I Finally Played Resident Evil 4, You Monsters

Everyone has their pile of shame, those games that everyone expects you to have played but, for whatever reason, you haven’t. Other than computer game demos from Maximum PC or the occasional game at a friend’s house, I didn’t get to play video games, so I missed a lot of games, which means that for me, that pile of shame includes so many classics, like Final Fantasy VII and Super Mario Bros. 3 because I grew up without games. Until recently, it also included a little game called Resident Evil 4.

This article was originally posted on my old blog, and I’m reposting it here, now that Resident Evil 4 has released and proved my point.

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I know gaming article’s about one’s past aren’t that interesting; we all have a past, we all have a history with games, how we got to the game and why is often less interesting than the game itself. But… this time, it’s directly relevant.

One of the earliest debates about gaming I can recall being involved in was a debate about controls. Some friends argued that bad controls were designed intentionally and made the games better, because imprecise, awkward controls made games scarier. Other friends argued that if a game’s controls were what made it scary, then the game itself wasn’t that scary at all. Resident Evil games were frequently brought up in this discussion, and because they weren’t available at all on the only gaming platform I had the ability to play for years, I had no reason to try them.

It wasn’t that I intentionally tried to avoid them — I’m of the belief that you can learn something from every game, so I’ll play anything once — it was just that there were other games that appealed to me more, so when it came time to choose a game, the other game usually won out over Resident Evil games. Because I rarely jump into the middle of a series, I gave the original Resident Evil remake a try, but even with the shinier graphics, the controls just didn’t do it for me; I didn’t connect with the game at all.

It turns out that I’m one of the people who thinks bad controls prevent a game from being good. I grew up with PC games, which had much more intuitive control schemes than many console games. Those PC games were either designed for a mouse cursor, like Age of Empires and The Oregon Trail, or used a simple WASD key and mouselook aiming system, which is the ideal way to play shooters. Intuitive control schemes come almost naturally to the PC; once Quake and Marathon shipped with WASD, that was that. Everyone started using it.

Many of my console friends grew up with things like the bizarre, three-handled N64 controller, or the Playstation Controller, which didn’t have any joysticks. Heck, some of my friends even loved the weird Fisher Price-style monstrosity that is the Gamecube controller. In fact, they swear by it. Resident Evil 4 was designed for that controller.

But more on that later.

Having grown up on PC controls, I developed a specific taste in controls, which can be summarized like this: controls should be invisible.

That’s it.

In film, there’s this idea that editing should be invisible. Walter Murch, one of the world’s greatest film editors, argued that if you were paying attention to the edits, they weren’t doing their job. With the advent of non-linear editing software, it got a lot easier to edit movies, which meant that people started putting a lot more of them in their films because they could, which means you end up with disorienting scenes like this scene in Taken 3. What should be a simple shot or two of Liam Neeson jumping a fence becomes a disorienting mess.

Controls work the same way. They exist to take thought and turn it into action. When we walk, we don’t think about it; we just do it. Fine motor skills are a part of basic human biology; think ‘grab,’ and you grab. You don’t have to think about which neurons to fire, which muscles to pull, and so on; your hand simply grabs when you want it to. Video game controls work much the same way; if you have to think about how to move more than you might as a person, the experience often becomes a jumbled, frustrating mess.

(In the case of QWOP, that’s exactly the point.)

The human brain is great at filtering out unnecessary information, and it gets better as it ages. We don’t have to think about inhaling and exhaling or manually turn our eyeballs towards the source of a surprising sound; we just do it. Sometimes, our brains are too good at filtering out information; it’s why you might start idly looking for some milk in the refrigerator while thinking about bills, stare right at it, and miss it; your brain was filtering out the milk and focusing on the more prominent task.

Most video games exist to replicate some human behavior in a virtual environment. That experience might be extremely abstract, like The Oregon Trail, where players click a button to proceed and watch a little wagon trundle across the prairie, or it might be more simulation oriented, like Red Dead Redemption, where players have to steer horses by the reigns, getting them to slow down and speed up as necessary. Whatever the case may be, a game is always taking human behavior and simplifying it, boiling it down, to make sense on a controller. The closer a game gets to real-world actions, the less players want to have to think about it.

Intuitiveness becomes more relevant as fidelity increases.

Originally, I didn’t want to write an essay about Resident Evil 4 and the controls, because I’ve talked about it in conversations and on twitter and my Resident Evil 4 streams so much. Part of me wants to talk about how great the encounter variety and pacing are — and they are good — but Resident Evil 4 has been thoroughly surpassed in its encounter and enemy variety by games like Dead Space 2 and Gears of War 3, and neither one of those games are plagued by the frustrating quick time events, bizarrely-paced cutscenes, or nonsensical story of RE4. The boss fights in Resident Evil 4 are great, sure, but Binary Domain’s are the best, and I prefer some of Resident Evil 5’s boss fights in co-op to Resident Evil 4’s.

