Morrigan Lover
CAGiversary!
ML’s Quick Reviews: Resident Evil Code Veronica
Game: Resident Evil: Code Veronica
Original Platform: Sega Dreamcast
Platform Played On: Sony Playstation 2
Also Available on: Nintendo Gamecube
Recommended platform: PS2 (GC and PS2 versions are identical, except PS2 comes on 1 disc (no disc swapping) and can be found for cheaper than the GC version. Both GC & PS2 versions have graphical updates over the DC version).
Quick thoughts: Wow, I loved this game. Definitely the best pre-4 RE game I’ve played. I’d rank it up there with 4 and Eternal Darkness as one of the best survival horror games ever made.
Gameplay: First, there are 2 seemingly minor game play changes made to this RE that make the game an immensely more enjoyable experience than the others in the series. The first is the camera, while fixed location wise, is allowed to rotate on a single axis to pan the view. This game is fully 3D, and this panning gives a greater sense of depth to the environment. This just makes the rooms seem more alive. You still can’t see around corners, but you can see more of a room without camera switches.
The second minor change is that the knife now does what I call slash damage instead of poke damage. In other words, a single knife attack does multiple hits in a single slash as it rakes across an enemy. This makes the knife actually useful as a combat weapon against a lone zombie, even for a novice RE player. You get used to the shoot your pistol at a zombies knees to make him fall, switch to the knife and slash before he gets up game mechanic. There is a period during the game where you first play as Chris where it feels like your knife can tear through zombies like butter. I guess this is because Chris is stronger than Claire, and zombies on the island are a little weaker than zombies in Antarctica.
Base weapons are standard RE fare, with some extras that really add some depth to the game. You can upgrade your pistol to an automatic pistol. This makes it actually useful against bigger enemies, but makes it easy to deplete you ammo quickly. The game adds the dual-wield weapons feature, meaning certain weapons come in pairs, can be held 1 in each hand, and you can target 2 enemies at once. To compensate this, zombie AI tends to form in smaller/multiple groups instead of the 1 big group strategy they employed in RE3. Ammo for the games weapons never felt scarce (except for the magnum, of course), and you get more automatic weapons than you’d expect from an RE game (2 pairs of sub-machine guns and an Ak-47 clone). There’s also two 1st person sniper weapons, but they are only used in 2 boss fights.
The cost of all these automatics is that the shot gun is downplayed (you find it late in the game), which is a shame. This game adds the crossbow, which can be approached as a pistol that does ½ the damage. Ammo for the crossbow is the most plentiful in the game, but also the weakest. It feels like a long range knife. You do find a handful of explosive arrows, it’s best to treat these like a poor-mans magnum, using them for strong yet not boss-strong enemies.
Level design: In a word, excellent. There’s a part in the game where your character is walking on an ice sheet, and you can see a huge-ass spider stalking you on the side of the sheet. You got claustrophobic interior areas as well as wide open outdoor areas. The panning camera seems to really seems to have un-handcuffed the designers when it comes to room design. More rooms have multiple levels/stairs. There is a mad doctor with a medical experiments building with a torture chamber underneath. Two distinct areas: the Island plus Antarctica.
Enemies (Bosses): Your standard RE zombies, dogs, spiders, but no crows. Zombies are the same is all other pre-4 RE’s, except you meet a few later in the game with bombs strapped to them. A single bullet sets off the bomb, so you A) have to keep your distance when you fire (knife attacks don’t set off the bombs) and B) can use a single bomb zombie kill in a group to whip out the whole group. There’s also zombies with glowing eyes later in the game, which appear to be a little tougher than the regular zombies. The Dogs are the same as all other RE dogs, but the spiders have less hair. I guess they’re modeled after black widows instead of tarantulas. The game has bats, which are essentially crows who live indoors.
Both green (regular) and red (poison) hunters are present. There are scanners late in the game which act like boobie traps which will cause a hunter to enter the room when your character crosses a beam. This game adds the Bandersnatch, which is essentially a mini-tyrant with an elastic arm to reach at you.
This game adds one of the coolest enemies in the RE series: giant moths. They fly around and attach to you to lay an egg, than fly away. The egg latter hatches and the larva crawls out of you, damaging (and poisoning) your character.
