It's a strange sensation to review Resident Evil in the year 2002. As most of you know, Capcom released Resident Evil on the Sony PlayStation game console back in 1996, giving rise to the now-popular "survival horror" genre. While it wasn't the first game to employ the horror theme, it enjoyed commercial success that helped push that style of game to the mainstream. Multiple sequels and millions of dollars later, Capcom is re-releasing a completely new vision of the original Resident Evil (dubbed "REmake") on the Nintendo Gamecube, with updated visuals, new storyline additions and tweaked play mechanics. Though this is a remake, there is a lot that is new, and compared to the original game, most of it is for the better.

When starting the game, you're asked to how you'd like to play. Your two initial options are mountain climbing (normal) and hiking (easy). From my experience, it seems normal is a little too hard for newcomers, while easy is a little too easy for RE veterans. If you haven't played a Resident Evil game in a while, there's no shame in selecting easy, as the game is more difficult than it used to be. From here, you pick your character, either Jill Valentine or Chris Redfield. Jill has a slightly easier mission (plus she can carry 8 items compared with 6 for Chris), so you might want to start with her first. Chris has more stamina, though, which is great when you want to play on the harder difficulty settings.

The opening to the game follows the formula from the original, with STARS members Jill, Chris, Barry, Brad and Wesker sent to look for their missing comrades from Bravo Team in the Arklay mountains. The silly, live-action sequence has been replaced with slick computer-generated imagery which suits the tone of the game much better. The acting is much more restrained, thankfully, but the forced dramatic pauses in some of the lines still sound a little cheesy at times. The characters look fantastic, with smooth animation and a superb amount of detail. A few first-person camera sequences add quite a bit of cinematic polish to the proceedings.

Once inside the mansion, you take control of Chris or Jill. Here you'll notice the game's biggest selling point, the updated visuals. Capcom has completely re-modeled and re-rendered each room of the mansion with much greater detail and a more realistic look. The mansion looks much more like a haunted house then it ever did, which greatly adds to the tense atmosphere. The environments are still pre-rendered, but they're not flat images, but looping FMV animation much like Fear Effect. You can pick out the seams on occasion, but otherwise they look great. The animated shadows and lighting effects are outstanding, and add a sense of depth to the surroundings. The mansion and surrounding areas are quite a bit bigger than before, so there are lots of spooky new locales to explore.

The real standout, however, are the characters themselves. Jill, Chris and the others look very life-like, sporting a ton of tiny details. You can see the minute and second hands on Barry's watch, and you can read the description of STARS on the back of Jills shirt. Each face is expertly carved and rendered, though Capcom borrows a page from Konami's book by using generic lip movements that don't quite match the speech. The characters are all smoothly animated and move in a very realistic manner, especially during cutscenes. These are a huge step forward from Code Veronica, which looks dated by comparison. With so little of the Gamecube's resources used on the environments, Capcom was able to sculpt and texture character models that closely resemble their FMV counterparts.

The zombies look great as well, decked out in the latest in tattered clothing and decaying flesh. In fact all the enemies sport a great-looking next-generation makeover, especially the bosses (the giant snake looks especially menacing now that it actually resembles a snake). The 3D models blend in with the backgrounds quite well, and a new depth-of-field effect does a decent job of blurring characters further away from the camera. The gore is more visceral than ever, as bloody chunks and severed limbs are rendered with more gruesome detail than in previous installments. Sadly, you can't dismember the zombies with some of the high-powered weapons like you used to (Damn!). There are some cool-looking fire effects in the game, most notably from Chris' flamethrower which looks downright incredible.

The presence of jaggies (which is very curious, considering the game has very few 3D models) mars the presentation a bit, and it must be said that the realtime shadows are unusually terrible. They're extremely blocky, and it honestly looks like an Intellevision-era sprite is following your character around. The pre-rendered backgrounds show some compression artifacts, like dithering and banding, no doubt due to the smaller Gamecube storage medium. It's not nearly as bad as it was on the PlayStation, but the backgrounds still aren't as sharp and clean as you'd like. These are relatively minor quibbles, but the killer problem is that you can still distinguish between polygonal foreground elements and the pre-rendered backgrounds. This means you can predict the scare points in advance, such as where dogs will jump through the window or where a zombie bursts through a door. This is perhaps the biggest argument for a move to full 3D, like Capcom did with Code Veronica.

