OK, so since my last post I’ve played the modern remakes of both Resident Evil 2 and 3, after which I finally went through the story for the NIKKE collaboration.  It was probably 20 hours worth of controller time to get through the full Claire > Leon sequence in RE2 and then the single path of RE3.  Most of that was RE2, of course.  I’d heard complaints that the RE3 remake was criminally short, but I didn’t realize just HOW short it was.

I looked it up after the fact, and it looks like they legitimately charged $60 for a game that is like, 5 hours long with a solid half of the assets reused from the RE2 remake.  That’s ballsy!

I paid $40 for the bundle of (RE2 + RE3 + RE4 + extras) in the recent steam sale, and that seems like a pretty good deal.  Adding the remasters of the remakes of the first game and Zero only added another ten bucks to that.  That’s a lot of zombies per dollar.

Anyway.  I’m glad I played through the first three, because that gave me enough information to understand the NIKKE collab.  It seems to have been set immediately after the end credits for 3, in fact.

The story wasn’t too impactful – collaboration stories can’t be impactful, because it’s not like Shift Up can rerun them – but it had some great character moments between Claire and Quiry and especially between Ada and D.  I felt it was definitely worth the time invested in catching up on RE lore.

Also, they’re good games!  RE3 may have been blink-and-you’ll-miss-it-short, but I liked the way it fleshed out the events of RE2 while also doing its own thing.  There were times in both where I found myself cursing the inventory system, but neither was as bad as RE1 and it made finding the assorted belt pouches to give myself more inventory space feel rewarding.

Though I would like to curse whoever came up with the achievement name of “It’s Hip to Add Squares” because I spent ALL NIGHT with the Huey Lewis song stuck in my head, and also the bit where Leon is running all over the police station trying to find two electronic components felt just a tiny bit stretched.

These are minor complaints.

My plan WAS to play 4 next, but looking at the franchise release order I realized that I really need to do Code Veronica and Zero before I get to 4.

It’s been a few years since I owned a Dreamcast and the disc version of Code Veronica, so I went and hunted down disc images, and found a Dreamcast emulator that would run on my M2 iPad, and got it booted, and…

…boy, Dreamcast graphics are pretty rough in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty-five, huh?  And OMG these controls.  It’s not just the tank controls for movement, it’s the B to open the item menu and then X to select items and…

It looks like there is a 2.5 hour “movie cut” of all the game cutscenes and important gameplay on Youtube, and my plan is to watch that to understand what Claire got up to after leaving Raccoon City.  Hopefully Code Veronica gets the remake treatment at some point.

Assuming I make it through Zero, and RE4: Remake after that, I have quite a few other titles in the series already.  From various sales, I own Mac App Store versions of RE: Biohazard and RE: Village, and I picked up the  3DS release of RE: Revelations during the waning days of the eShop.  It looks like the only important titles I am missing at this point are 5, 6 and Revelations 2.  I think they go on sale often enough that I should be able to fill out the library cheap if the urge hits me.