Their ordeal was only a prelude – Resident Evil – Code: Veronica X

[Throughout this project, I’m occasionally handing the blog over to bring you someone else’s thoughts on a #1 game. For this guest post I’m pleased to welcome back David C James, who previously wrote about Tomb Raider: The Last Revelation. You can find David at pixelhunted.com and on twitter as @PixelHunted.]

Resident Evil – Code: Veronica X proves that developing a game is a lot like cooking from a recipe. Two different people can try for the same thing with the same ingredients and produce two similar dishes. But whereas one might be scrumptiously delicious, the other is basically inedible.

Code Veronica is the latter. I had this back on its original Dreamcast release in 2000 and remember my sister playing it through it, only to become stuck on an unwinnable mid-game boss fight.

I gave it a crack a few months later, only to find myself in a similarly hopeless state after an unexpected change of characters meant I no longer had access to my best weapons. I gave up and wrote the game off. Now, 20 years later I have finally seen the credits. Was it worth the wait? No. No, it was not.

Back to the recipe analogy. If the ingredients of the classic Resident Evil gameplay are ammo and health conservation, item management, mild logic puzzles and avoiding as many enemies as you can, then they’re all present in Code Veronica. But whereas Resident Evil 2 and Resident Evil 3: Nemesis get it just right, in Code Veronica the seasoning is completely out of whack.

That there’s multiple ways to ruin your game and force you to start over from the very beginning is a big black mark against it (particularly on the original Dreamcast release where VMU memory constraints meant it was impractical to do rolling saves). But it was the little things that gradually ground me down.

It wouldn’t be right for a classic Resident Evil to not feature slowly opening doors, but there’s so much backtracking built into this game that I reckon I have spent upwards of an hour staring at them.

Worse, you’re required to repeatedly use elevators in the game, which consists of you slowly watching elevator doors open, then a non-interactive cutscene of your character standing still,, then another cutscene of the elevator doors opening yet again. And then, of course, you realise you’re not on the right floor…

The game is chock full of tiny little annoyances and about two thirds of the way through I was wishing the damn thing was over already. But nope, I still had another two hours of fiddly collect the jewels to open the secret passage to search for yet another completely different set of jewels to open the music boxes to swap the music box disc to… eesh.

I found myself envying the zombies. At least they don’t have to fiddle with stupid trinkets.

It’s not all bad. The PS2 version still looks fairly nice and as a first attempt at 3D I can’t fault the environmental design – especially the late game sequence where you visit a recreation of the iconic Spencer Mansion. Plus, the fact that a late game puzzle requires you to figure out the solution is in the title of the game still tickles me in a Kojima-ish sort of way.

In addition, having no less than three hammy villains delivering supervillain monologues and ominously cackling is a real treat as Resident Evil is at its best when it’s flirting with camp. I even enjoyed Steve Burnside, who is essentially what you would get if you crossbred Titanic-era Leonardo DiCaprio with a horny Pomeranian.

But sadly, for the most part I found Code Veronica X a repetitive, dull and extremely not scary grind and it’s obvious why it’s (apparently) being skipped over for a HD remaster. It’s easy to see why it’s a cult favorite amongst fans, but while it’s not a bad game, this is a biological nightmare worth leaving in the past.

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Top of the charts for week ending 15 September 2001:

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