Resident Evil 3 Demo

19 October, 2020

I tried out the Resident Evil 3 remake demo on the PS4 the other day. It looks nice, but the gameplay is brutal. It takes three headshots to kill a zombie, and about a dozen non-headshots if your aim is as bad as mine, so you run out of bullets in about 10 seconds flat, and then have to either run away or use the knife. The knife is not a very effective weapon.

Facing down a street of zombies with a hunting knife.

It’s also a major drag to do the old-school adventure-style puzzle solving. Get bolt cutters to cut the chain on the door, so you can pick up the fire hose in the alley, so you can connect it to the fire hydrant to put out the fire, except you have to figure out how to open the door that closes behind you, and somehow restore power to a subway, and there’s a combination to a safe over here but the safe is way over there, and everything is scattered all over the place and impossible to remember, and on and on and on. And your inventory is too small to carry much of anything, so you have to keep swapping things back and forth into storage.

I don’t really miss those games. It’s a chore. There’s no rhyme or reason to any of the puzzles, you just have to hope you randomly stumble on the right solution with persistent exploration of every nook and cranny, and successful memorization of everything in previously-explored locations.

Jill's neck takes a beating in this game.

Anyway the main purpose of it was to a) record a video to throw on my channel because that’s apparently where I talk about gameplay mechanics now, and b) to test the new Elgato HD60 Pro HDMI capture card that came in over the weekend, which I got for a whopping $15 off on Prime Day. It has worked successfully twice now, so I’m hoping to use it to finish up the Horizon Zero Dawn Frozen Wilds DLC.

In other gaming news, I haven’t written a post about this, but I’ve played not one, but two more sessions of Genshin Impact on the PS4, bringing my grand total of play time up to about 2 1/2 hours. I still don’t quite understand what the fuss is or was about. It’s been about three weeks since it launched and I’m starting to see more and more people report that they’re tired of it, or dropping it for the World of Warcraft expansion.

Speaking of that World of Shadowthingy, I’m not planning to buy this one. I got caught up in the hype of the last two expansions and played both of them for about two weeks, which was enough time to get one character to the max level. That was all I needed to play them. They were fun while there were new lands to explore, but they weren’t that fun. Not $65 worth of fun, at least, for a month of subscription and the cost of the expansion.

Anyway here’s the thrilling saga of Jill Valentine getting her throat torn out over and over again.

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