I give this game positive marks for the boss variety. You can run from 3 of the bosses without fighting them, and just collect the item they are protecting. While it seems too easy, I’ve come to realize this technique is common in the RE series. The bosses are: a Tyrant (fighting him on the plane is the best RE boss fight I’ve experienced yet, IMHO. Dodging him while being patient for the catapult to reload puts you on the edge of your seat), Giant spider (avoidable), Giant “Tremors” worm, same as RE3, “Steve Monster” (avoidable), Albanoid (giant salamander) (avoidable), Alexia Ashford (x2), and Nasfarutu. Looking at that list, I guess you only have to fight 4/7 of the bosses, and can run from the other 3. I think the last form of Alexia is the hardest boss I’ve fought in a RE game yet. At first she stays stationary, and attacks with her tentacles. This form takes all the magnum ammo in the game + a significant portion of the AK-47 ammo to kill. The second form involves her flying around, and it is rather difficult to target with the 1-st person sci-fi gun you are given, which is made even harder by the long reload times if you miss.
Story: The Ashford twins are the boss, and the brother/sister combo of Claire and Chris chase them over an Umbrella controlled island and an Antarctic base. You control Claire for the first 2/3 of the game, then you play as Chris over the last 1/3. While the Chris game is set in the same takes place in the same areas as Claire’s, the areas are changed dramatically between the 2 quests. The island goes through a self-destruct sequence after Claire but before Chris, and only a small, ruined portion of it is open to Chris. A Much larger portion of the Antarctic installation is open to Chris, due to a flooding + freezing event at the end of Claire’s quest. OF course, you find Wesker was working behind the scenes. There is a CG boss fight with Wesker before the closing credits, but you don’t control Chris while he’s fighting Wesker, it’s just a short FMV.
The Good:
Panning Camera, 3D graphics
Excellent enemy design, both regular and bosses.
Stronger knife
Excellent level design, not as much back tracking as typical RE game. More “jump out and surprise you” zombies than typical RE game.
The Bad:
Hard to believe this game and REmake are the same generation, graphically.
Rating: 9/10. This game ranks up there with Eternal Darkness and RE4.
RE games I’ve played: Remake(GC), RE4 (GC), RE:CV(PS2), RE3 (Dreamcast)
RE games I have in my backlog: RE2(IBM-PC), RE0 (GC)
Game: Resident Evil: Code Veronica
Original Platform: Sega Dreamcast
Platform Played On: Sony Playstation 2
Also Available on: Nintendo Gamecube
Recommended platform: PS2 (GC and PS2 versions are identical, except PS2 comes on 1 disc (no disc swapping) and can be found for cheaper than the GC version. Both GC & PS2 versions have graphical updates over the DC version).
Quick thoughts: Wow, I loved this game. Definitely the best pre-4 RE game I’ve played. I’d rank it up there with 4 and Eternal Darkness as one of the best survival horror games ever made.
Gameplay: First, there are 2 seemingly minor game play changes made to this RE that make the game an immensely more enjoyable experience than the others in the series. The first is the camera, while fixed location wise, is allowed to rotate on a single axis to pan the view. This game is fully 3D, and this panning gives a greater sense of depth to the environment. This just makes the rooms seem more alive. You still can’t see around corners, but you can see more of a room without camera switches.
The second minor change is that the knife now does what I call slash damage instead of poke damage. In other words, a single knife attack does multiple hits in a single slash as it rakes across an enemy. This makes the knife actually useful as a combat weapon against a lone zombie, even for a novice RE player. You get used to the shoot your pistol at a zombies knees to make him fall, switch to the knife and slash before he gets up game mechanic. There is a period during the game where you first play as Chris where it feels like your knife can tear through zombies like butter. I guess this is because Chris is stronger than Claire, and zombies on the island are a little weaker than zombies in Antarctica.
Base weapons are standard RE fare, with some extras that really add some depth to the game. You can upgrade your pistol to an automatic pistol. This makes it actually useful against bigger enemies, but makes it easy to deplete you ammo quickly. The game adds the dual-wield weapons feature, meaning certain weapons come in pairs, can be held 1 in each hand, and you can target 2 enemies at once. To compensate this, zombie AI tends to form in smaller/multiple groups instead of the 1 big group strategy they employed in RE3. Ammo for the games weapons never felt scarce (except for the magnum, of course), and you get more automatic weapons than you’d expect from an RE game (2 pairs of sub-machine guns and an Ak-47 clone). There’s also two 1st person sniper weapons, but they are only used in 2 boss fights.
