the game that started it all.. (and the hardest in the series)
the first game in the series i have ever played was resident evil 2.
it was scary, puzzling and fun. over the years i got curious and wanted to see what the first one was like and decided to go on a hunt to find it, until one day i wondered into gametraders and found it for thirty dollars. when i got home, i was a little dissapointed in the graphics, sound effects and the overall look of the game.
so i then returned it. months later i got even more curious and decided to go search for it again. i then found it again in second hand condition for 10 bucks and decided to get it.
when i got home.. i played it, bet it and now decided to write a review on it.
at the start of the game you are giving a choice of playing either Jill valentine or Chris Redfield. i chose Jill because Chris's story is much more harder due to the fact that you don't start off with a gun, you don't have a lockpick and the very limited storage space in his inventory screen.
what struck me first was how slow it was. whenever you open a door you always have to watch a video of the door opening (this is a tradition for most resident evil games), there is always a pause between each of the background loading and as for the text on screen...... it takes forever to write.....I'm playing the PAL version and I've heard that the NTSC version is faster by a margin.
what also got me was the overall difficulty of it. even on the normal/easy setting it is still is a pretty hard game (even for Jill) the first time i played this i wasted at least 6-8 of my hand gun bullets just to kill 1 zombie and I died in the L-shaped hall were all the zombie dogs pop out. there is also no auto-aim in this game so whenever you want to kill something you have to turn and face them directly in order to shoot them.
what made me stop playing this game for awhile was the hunters (them frog-like creatures). When i first encountered them i was on very low ammunition and didn't have enough green-herbs to heal myself. so of course i died. later on when i started playing again i managed to kill some of them and run past a few....... and that's when i encountered Yawn (the giant snake) a second time.
and since that i was on very low health and had bugger all ammunition, I couldn't find a way to kill him. so of course i got killed and then stopped playing for a awhile (again)
i then decided to play through it all over again and save as much ammunition and health to kill that reptilian fiend. it worked yes, but bloody hell was it annoying.
And finally i have to comment on the voice ac-ting. Everyone knows that this game is notorious on its legendary bad voice ac-ting and playing it the second time, it is far worse then i remember it. its not just the poor ac-ting but also the the bad grammar, wording and sentence structure. some fans like it as it reminds them of a bad horror movie, but i hate because it takes away the realism that this game has. lines like.... "Here's a lockpick. It might be handy if you, the master of unlocking, take it with you" or when Jill tells Chris to stay inside a cell that he is already locked in, are so cheesy and bad that it is almost laughable. I don't know if it is the fact that the rest of the series has better voice ac-ting but this game reminds me of house of the dead 2 and how bad its voice ac-ting was.
when i finally got up to the last boss battle with the tyrant (and also i would like to mention that i don't have chris with me) the game suddenly got impossible for me. even though i had the strongest weapons in the game and plenty of green herbs i still found it impossible to aim and shoot this bugger without getting myself damaged in the process. i did beat him after 5-8 tries.
after i bet him, i was greeted with a FMV video of Jill and Barry leaving this hell-hole. even though i was given a bad ending i was still satisfied that i bet it.
i guess thats all I got to say about this one. For the casual Re-fan i would recommended them to play either the remake or the DS version due to the fact that they are easier to find and a hell of a load faster. but if you are a die-hard Re-fan and you MUST play the original, be prepared to be frustrated on the slow-loading times and poor ac-ting. its a good game, i have to give it that but there are so many flaws to make others think of it as a bad one.
~biotyrant