Screenshot

OK, so.  I’ll admit that the number of modern high-budget console-style releases that have gotten Mac releases in the last few years can be easily counted without running out of fingers.  For all that Apple is the biggest gaming company in the world by revenue, they really don’t emphasize games for their personal computers.

That being said, I played through Resident Evil 7 back in December and followed it up this month with Resident Evil Village (I’m just going to call it 8 from now on), both of which performed really well on my M2 Pro-equipped MacBook.  I mean, sure, there was some upscaling trickery involved – but I was getting frame rates in the 100+ range and I rarely noticed that it wasn’t REALLY rendering a 2560×1440 screen.

I hadn’t finished a Resident Evil game before October of last year, so it’s been kind of interesting going through the entire series (or, at least, the mainline entries) in the span of about 4 months.  I’m hopeful that there will be modernized remakes of 0 and Code Veronica at some point, because they seem pretty important to the overall plot but are really games I’m not patient enough to play in their current incarnations.

Resident Evils 7 and 8 were pretty different when compared to previous entries.  The horror aspects were ramped up in 7, to the point where the opening couple of hours weren’t easy to get through, and 8 was still pretty disturbing at the beginning even if it doesn’t take long for you to start collecting weapons and being more of a threat to the various vampires, werewolves, zombies and …weird techno zombie things than they are to you.

Note: I play these games on the easy difficulty setting, for the most part.

8 was also pretty far out there in terms of how grounded it was, or rather wasn’t.  I’m used to the series justifying almost anything supernatural-adjacent with “they’re a biological weapon, don’t think about it too hard” but 8 REALLY leaned into it.

Good time, though.  Really, most of the series has been a good time.  I’m not fond of the entries that go hard on the limited inventory and backtracking aspects, though I understand those have traditionally been hallmarks of the series, but even the worst of the mainline games were worth playing.

I’m now in the odd position of being caught up to a long-running series just before a new entry releases and not knowing exactly where I want to play it.  Like, I could go with the PC version for the best visuals, or the Switch 2 version will probably be decent enough and that has its own advantages… or should I wait for a Mac port?  They haven’t announced one, though it seems likely there will be one…

Of all of the various dilemmas of life, this is a pretty mild one.  Somehow, I’ll probably spend more time on it than I spend on decisions that are actually important, though. 🙂