I keep coming back to RE4’s controls. Some friends have argued that Resident Evil 4 was designed to be played with its awkward control scheme, that it’s a great game because the control scheme was designed intentionally (name a game with unintentionally designed controls, please?), that they somehow ratchet up the tension because moving isn’t easy. The theory goes that all the tension of the game would be destroyed if the game were to have a more conventional control scheme.

I generally like to leave people to their opinions, but this time, I’m just gonna say it: these people are wrong. They are wrong in the strictest, most absolute sense of the word. They’re making excuses because they love the game and don’t want to admit that it could be even better than it is. But it could be. Oh boy, it could be. And I’m going to prove it.

Once upon a time, a company called Nintendo made video game consoles. Nintendo is great in a lot of ways, but they do one thing that I think is A Major Problem: they try to make every console ‘new’ in some way, usually in regards to control schemes.

I don’t think this makes for better games.

Nintendo’s whole deal is like, hey, they won’t make something unless they can do it in a new way; I think people who won’t do something unless they can do it Extremely Well make more interesting process. Nintendo is more about innovation for innovation’s sake. It’s one of the reasons we don’t have a new F-Zero; developers at Nintendo have said that they won’t make a new one unless they can revolutionize it. That approach is why the latest Starfox games have been terrible and we got Metroid: Other M.

Nintendo seems to think this is why they succeed, so, with every generation, they work on a new control interface and try to get people into their games, but, in all honesty, I don’t think this is why their games work. Take Super Mario Galaxy, for instance. There is nothing about that game that couldn’t be done with a traditional controller. You can play it on a gamepad in the Dolphin emulator if you want right now. Super Mario Galaxy is great because an extremely experienced team of developers made the game they’re the best at making; it’s not great because of the Wii’s controller.

Innovation for innovation’s sake is how you get pickle and telephone-flavored ice cream; it’s not great. It’s also how you wind up with things like the N64 controller, which also isn’t great.

“Okay, Doc, so what’s wrong with quirky controllers? Haven’t you seen the cool unique control games that show up at GDC every year?”

Well, the big thing is that quirky controllers tie games to hardware, and the problem with hardware is that it’s much more difficult to replicate than software. Once the hardware stops being manufactured, you lose the software. People can fix ancient games and make them work again on the PC, but a lot of stuff, like old light gun games, rely on technology that simply doesn’t exist anymore. It’s much harder to preserve those games.

At some point in the future, it’s going to be extremely hard to play old Nintendo DS games, because carts are failing and the dual-screen console only has X number of viable units made, and those units are going to decay over time. Emulators aren’t an ideal way to play DS games. Eventually, it’s going to be impossible to get a working DS and play a DS game, and so many wonderful games will be lost to time.

When you lock a game to hardware that isn’t standardized in some way, like your average 16–18 button controller, you run the risk of putting an expiration date on your game, which brings me to the GameCube.

Now, look, some people really like the GameCube controller. They do. I think they’re nuts, because most of the buttons are really mushy, especially the bumper, and that right stick is awful. The build quality on these things is terrible too; it took me forever to find a good, working GameCube controller because I kept finding busted ones.

The GameCube controller was great for the year of our lord 2002, when nobody but Bungie and Free Radical knew how to design 3D game control schemes for a controller (borrowing from the PC’s ‘left stick to move, right stick to aim’ with a hefty dose of auto-aim, natch!). If you go back and play a lot of old games, many of them, especially ones with free aim, don’t hold up. That’s why so many old console games had some form of z-targeting — nobody knew how to make it work, so they relied on a less interesting form of gameplay until people figured out how to make aiming work.

The standard control scheme sucks on a GameCube controller.

Like, it is the worst thing, mostly because that right stick isn’t great and the buttons are mushy as heck… which brings me to Resident Evil 4. Look, RE4’s fans are right when they say that the game was designed with its controls in mind, but they forget that those controls were designed with the GameCube controller in mind.

Resident Evil 4 was released on the GameCube in January 2005, came out on the PS2 in October 2005, was re-released on Windows in the spring of 2007, hit the Wii a few months later, hit Zeebo in like 2008, and finally hit ‘standard’ HD consoles in 2011. Resident Evil 4 is designed for the GameCube controller, or, put another way, it’s designed to take into account the limitations of the controller’s odd setup. One example of this is how the right stick goes mostly unused.

Like I said before, in a traditional game, the left stick moves you, and the right stick aims y ou. It’s one of those “this is so simple I’m surprised no one figured it out sooner” things, but I’m a PC gamer, and we’ve been doing this in games since…

A Mac game.

