A bizarre incident occurred in the outskirts of an American suburb called Raccoon City...

Day 21

After thinking about what to write about today, many topics came through my head like my relationship with food or my love/hate relationship with working out, how bad I am at playing sports (but play them when I have to), my 2.5 years late IG post about my cats and how they have help me with stress, continue stories about travel or share some additional family drama, but going through social media I came across an interesting post by CAPCOM (the game developer) that today is the 25th Anniversary of Resident Evil 2. 

As posted on Instagram

You can bet that this entry will be about that particular game and how it changed my perspective of what a videogame could really be regarding storytelling, atmosphere and gameplay.  I have to give a little bit of background first though, as mentioned before, I'm a Nintendo fanboy at heart and by the fifth generation of gaming consoles, I definitely choose the Nintendo 64 over the PlayStation (PSX) and there were a few reasons why: 

• The most obvious one, Nintendo games (Zelda, Mario, DK, and many others) were going to be exclusive to the N64.
• Graphically it was superior: texture filtering was a thing (no blocky textures), anti-aliasing was also another thing (less jagged edges) and textures wouldn't wobble. 
• No loading times due to the use of cartridges vs CD (more on this later)
• Innovative (yet clunky-ish) controller.
• Decently priced

My cousins on the other hand, preferred the PSX due to various reasons:

• Games tend to be more mature: horror, racing, shooting, cursing, blood, etc.
• The games tend to be bigger with lots of full motion videos, speech, and great audio quality due to the CD-ROM media.
• They could pirate games with the use of a mod-chip.

Developers also took notice of the fact that the CD media offered way more flexibility regarding the development of games due to the massive storage difference when compared to cartridges - N64 cartridges were at most 32MB while a CD-ROM could storage 650MB, which is plenty of space for FMV, voices, music, textures, etc, and also the manufacturing cost of the cartridge was massively higher than the CDs.

Capcom, which was a great Nintendo partner in the SNES era, moved their new IP and bigger ideas to the PSX and one great game that came out in 1996 was the original Resident Evil, a great steppingstone for a franchise but that had many glaring issues like subpar cheesy dialog (Jill sandwich comes to mind), very rough graphics (this is the time were developers are playing with brand new 3d technology),  sound design a bit underwhelming, but it was definitely scary and a great movie-like experience then.  I remember playing that game with my cousins and really loving it and when Resident Evil 2 was announced, expectations were really high for me.

Eventually the game came out a day like today 25 years ago, and oh shit did it changed my perspective on what an immersive video game could be.  Everything compared to the first one was better: the graphics, the FMV, the audio design, the story which was more grounded and believable, the characters, the gameplay design (the whole game had basically 4 different scenarios).  The jump scares were all over the place and the survival-horror of the first game was turned up a notch and I simply fell in love with the game.  

I remember clearly the first time I played it at my cousin's, it was a Friday night, I was 12 years old, the first part of the game was scary as shit for me: the intro (that depending on the starting character was different and its dialog is something I still remember today), having to deal with zombies from the get-go, and then trying to reach the Raccoon City Police Department just to be thrown into a licker in the first 20 minutes of the game was a bit much.  My heart was racing like a madman with a mixture of excitement, fear, anxiety, amazement, intrigue, cluelessness and many other indescribable feelings, but I couldn't stay and play all night long, and had to eventually leave and go home.

Normally in my barrio there would be people walking around at night, and my cousins just lived a few houses down the street from mine but went I left, the streets were EMPTY, the night was way too quiet, the wind was blowing as if a hurricane was about to come in and I was scared as shit because of the game.  Long story short, I sprinted back home at almost the speed of light.

For the next few days my mind was only thinking about Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield, about how I didn't have a PSX and how badly I wanted to play the game.  In early 1999 Capcom announced a port of Resident Evil 2 to the N64 and felt like my prayers were answered, but at the same time a feeling of dread came over me for a very simple reason: how would the game be on N64 if the original PSX version was on 2 CDs? But that's the cool thing about technology, and the mastery of software development, that it gives you the tools and possibilities to dream the impossible.

The N64 version was developed by Angel Studios (nowadays Rockstar San Diego) and it was a technical showcase I thought I would never see on the N64.  Basically, they were able to put the whole game (FMV included) - 2 CDS - about 1.3GB of data into a single 64MB cartridge - the biggest ever on the console.  Everything about the port was amazing, and they were even able to add new features and even better graphics than on the PSX due to the power of the N64 and just simply I LOVED IT.

As years went by, many ports of the game were released on different systems like the PC, the Sega Dreamcast, the Nintendo Gamecube and lastly on the PS3 as a classic PS1 game. Also, through the years Capcom remade the original Resident Evil for the Nintendo Gamecube, which in itself still one the best remakes ever made, and it was so good that everybody wanted a remake of the second game. Time went by, and nothing happened, until August 2015 when Capcom said they were working on a remake. I still had to wait 3 more years to see a trailer, and wait a bit more, until January 2019, for the game release, but it was worth the wait as the game itself can be described in just one word: AMAZING.

Showing off the PS4 remake on my IG - I rarely get games on day 1 at full price, but I had to do it for this one.