE4, but I will say that I talked about it earlier on the podcast. Like, I honestly feel like the Evil Within 2 is the closest I've seen anyone come to making an RE4. Evil Within 1 had a lot of problems, and it was a very flawed game, and I understand why no one would want to play 2, and it seems like nobody did.

Yeah. But it felt like it is approaching an open world horror game, which I've never seen before, but it was the closest I've seen to something reaching the heights of RE4 and that it's it's all about like tactically defeating enemies and defeating all the enemies and making wise decisions and I'm sure it's like 20 bucks everywhere now so if you want already shot yeah it's definitely worth it it's a very long game too and I thought a major improvement over the first game but if you're looking for a similar experience to RE4 definitely the evil within two was super overlooked and I thought it was one of the best games of 2017 and nobody played It's, but that's their problem.

I love that game. But we're going to wrap up now. Zach, thank you so much for joining us. This is great. We'll have you back for sure. This is your first time on Retronaut. So where can we find you? I know you're working at ubiquitous software, of course.

But you have an internet presence, Syl. Yeah, you can follow me on Twitter at Zachary. Okay. And Jeremy, how about you? Yeah, I'm Jeremy Parrish, also known in Japan as Biohazard. And you can find me on Twitter as GameSpite. And you can find me doing stuff at Retroner. You can find me invisibly at greenlit content.

But yeah, you should do stuff that is involving following me on social media. Man, I'm tired. I do a bunch of videos about video games, old video games, kind of in the Retronauts wheelhouse. It's part of Retronauts. So you could check that out on YouTube. Game Boy works. NES works. Virtual Boy works.

Very exciting. No Resident Evil works, though. I'm sorry. That's coming, right, Jeremy? Sure. When you hit Resident Evil. Guy Dan on Game Boy for Game Boy Works. Okay. Did that come out? Yeah, I did I guess. It came out like in 2001, so you got, I don't know, 20 more years of Game Boy Works. Okay. So, we'll get to it,

we'll get to it. But as for us, we're Retronauts. And in case you don't know, we are all supported by Patreon. It pays for everything that we do here hosting and travel and our nice accommodations we have here. So if you want to support the show and get all of our stuff a week out of time and add free, go to patreon.com slash Retronauts. You can do just that for three dollars. It would help us out a lot if you could donate and you get some nice incentives on top of that. And as for me, I've been your host for this one, Bob Mackey. You can find me on Twitter. As Bob Servo, my other podcasts are all on the Talking Simpsons network at patreon.com

slash Talking Simpsons. And those podcasts are Talking Simpsons and What a Cartoon. Check those out anywhere you listen to podcast. But if you want to get some bonuses, go to patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. And we have many things on top of our regular podcast for you, including limited mini-series and movie-length podcast. So check it out at Patreon.com slash Talking Simpsons. But as for us at Retronauts, we will see you next week with a brand new podcast. Goodbye.

Come back anytime.