The cost of all these automatics is that the shot gun is downplayed (you find it late in the game), which is a shame. This game adds the crossbow, which can be approached as a pistol that does ½ the damage. Ammo for the crossbow is the most plentiful in the game, but also the weakest. It feels like a long range knife. You do find a handful of explosive arrows, it’s best to treat these like a poor-mans magnum, using them for strong yet not boss-strong enemies.
Level design: In a word, excellent. There’s a part in the game where your character is walking on an ice sheet, and you can see a huge-ass spider stalking you on the side of the sheet. You got claustrophobic interior areas as well as wide open outdoor areas. The panning camera seems to really seems to have un-handcuffed the designers when it comes to room design. More rooms have multiple levels/stairs. There is a mad doctor with a medical experiments building with a torture chamber underneath. Two distinct areas: the Island plus Antarctica.
Enemies (Bosses): Your standard RE zombies, dogs, spiders, but no crows. Zombies are the same is all other pre-4 RE’s, except you meet a few later in the game with bombs strapped to them. A single bullet sets off the bomb, so you A) have to keep your distance when you fire (knife attacks don’t set off the bombs) and B) can use a single bomb zombie kill in a group to whip out the whole group. There’s also zombies with glowing eyes later in the game, which appear to be a little tougher than the regular zombies. The Dogs are the same as all other RE dogs, but the spiders have less hair. I guess they’re modeled after black widows instead of tarantulas. The game has bats, which are essentially crows who live indoors.
Both green (regular) and red (poison) hunters are present. There are scanners late in the game which act like boobie traps which will cause a hunter to enter the room when your character crosses a beam. This game adds the Bandersnatch, which is essentially a mini-tyrant with an elastic arm to reach at you.
This game adds one of the coolest enemies in the RE series: giant moths. They fly around and attach to you to lay an egg, than fly away. The egg latter hatches and the larva crawls out of you, damaging (and poisoning) your character.
I give this game positive marks for the boss variety. You can run from 3 of the bosses without fighting them, and just collect the item they are protecting. While it seems too easy, I’ve come to realize this technique is common in the RE series. The bosses are: a Tyrant (fighting him on the plane is the best RE boss fight I’ve experienced yet, IMHO. Dodging him while being patient for the catapult to reload puts you on the edge of your seat), Giant spider (avoidable), Giant “Tremors” worm, same as RE3, “Steve Monster” (avoidable), Albanoid (giant salamander) (avoidable), Alexia Ashford (x2), and Nasfarutu. Looking at that list, I guess you only have to fight 4/7 of the bosses, and can run from the other 3. I think the last form of Alexia is the hardest boss I’ve fought in a RE game yet. At first she stays stationary, and attacks with her tentacles. This form takes all the magnum ammo in the game + a significant portion of the AK-47 ammo to kill. The second form involves her flying around, and it is rather difficult to target with the 1-st person sci-fi gun you are given, which is made even harder by the long reload times if you miss.
Story: The Ashford twins are the boss, and the brother/sister combo of Claire and Chris chase them over an Umbrella controlled island and an Antarctic base. You control Claire for the first 2/3 of the game, then you play as Chris over the last 1/3. While the Chris game is set in the same takes place in the same areas as Claire’s, the areas are changed dramatically between the 2 quests. The island goes through a self-destruct sequence after Claire but before Chris, and only a small, ruined portion of it is open to Chris. A Much larger portion of the Antarctic installation is open to Chris, due to a flooding + freezing event at the end of Claire’s quest. OF course, you find Wesker was working behind the scenes. There is a CG boss fight with Wesker before the closing credits, but you don’t control Chris while he’s fighting Wesker, it’s just a short FMV.
The Good:
Panning Camera, 3D graphics
Excellent enemy design, both regular and bosses.
Stronger knife
Excellent level design, not as much back tracking as typical RE game. More “jump out and surprise you” zombies than typical RE game.
The Bad:
Hard to believe this game and REmake are the same generation, graphically.
Rating: 9/10. This game ranks up there with Eternal Darkness and RE4.
RE games I’ve played: Remake(GC), RE4 (GC), RE:CV(PS2), RE3 (Dreamcast)
RE games I have in my backlog: RE2(IBM-PC), RE0 (GC)
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