Hold on to
your decaying body parts: Capcom’s about to throw you a curve ball.
As gamers worldwide are well aware, Capcom’s signature survival
horror series has become literally synonymous with the living dead,
to the point where the mere mention of the Resident Evil
series is likely to conjure up images of zombies, zombies, and more
zombies. Strange, then, to discover that the latest installment in
the Resident Evil series will not contain zombies. You heard
me right, no zombies. Before you toss your sweaty GC
controller at the wall, though, take a deep breath and keep
reading. While there may be no literal “living dead”, in the finest
tradition of Euro-horror, the de facto “zombies” will be
present, albeit in somewhat modified form. In the tradition of
Rollin’s Raisins de la Mort or Klimovsky & Naschy’s People
Who Own the Dark (not to mention Romero’s domestic
classic the Crazies), the “zombified” menace comes in the
form of some still living, but somehow entranced villagers. Trust
me, it amounts to the same thing in the end, albeit minus a bit of
aesthetic grue.

Also missing in
action from this entry in the series is the evil Umbrella Corporation,
the clowns who caused all those damn zombie infestations in the first
place. Instead, playing as Leon Kennedy (from Resident Evil 2),
you’ll have to find the President’s kidnapped daughter. The game
takes place 6 years after the events that took place in Raccoon City,
where last we left the erstwhile Kennedy brother. Your quarry has
been spirited away to a mysterious village, whose denizens appear to
be “zombified”. One major difference between the living and undead:
in place of the shambling zombies of previous entries, you’ll find the
zonked-out villagers to be much smarter, faster, and worse, with the
knowledge and ability to brandish weapons against you. Thankfully for
the more liberally inclined among us, you can target specific
body parts this time around, allowing you to shoot weapons from their
hands or take them down with a well placed shot to the leg.

While I’m not
sure how this will affect things aesthetically, backgrounds will no
longer sport the gorgeous pre-rendered look of the last few entries.
Instead, everything will take place in real time and in full 3D. Also
altered will be the wacky camera angles and slightly buggy controls
that have traditionally frustrated series fans. Replacing them will
be an over-the-shoulder third person view, with Leon remaining on the
left side of the screen for most of the game. For the obsessive
purist, the game will be displayed in widescreen. In perhaps the
weirdest of all these apparently dramatic changes, a Shenmue
style quick-time “action button” will appear at various junctures of
the game, forcing you to perform a particular “pass/fail” action in
order to proceed. The times, they are a’changin…
Resident
Evil 4 will be released
exclusively for the GameCube this fall.
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