A reader suggests that Capcom try and push the comedy elements of its games further, with an action parody based on Resident Evil or Dino Crisis.
I am a great fan of Resident Evil. I would probably say it is my favourite video game series and as a fan I have been eating pretty good the last several years. The remakes and new games have almost all been fantastic, with only Resident Evil 3 and, to a degree, Resident Evil Village, being a bit of a letdown.
I’m really looking forward to Resident Evil Requiem, because the buzz around that seems really good from everything I’ve read about it, but it’ll have to be really good to beat my favourite game of this generation: the Resident Evil 4 remake.
Considering the problems it had with adapting the original control system, I think it turned out amazing and I’ve played through it three whole times. I’m glad that it does keep some of the weird and funny dialogue, but they have cut it back, so it’s not as funny as the original, and that’s my one complaint against it.
I miss the cheesy camp of the early Resident Evil games and think they’re a really important part of the series. New games, like Village, have tried to recreate it but it’s difficult to do because originally they weren’t meant to be funny and then you’re just writing intentionally silly dialogue.
It’s not that that can’t be done well but it’s difficult and I don’t think Capcom has been entirely successful with it yet. But I’d really like them to try. Resident Evil 2 remake only had a few nods here and there to the old dialogue and tone; while trying to make some things more serious but I’d like a future game to go the other way.
What would be great is an alternative voice track, especially for Resident Evil 4, where it’s all meant to be a comedy, like a cross between Evil Dead and Airplane. You have different voice tracks for different languages in games, so I don’t see why you couldn’t have ones for different scripts.
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Of course, it’d be even better if they redid the animations and everything or just went full-out and made a dedicated game that was a comedy.
Everyone wants Capcom to remake Dino Crisis, but they don’t really look like they’re going to. I’ve played the original recently and it is very old-fashioned and kind of silly, but it doesn’t have as funny dialogue as Resident Evil, with no really interesting characters. What would be really cool is if they did a reboot and it was played for laughs.
This time it could be Evil Dead and Jurassic Park, and that sounds really good to me. It could still be a proper game, with similar gameplay to the old Dino Crisis, but just make it intentionally funny. Heck, make it an actual remake but with jokes, that happens plenty of times in movies.
Comedy is already rare in video games and I think that’s just because it’s hard to do and the people they hire to write video games aren’t built for it. When you’re still giving examples of Monkey Island and Portal as the funniest games you know there’s a problem, because those games are old!
The only game I know that did hire comedians to write it was Lego City Undercover, of all things, and it was really funny. Or at least funnier than you’d expected and given it had to be family friendly. I’d love to see a similar thing happen on bigger scale and with a higher age rating.
I know it’ll probably never happen but so many games are just the same old thing, I feel companies should be trying to expand their horizons more. They’re always going on about attracting more people, but they always try to do it with the same old games. We’re at a point where if someone wanted to play a game they already would’ve done it, so they need something different to draw them in.
By reader Landon
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