The sound is clean and crisp, and what little music there is adds nicely to the tense atmosphere. Most areas are played in the absence of music, with just the ambient sound score setting the mood. The acting is much improved over the other RE games, though it's still not as good as it could be. Most of the cheesiest lines ("master of unlocking" and "jill sandwich") have thankfully been removed in favor of comprehensible English sentences. The game has a claim to legitimacy that it never had before, as the audio and visual makeover lets you enjoy the game as more than just camp. The new status screen looks better than ever, sporting a darker look and an old-school analog ECG meter. Just like Code Veronica and the original Resident Evil, you can examine your inventory items in full 3D. Not only does this look cool (the items are nicely rendered with bump-mapping and specular lighting), but it's necessary to discover the hidden uses of certain items, like a key embedded in the back of a book.

At its heart, Resident Evil is game that employs a healthy balance of zombie-killing action and arcane puzzle-solving. You search for clues, puzzle items and ammunition, while keeping the ever-present forces of the undead at bay. The detailed surroundings hide items very well, so you'll have to search each room very carefully. Important items (like keys or files) display the trademarked "glimmer", so those are relatively easy to find, but items like handgun magazines and ink ribbons blend in very closely with the background. That means no more bright-red boxes of handgun bullets from Tony's Ammo. You'll be doing a lot of what I like to call "scrubbing the walls", as you search the various rooms for clues and items. Luckily, the updated map keeps track of what rooms still have items or unsolved puzzles in them, in addition to showing you locked doors and safe rooms.

Playing Resident Evil is an exercise in patience. The GameCube joypad was made to play 3D games, and it does so quite well, but I have great difficulty manipulating the undersized digital pad. It's very difficult to press a single direction reliably, and it's so sharp and hard that constantly pressing on it hurts my thumb. Many new games still use the digital pad quite a bit, and as a result, GameCube titles that rely heavily on the D-pad (Iike Tony Hawk 3 or SSX Tricky) become very difficult for me to play compared with their counterparts on other systems. Toss REmake into this category, as playing it with the GC pad is a major chore.

To be fair, though, playing Resident Evil on any joypad is a chore. It's just not an easy game to play, with its clunky, 6-year-old play mechanics. This is why I decided to invest in The Cube Connection peripheral device from Innovation. It allows you to plug a Sony DualShock controller into your GameCube and use it to control your GC games. Playing the new Resident Evil with my trusty and familiar PlayStation joypad let me concentrate on enjoying the game rather than fighting the controller. The button layout is exactly as it should be, and the analog and vibration functions work perfectly. For survival horror veterans accustomed to the Sony pad, I fully recommend this device.

Even with a good pad though, the control in REmake is stiff and unresponsive, especially after playing the comparatively nimble Code Veronica. I think the updated character animations have much to do with this. Unlike previous games, Jill and Chris walk in a very realistic manner, leading with one leg and holding their weapon cocked at their hip. It looks great, but the characters move maddeningly slowly as a result. Turning in place also takes an inordinate amount of time, as your characters will shuffle their feet to shift their position, much like James in Silent Hill 2. Again, it looks very life-like, but makes the characters move more slowly than they should. This isn't much of a problem against the slow-moving, slow-witted zombies, but once you start facing mobile enemies like zombie dogs or hunters, you'll find yourself cursing the unresponsive controls as you're mauled repeatedly.

And you will be mauled repeatedly, as REmake is a much tougher experience than any other Resident Evil game. Zombies take an inordinate amount of ordinance to bring down; sometimes as many as 15 bullets are necessary to fell just one. The familiar zombie dogs, previously pushovers, now pose a serious (and mobile) threat. They eschew beeline tactics for more effective zig-zag dashes, and require 4 to 5 bullets to bring down. Shooting them no longer knocks them to the ground, and only a few well-placed bites will turn you into a bloody mess. One dog isn't that bad, but a pack of them are now a very formidable foe. You don't even want to know what the enhanced Hunters will do to you. *shudder* The boss encounters are invigorating, though not all that tough if you're packing the right weaponry.