…wanna guess who developed the Mac game?

“Was it Bungie, the guys who developed the modern control scheme for shooters that makes Halo 1 feel so wonderfully ageless, even to this day?”

Yes.

Yes it was.

In 1994, Bungie created the first free-look game with marathon. Move with the keyboard, look with the mouse. Other games had some form of free-look, the earliest one probably being Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss (by Looking Glass Studios, the most important developers of all time, back in 1992).

Anyways, this idea of keeping all movement on one input and all aiming on another input is something we take for granted now, but 11 years after Bungie figured it out, and 4 years after Bungie made it work on a console, Capcom wasn’t able to take advantage of it because the GameCube Controller is kind of Super Garbage.

In a modern game designed for an Xbox 360 or other standard layout controller, like Dead Space 2 or Gears of War 3, player movement is responsive; both games pretend to have bulky, slow characters through their animations, sounds, and particle systems (just try slamming Marcus into cover and watch how dust puffs off the wall in response), but the games both respond really quickly to player input. Think it and it happens.

More importantly, you can strafe.

This was a source of some confusion for my friends, so I want to be clear: strafing in video games is just sidestepping. In first person games, if you press the A or D keys, you step to the side. In third person games, some people take “strafing” to mean “sidestepping while aiming,” but in a first person game, you’re always aiming, so I don’t think that’s a requirement.

In Gears of War 3, if you push left on the stick, your character moves left. If you push right on the stick, he moves right. The camera itself stays looking the direction you were looking, and if you pull the left trigger to aim your gun, your aim will snap in that same direction. You aim with the right stick and you move with the left stick, handily dividing inputs in a way that makes perfect, intuitive sense for all players.

Modern third-person AAA shooters almost universally work this way, and it’s great, because it lets you focus on playing the game instead of managing the camera. This control scheme isn’t 1:1 human-perfect simulation, but it’s doing its best to feel like human movement even when it isn’t. We can turn much more quickly than a controller stick can turn our cameras, for instance.

But then there’s Resident Evil 4.

In Resident Evil 4, when you push the stick to the left, Leon doesn’t go anywhere, he just spins. The right stick moves the camera, but it snaps back to wherever Leon was facing. If you hold the right stick and then pull the trigger, Leon will snap aim in that direction, but you have to hold it down. And, again, no matter what, Leon won’t move from his spot unless you press forward or backward on the stick.

So, imagine that there is an enemy behind a pillar in front of you. He doesn’t know you’re there, so he hasn’t moved. In Gears of War 3, you simply hold left on the stick, move over a few inches, pull the left trigger to aim, and fire, getting a nice, juicy headshot.

In Resident Evil 4, you push the camera to the left, Leon turns to the left, making you lose sight of your target. Then you push the camera forward, then you turn Leon back, and you hope you moved far enough to be able to hit the guy. If you didn’t, you’re going to have to keep turning to the left, walking forward, and turning back to hit the guy. It’s a tedious process of micromanagement that never feels good to play.

Jerking the camera around decreases readability. Readability is everything in a video game. In 99% of all cases, a game can only get better the more readable it is. If you’re constantly needing to orient and reorient yourself for simple, small movements, you’re destroying readability, which means the game is suffering as a result. Clarity is always better. I’m sure someone will tell me about some little indie game that glitches words all over the screen in an unreadable mess or whatever, and that’s great if you’re trying to, say, show that a character has dyslexia or something, but you don’t want your entire game to be like that.

It’s interesting to me that a lot of RE4’s fans have developed a kind of Stockholm syndrome, arguing that Re4 makes positioning important because it prevents you from moving while aiming, but it’s abundantly clear that this isn’t why RE4 is designed this way. The fact is, if you could move while aiming while playing RE4, the camera would constantly be looking in directions you don’t want to look when you’re trying to fight, since the camera is tied to the left stick.

You stop moving to aim not because the game is better for doing so, but because the game would be literally unplayable — not in the meme joke sense, but in the strictest, most literal sense possible — if you didn’t. The decision to stop the player in order to keep the game’s readability cascades from the decision to put the camera on the stick, and I think the camera’s on the left stick because the right stick is the worst stick that has ever existed on any controller in the history of the world.

(…er, that I’ve tried. I’ve tried a lot of controllers and I’ve never used a worse stick than that one, which is why I don’t think many people use it in GameCube games)

If Resident Evil 4 had been developed first for, say, the Xbox One, where I’ve been playing Resident Evil 4 lately, I think that not only would the game play a lot better, but Capcom wouldn’t have locked players in place to aim.

