If you never owned a Dreamcast thus never bought the original, then have a ball with X, but don't expect the experience
I remember a long time ago when I first introduced the Resident Evil series to a friend of mine, I was absolutely appalled at his reaction to it: he basically told me that everything that made it successful to him wasn't the lingering jump out and scare you atmosphere, the blood and gore, the replay value or the mildly entertaining 70's horror movie plot or even the zombies & monsters. To him, it's success was the focus of gunplay for survival and poorly written dialogue, all of which he stated would've helped better if the series had more of an action emphasis to the point where the laws of human abilities and physics were thrown out the window in exchange for tossing characters around during retarded FMV sequences.
Obviously, I'm no longer friends with said friend, though I certainly didn't kick his pasty-white butt out of my life for his lack of vision, respect for horror gaming or even his action-lover perspective, but his mind-set was exactly the kind of mind-set that I feared would rise to power when the Resident Evil series finally started catering to that audience more often. The evidence is stark in the Playstation 2 port of the Dreamcast original Resident Evil Code Veronica.
Because the game is a mere port of the original, I won't dive too far into the plot because nothing's really changed, except mostly in that the reoccurring villain Albert Wesker has suddenly received far more screen time than necessary in Code Veronica, forgiving the fact that before Umbrella Chronicles, Zero or ANY of that BS, Wesker officially DIED at the end of the original game (for those of you unconvinced, buy the original, beat it and tell me how he could've even marginally escaped much less survived [and if that's too big of a spoiler, TOUGH]).
In general, the game handles the same and save for the graphical differences between Dreamcast and PS2 graphics the game pretty much looks the damn same and even feels the damn same what with Claire still being unable to bend forward and pick up an item fast enough to avoid being crushed by some stupid unintuitive death-trap that you still can't avoid by just shooting the damn thing that puts you into that godawful puzzle in the first place.
If anything, the whiny, gun totting teenager that is Steve Burnside no longer looks like Leonardo Dicaprio, but he's still the oddly empathetic, whiny gun totting teenager who seems to have watched so many action schlock films that he can defy not only the laws of physics but the games' own laws of wielding handguns where he fires Lugers without having to reload either of them at 15 Shots per Second per second, yet he still fires them at 2 Shots per Second a second when we play as him.
As I mentioned only a few paragraph shaped sentences ago, the game seems to be dedicated almost entirely to Albert Wesker and delivering all the atmosphere killing action schlock garbage characters like him and Steve stood for (hence the stupid X title I guess): we get more unnecessary scenes of Wesker showing off all the wall-skipping, high jumping, Terminator action moves that despite being pretentious, you still can't help but wonder why Capcom tried to pass Code Veronica as a survival horror game by having them.
Admittedly I suppose I'm not entitled to complain about all this because like the Dreamcast original, you still can't perform any of these stupid stunts that Steve or Albert perform during their lengthy FMV sequences. Which I can certainly be thankful for because giving the player unnatural, godly abilities takes away the feeling of unease and edginess expected in horror media. But exploiting the action to the point where it starts squelching the horror makes me feel that Capcom pretty much made the game to make it less scary than the Dreamcast original all ready was.
So I guess if you never owned a Dreamcast and thus never bought the original Code Veronica, then have a ball with the PS2 port, but don't expect the experience to feel any scarier. If you did happen to play the original, then the same applies, but don't expect it to feel any different, either.
The game still has evident moments of atmosphere all thankfully represented by Claire's mere presence (which makes me like her even more than I all ready did), it still has the lack of actual gore, the characters handle the same and so do the guns, the soundtrack still blows with only a few solid dramatic and atmospheric songs with the crappy would-be tension songs out-weighing the rest and the villains are still laughable and racially pretentious (why the antagonist had to be English instead of just American or ambiguous and why he had to sound like the Joker, I'll never know).
The only real big difference is the simple fact that the stupid action-packed BS has been upped to the point where it's borderline uncomfortable to be even associated with a game series like Resident Evil. Maybe not to the point where it suffocates the atmosphere, but enough to the point where you wish the game could briefly turn in to someone you could back-hand for trying to be an action epic.
Port vs Original. Winner: ORIGINAL.
At least by having one pretentious action scene it still leaves room for the atmosphere to leave a significant impression and what little drama there was. If you think this review's too unfair, then tell me how fair it is to live in a generation of horror movies livened up by unoriginal writing, remakes, Americanized Asian films and genre-crossing.