Resident Evil on PS1 - a truly revolutionary title

Had there ever been a game as scary, as engaging or as inventive as Resident Evil? This was before the days of the internet so while I don't exactly remember for certain, we likely found out about this game via some sort of gaming magazine like Game-Pro or something along those lines. On another note I really miss those gaming magazines :)

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Remember when Playstation games came in a massive box and had the black plastic scratch guard on the bottom of the disks? That's the version of Resident Evil that I ended up with.

From the moment that you put the game in the system and it shouted "RESIDENT EEEE-VIL!" at you when you pressed start, you knew you were in for a treat. The cast of characters were quickly introduced and you ended up in a large mansion being pursued by dogs.

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Of all the characters that we meet at the very beginning, Barry is by far the best and the voice actor they chose for this guy is just remarkable and by remarkable I mean awful, but in a "so bad, it's good type way."

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I also love the line where they find some lockpicks and someone says something along the lines of "Jill, here’s a lock pick. It might be handy if you, the master of unlocking, take it with you."

Another great Barry line happens when Jill escapes a collapsing room and Barry says "you were almost a Jill sandwich!"

Humor aside, when we are first introduced to the zombies at the very start, it was a truly scary situation.

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It was also immediately evident that we were going to be dealing with a limited ammunition situation that ended up being a frequent problem throughout the game.

The puzzles were engaging yet not too difficult, and just when you start to feel as though you could breathe easy, a dog would crash through a window scaring the bejesus out of you. I think the most terrifying moment for me was towards the 70% mark or so a gigantic spider crashes from the ceiling that I don't know about you, but i didn't even notice it was there when I walked i.

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I don't know about you, but rather than use up my ammo, i horded it and would learn tactics for what i called "juking" the slow moving zombos in the hallways rather than killing them. They were pretty easy to avoid for the most part.

Another issue that arose in Resident Evil that may have affected other people more than me is that you couldn't just save the game willy-nilly. You had a limited amount of typewriter ribbons, and while there were more than enough of them to comfortably save at reasonable intervals, you couldn't get away with simply saving all the damn time.

The day that I purchased this game (probably the day it was released,) myself and a friend stayed up the entire night with him serving as a copilot and finished a great deal of the entire game. I remember when my female roomate at the time woke up to see us in the same places we had been 11 hours prior and simply said "you guys are nuts!" But that was simply how great that game was.

It would later be remade and changed quite a great deal and sold nearly as well as the first time they sold it. Some would say (like me for example) that they have kind of done all that they can with this franchise and I no longer look forward to the games when they come out; but there was a time when Resident Evil was king and it was first established in 1996.

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I just found out that another RE game, a remake of RE 3, is going to be released in less than 3 months. I will probably wait until it is a couple years old before I get on board, but since the remakes have been so successful, it is easy to understand why Capcom does this.