Fox pointed me at this. He's an RE fanatic and I was hearing about RE4 from him over a year before it was released. Anyhow, it sounds like there's a port of RE4 for the PC. Might be decent. I've got my issues with the game in terms of plot, but it was reasonably solid when I played it (I got it for my brother for his GameCube). Only on a PC I might be able to actually aim accurately. It wouldn't be so bad if it weren't that the game makes it necessary to shoot all of your opponents directly in the face. Not helpful but necessary. It's irritating. There's eleventy-billion of these villagers and they can take three bullets to the face. Or roughly half a clip to any other part of their bodies. What kind of gun does Leon have, a .22 Glock? (For the record, yes, I know it's not a .22 Glock.) Give me my Colt 1911 "Proven in film noir to make bad people stop moving" .45 Automatic any day. The big complaint I have is that it suffers from the same problem as every other Resident Evil game ever made. Only, RE4 suffers from it in a new and unique way. What's this problem, you who have never played RE ask (as anyone who has played or seen RE played knows the answer already)? The crummy camera angles. In most RE games, the camera angles are so bad that it is easily possible to be attacked by a zombie when both the zombie and you are off the screen. So you have no idea if the zombie is ten yards away...or six inches and about to bite into your sinuses. RE4 takes this and changes the paradigm. No longer will you be off the screen. Zombies might. They might be right behind you, giving it to you in the backside and you can't see them (sort of like real life, I suppose), but at least you are always in the middle of the screen. Oh, wait, no you're not. And that's RE4's camera problem. It is not placed directly over your shoulder like, say, any other 3rd person non-fixed camera game released in the past eight years. No, it is behind your shoulder and about two steps to the side. For someone who's used to more traditional camera angles, like right behind the player character, or looking through their eyes, this is remarkably frutrating. I can walk into a room in FEAR shoot two helmeted baddies dead, right through the craniums with two bullets (from Phobos and Deimos, my twin AT50's, that's the pistols) and be back in cover before they can regroup. In RE4, it takes three bullets to take down an unarmored alien zombie villager, assuming they are all clustered in the head. Which, since I can't aim based on how I'm holding the gun, is not so easy to do. Fortunately, your pistol has a laser sight. Without it, you'd be screwed. By moving the camera two feet to the side, Capcom turned the laser sight on your semiautomatic version of the Klobb (way to make the gun more worthless Capcom! That's a major achievement!) from a nice feature to an absolute necessesity. Now, if the villagers went down more easily (like say, how anyone who isn't hopped up on enough PCP to really make the dead walk), this wouldn't be so much an issue. Or if, you know, you weren't having to fight your way through the entirety of the village. But near as I can tell, there's no sneaking either. You eventually get spotted, and then everyone and their crazy, chainsaw-wielding, burlap-sack-wearing uncle shows up to tear you apart. Each of them requiring three bullets administered to the brain box to drop. And ammo is kept to "survival horror" levels, meaning that if you don't shoot all of them directly in the face, you are probably not going to have enough.

Now maybe I'm being to harsh. Maybe the port can prove me wrong. Maybe, if I get it, I'll come back with an entirely different opinion. After all, my attempts at Halo (Dear Bungie, thanks for making an entire two maps for multiplayer play. Or at least making sure that people who didn't actually own the game would never know that there were more than two maps.) proved to me that after mastering the superior control mechanism of the mouse and keyboard, I cannot possibly aim properly with a thumbstick (not fine enough grain, it makes me very angry). Or at least I would need a console in order to learn how to do so. Since Playstation generally manages the worst FPS's in history ("007 The World is Not Enough", I'm looking at you) and I'm bound to Sony's product for my DDR and Armored Core and Dark Stalkers, the odds are not so good that I will learn to aim with the thumbstick. Especially since I'm unlikely to buy a console any day soon. I would much rather rebuild my computer, and since I can do that for only slightly more than the PS3 is going to retain for, you can guess what I would rather do with my cash.

That's right...Spend it on Imperian.

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