That's not the worst of it. As time passes in the game, the zombies you previously killed will reanimate into super-strong zombies called V-ACTs. These zombies, aptly nicknamed "Crimson Heads" for their insatiable bloodlust, run faster than you and can withstand several rounds of handgun fire. Oh, and they can hide and ambush you too? *gulp* Luckily, Capcom has provided 2 methods to prevent zombies from coming back to unlife. You can simply destroy the head (with a shotty-decap, for instance), or burn their bodies. You'll need a lighter and a canteen of kerosene to do the latter. This MGS2-style body disposal adds some new depth to the game, as you've got to be careful not to leave zombie corpses around in well-traversed areas. Certain zombies will reanimate after key events even if you try to burn them, so you'll have to be careful at all times.

Of course, you could just opt to avoid killing everything. That might sound like a strange tactic to employ in a game that glorifies blood and violence, but Resident Evil is a survival horror game, and ammo conservation plays a major role in your survival. There is less ammo to go around, but this shouldn't pose too great a problem for experienced players. Novice players need to adapt, however, as RE is not a strict action game, and they run the very real risk of permanently running out of ammunition. So while it's fun to run around blasting everything into oblivion, you're better off showing some discretion by ignoring those enemies that don't post an immediate threat, like that lone zombie making the rounds in the upstairs dining room. Of course, when you're faced with a pair of hunters, you'd better blast those bitches quick.

Once you adjust to the new control issues, the game plays much the same as the other games in the series. Long-time fans have learned to tolerate the less-than-adequate controls, so adjusting to REmake shouldn't pose too much of a problem if you've played Resident Evil before. Thankfully Capcom included the 180° turn found in later installments, which helps when you want to turn and run from attacking zombies. When you're grabbed by a zombie, you can fight back with the new Defensive Items. These weapons, including daggers, grenades and stun guns, take up no inventory space and kick in automatically once you're grabbed by an enemy. This somewhat compensates for the stiff controls and restrictive camera angles, and is a welcome addition to the series. No longer will you take a cheap hit because you ran straight into an enemy you couldn't see, as you can defend yourself in style. The flash grenade looks especially cool after Chris stuffs it into a zombie's mouth and then shoots it; the arterial spray is quite satisfying.

Once you finish the game, you'll start to open up extra modes and secrets. There are the requisite infinite-ammo weapons for very fast players, and a couple of extra outfits for Chris and Jill. The infinite-ammo Rocket Launcher is the coolest the series has seen, bar none. The game includes Real Survivor mode, in which Item Boxes aren't linked to each other, and Invisible Enemy mode, in which the enemies are, you guessed it, invisible. And to top it all off, there is the One Dangerous Zombie mode. Here, there is one crimson head style zombie that has grenades strapped to its chest. It appears at random throughout the mansion, and if you shoot it... KA-BLAM. These are some great extra challenges for veteran players who can finish the game normally with little difficulty. The only thing the game lacks is a true mini-game, like The Mercenaries from RE3 or The 4th Survivor from RE2.

Overall the experience is quite engaging, thanks to great visuals and greatly improved acting. There are new storyline additions that tie all the games together, and fill in some of the plot holes from the original. These new bits are suitably creepy, but would probably feel more at home in the Silent Hill games. The game is plenty challenging, and while the atmosphere is quite spooky, the game is ultimately lacking in scares. How many times can you be scared by dogs jumping through the window? The formula is getting a little stale, and Capcom needs to reinvent the survival horror game a bit with its next iterations. Konami really showed how scary a video game can be with its harrowing exercise in paranoia (and reigning scare king) Silent Hill 2. Those pre-rendered backdrops need to go as well; Capcom is the only top-name company that is still making games the same way they did in 1996. Again, Konami's Silent Hill 2 provides comparable visual quality in full 3D, resulting in greater immersion and a more compelling experience. I did have a lot of fun with REmake, however, and finished it multiple times in rapid succession.

In revisiting the game that started it all, Capcom has crafted the ultimate haunted house game and one of the best games in the venerable Resident Evil series. The progenitor of survival horror gets the makeover it deserves, as Capcom delivers an artistically stunning, albeit technologically unimpressive, statement with Resident Evil. If you're new to survival horror, the Gamecube iteration of Resident Evil is the best place to start. Long-time fans will snap the game up, but if you're a PS2 owner on the fence about getting a Cube, might want to rent the system and try before you buy. Resident Evil is a great game, however, and is sure to please fans of the horror game genre. Just make sure to pick up that joypad converter. ;)