It’s worth noting that Mikami didn’t stick with RE4’s controls; on The Evil Within, his next horror game, he used that traditional left-to-move, right-to-aim control scheme we’re all familiar with. If Resident Evil 4’s control scheme was so great, why would Mikami have shifted away from it?

(Some folks may argue that TEW is not as good, but this is entirely down to the game’s encounter design and pacing, which is a separate discussion from its control scheme)

Now, some folks will argue that locking yourself in place makes RE4 a better game. I don’t think it will, but I’m not going to argue that point. I suspect that if you let players strafe when not aiming, locked them into place when aiming, and kept the camera to the right stick only, everyone would like the game more, it would have broader appeal, and even me, a grumpy old curmudgeon, would love it too.

It doesn’t help that there’s a bug in the game where your camera can jerk really far to the left or right when you aim; this wouldn’t happen on a typical control scheme, because the bug is tied to the game’s current camera setup; in a different camera setup, it wouldn’t exist.

For proof that this works, check out Resident Evil 5, a game keeps the same kind of tension and horror as RE4, but utilizes a more modern control scheme. Or look at the upcoming Resident Evil 2 Remake, which lets you move while aiming, which lets Leon strafe like a normal person, and all that jazz, but looks way more tense than RE4.

Why might Resident Evil 2 be more tense than 4 while 5 is less tense? All four games are slow, methodical experiences, but 5 is framed as a big, wacky action co-op game. It predominantly takes place in a bright, outdoor environment with a happier sound design and goofy monsters. Resident Evil 4 takes place in a spooky castle or creepy village, largely at night.

Resident Evil 4’s controls never made it creepy; the game featured a giant robot statue that chased Leon through a corridor. Was that frightening because you had to pass quicktime events to successfully escape? No. Of course not. The fear of Leon being crushed is what made it scary.

Resident Evil 2 Remake’s controls look like they’ll be relatively invisible, but the game looks so much scarier than Resident Evil 4 because the context of the game is so much scarier. The demo for Resident Evil 2 Remake is set in the claustrophobic, impossibly dark corridors of a police station. In each situation, it’s the environment and the art that determines how scary a game is.

There are so many ways to make a game scary. Start with context: you’re trapped somewhere with something that wants to kill you. Then make it dark; humans are survival-oriented creatures who rely on knowledge to survive. Darkness limits our knowledge, and our lizard brains know to be fearful when we can’t see what’s out there watching us. If we know we’re being hunted but we don’t know where we’re being hunted from, we’re gonna start to get scared.

Once you’ve done that, give players a way to fight back; if all they can do is run, then they’ll stop worrying about how to fight it. Make sure the way to fight back comes with its own risks — guns are better than swords in a horror game. I was a lot happier playing RE4 when I realized how powerful the knife was than when I was dreading running low on ammo. Uncertainty is what makes horror work; if you know that you’re going to find the bullets you need, or that your attack won’t bring more enemies, or that you won’t miss your enemy, you won’t be scared. The more uncertainties you face, the scarier the game becomes.

Resident Evil 2 looks like it checks all these boxes. Controls never really factor into it; Resident Evil 4’s relative unreadability doesn’t make it a better game. Its greatness comes from that wonderful encounter variety. It comes from seeing a thing and going “ah, okay, I need another thing to pull this off.” Working out How To Complete An Encounter is what makes Resident Evil 4 fun. Having Mike fly in with a helicopter and destroy all the zombies is what makes Resident Evil 4 fun.

Unlocking Ashley’s giant suit of armor in Resident Evil 4 is hilarious and wonderful; this game is brilliant at things like that. Apparently, you can get certain rewards for completing encounters in specific ways, like clearing out the guard towers before Mike does. There’s a lot of cool stuff that you can unlock for playing the game or its side missions, and I really love that about Resident Evil 4.

When Capcom released Resident Evil 4 for the Wii, they put the game through a dramatic control rework so it could use the Wii’s unique motion controls. Some players consider this the definitive version of the game. As someone with chronic pain, motion controls really don’t work for me. But I do find myself wondering what would happen if Capcom reworked Resident Evil 4’s controls to be more like what RE2make’s appear to be. I suspect people would be surprised at how well it works.

Resident Evil 4’s brilliant level and encounter design makes it scary. Hearing the regenerators is scary. Running low on shotgun ammo or being flanked by guys you didn’t see because you were trying to save Ashley is scary. Turning the camera to the left and losing sight of the guy you want to shoot is not so scary.

I might write a second piece about the game, focusing on the specifics of its encounter design; I still prefer the actual pace and variety of Gears of War 3 and Dead Space 2, but there’s something unique that Resident Evil 4 does with its level structure that I haven’t quite figured out how to talk about.

Thank you to David and Dillon for making me finally get this game off my backlog. Next up, Metroid Prime.