Monday, December 31, 2007

12 days of Christmas - time well spent

Have taken full advantage of not being at work by investing hours finishing ‘Resident Evil 4’.

The game is fantastic fun, if blowing away zombies with an increasingly exotic amount of weaponry is your idea of a good time (and why wouldn’t it be?). One criticism though – it starts really well but then sort of drops off.

Maybe it’s because it just starts so well, or maybe it’s because I’m a bit long in the tooth. But I really feel as though I’ve run along every corridor known to man shooting at alien, zombies and critters from dimension Y.

That was why the start of the game was so good, you’re in a village in Europe (Spain, I think), and the locals turn on you. Basically, this is brown-trouser stuff – great because it’s a fabulous premise that is recognisable from many movies (especially the excellent ‘Dagon’) but mostly because this is the base-level fear of any tourist who has ever driven though the sort of village where there are more goats than people about where you start to wish that the three-door sub-compact you rented came with a shotgun as well as collision damage waiver.

It’s all very well done and brings on a sense of creeping dread rather than shock and jumps. Then, of course, as soon as you pot a bloke and an alien sprouts from his decapitated torso, it’s business as usual.

Most terrifying of all – the game keeps track of how long you have played it for. Took me 22 hours to get through. Time enough to make a start on learning the guitar, dig the garden, write that slim volume of poetry or go to the gym 22 times (actually 21 times, first visit would be to join a gym) but let’s be honest – it’s actually simply saved me 22 hours of watching crap on telly.

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