Creatively Bankrupt at Capcom

Capcom used to be one of the biggest and best companies out there.  Street Fighter, Megaman, Dead Rising, Monster Hunter, Devil May Cry, the list goes on forever of great franchises under their belt.  While some of their stuff has gone a bit stale like Megaman, recent releases like Resident Evil 7 show the company clearly still has it somewhere.

Recently they released news that they were remaking Resident Evil 2.  This remake not just being like the RE1 remake on the Gamecube back in those days, but a full on remastering where it's all new fangled over the shoulder stuff now and basically nothing like Resident Evil 2 at all.  Sarcasm aside it doesn't look too bad, even if it's not the remake I wanted or hoped for, it'll probably still be, at the very least, a good game.  However the hype surrounding the remake has set off some money alarms at Capcom headquarters and they have realized that remaking old games=BIG BUCKS.  They have said they are going to "explore" the idea of remaking more of their older games.

This may be exciting for some people that we may be getting nice shiny new versions of Dino Crisis or whatever but to me this news screams that they now have an excuse to be lazy.  Now that they know that remaking old games will generate hype AND dollars, why bother trying to make anything new?  If you google "upcoming Capcom games" the three titles that appear at the top of the search are Devil May Cry 5, Megaman 11 and Deep Down.  So two sequels and Souls-looking dungeon crawl.  Google that in six months and it'll probably just be a list of remakes and a tweak to Street Fighter.

Maybe I'm just mad and cynical because I'm sick of seeing remakes and sequels EVERYWHERE.  Of course, gaming isn't devoid of it's original IPs, there's plenty of indie devs and other companies putting out original stuff but I just feel that it's a shame that a big lad like Capcom isn't using the piles of money it has to try something different.  Let's at least hope that if they do start churning out remakes, they are at least of good quality.

Torn About Resident Evil 2 Remake

So a remake of Resident Evil 2 got announced and when I first heard the news I was absolutely fucking stoked.  Resident Evil 2 is quite possibly my favorite Resident Evil game and the idea of having a version of it that's all in shiny next-gen-o-vision is a truly exciting idea.  However upon seeing some of the game play footage for it, I'm a little torn.  First let me start by showing you a video of the demo that someone has done that doesn't have any commentary on it so you can just see and process for yourself.

Like I said, on one hand I'm really excited because at the end of the day it's fuckin' Resident Evil 2.  It's the best game in the series made to look all pretty and have modern game play and whatnot but that's also half the problem.

I didn't WANT this.  When I first saw someone on my social media post about it I had visions of REMake but it's Resident Evil 2 instead of 1.  That's what I really wanted, just a nice shiny remake of the 2nd game for modern systems.  REMake had some extra content as well in the form of Lisa Trevor and all that stuff so maybe this dream RE2 remake I had in my head would have had some of that too.  Hell, I bet there's a lot of stuff from RE1.5 that could be implemented as bonus modes or as extra content to the main story.

But what we got was the RE6 looking thing that's stolen RE7s interface with all new shit going on.  Of course that isn't inherently a bad thing but I'm having trouble getting over the shock of it not being REMake 2.  I think that one things that long standing fans of survival horror have wanted for a long time is for games to go BACK to that old style because it helps to serve the horror.  I hate the fact that all modern "horror" games have just turned into 3rd person action games with jump scares and gore and that seems to be the direction that Resident Evil 2 Remaster is taking.

Still, I'm not going to completely shit on it just yet since a short game play video and a trailer aren't really enough to form a complete opinion on.  I've yet to see anything of Claire's campaign and I'm interested to see what they do with the plot since I've heard that they've done away with the whole A/B thing that the first one had.  Let's hope they do it justice.