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Good God almighty. Seriously. WOW.
So up until last night, I was a steadfast supporter of the notion that the first Silent Hill game was the scariest game ever made. The game presented a complete sense of confusion, and pitch-black tension. It was scary as hell because you could barely see anything, you could barely defend yourself and the things that the game kept throwing at you became more and more disturbing as time went along. However, the sacrifice for enjoying the scare factor of the game was crappy controls. The game used the standard Resident Evil setup, which made absolutely zero sense considering the 3D nature of the title. It was a concession that you had to make in order to enjoy it.
RE4 has managed to provide an experience about ten times scarier, and with great controls to boot!
A few nights ago, I finally got around to really sitting down with RE4 and I ended up playing about 7 hours of it in one sitting. That's a lot for me, and it's a testament to how highly I think of the game.
For those of you unaware of the setup, I'll give you a quick description. It's been six years since the zombie incident surrounding the previous games in the series, and six years since Racoon City was wiped from the face of the planet by the US government. Umbrella was revealed for what they truly were, their stock prices plummeted, their income died and the corporation jumped headfirst into the grave.
Being only one of a handful of people who survived the incident, officer Leon Kennedy was contacted by the federal government and was offered a job as a secret agent operating under direct orders from the President himself. After recieving several years of rigorous training, he was finally assigned to the lofty duty of providing direct protection and security for the president and his family. However, before he could actually begin his newfound responsibilities, tragedy struck the White House. An unknown party took the liberty of kidnapping the President's daughter, Ashley, and has made no attempts to contact her father for ransom or any other type of bargain. With no other options, the President turns to his daughter's official protector, Leon, to locate and rescue her.
Following a trail of shaky clues and anonymous leads, Leon finds himself on his way to a small, rural town named Pueblo, assumed to be somewhere in either Spain or Portugal. Being assisted by two police officers from the nearest city, Leon makes his way to the town to follow up on these leads and hopefully make contact with Ashley Graham.
So, the game begins with Leon in a police vehicle, being escorted by the local black n' white to Pueblo. Arriving just outside the borders of the town, Leon leaves the vehicle on foot to ask for directions. Upon entering a local's house, he is abruptly attacked by the man inside. After gunning the attacker down, he hears a truck revving up near the house and watches as it tears along down the road toward the police vehicle. Moments later, gunfire, screams, a large crash, an explosion and then silence fills the air. Quickly returning to the scene, he sees precisely what he had feared. The bridge has been taken out by the runaway truck, which now lies at the bottom of the river, along with the enflamed police vehicle. Faced with no other options, Leon makes his way towards Pueblo in the hope of possibly finding assistance.
Here's where the game really begins to show you what you're in for over the next 20 hours or so. You make your way to the actual town center, which is fairly small and quaint. At a distance, you can look through Leon's binoculars and see the townspeople going about what appears to be fairly regular business. Feeding the cows, corralling chickens into their pens, pitchforking hay into bins, etc. Then your eyes are drawn to a large bonfire in the middle of the town. You look and see a massive wooden post erected in the middle, and impaled upon a large hook attached to the post is one of the two officers that escorted you here. Cautiously, you make your way towards the town, keeping to the back paths and trying not to be seen. However, being spotted is inevitable. You just merely hope that maybe the villagers will be nice to Leon at least, and won't go sticking him up on a metal hook.
As you make your way between a pair of building, however, you hear the normal chatter of the villagers suddenly interrupted by an angry yell. You've been spotted. The music suddenly kicks in, crowding in on you as the townspeople grab pitchforks, axes and scythes with which to hunt you down and cut you to ribbons.
So, it's at this point that the real brilliance of the game sets in. You see, you've got a lot of options to choose from, and none of them are necessarily the right or wrong ones. You can go about surviving this encounter in nearly any way you can imagine, and you're gonna have to imagine quite a few different ways in order to make it out alive.
Here are some examples of the different approaches I took to this sequence.
The first time I tried it, I stood in the middle of the town like a moron, shotting everything that came my way. I was doing pretty well for a while, knocking airborne axes and sickles out of the air with my shots as they sailed toward my skull. Then, before I knew it, three villagers suddenly grabbed me from behind and started tearing me apart. I didn't even see them! They circled around behind my peripheral vision and snuck up on me! I was dead before I knew it.
The second time, I tried a different approach. I made my way to the large stone viewing tower at the northern end of the town and stood my ground. I figured, I have the advantage of higher placement, and there's only one way they can get to me, right? Wrong. I sat at the top of that tower for about 30 seconds watching the villages form a semi-circle about ten feet away from the entrance. Yet, none of them were coming up. I had about two seconds to ponder this before I saw the villages start to pull out new weapons. One of them proceeded to light their weapon on fire, and hurled it at me. I realized a split second before it hit that they were throwing Molotov Cocktails at me, and I found myself quickly doused in flame. So, realizing that I was a sitting duck up there, I leaped down to the ground only to realize too late that that's exactly the course of action they were looking for. In the time it took me to turn around and jump down to the bottom of the ladder, they had crowded the entrance to the tower and blocked me in.
The third time, I tried another path. I decided that I'd hole myself up in the two-story house next to the tower and bottleneck their assult. So, I bolted through the door, and watched a cutscene as Leon pushed a shelf in front of the entrance. I then ran upstairs and backed myself into a corner. However, it wasnt long before horror set in and I realized that I was now completely screwed. The villagers started getting out ladders and began breaking through the second-story windows. And if that wasn't bad enough, it was at that moment that I heard the chainsaw revving up. I looked down the stairs at the front door and watched, my mouth agape, as a huge, chainsaw-wielding maniac with a burlap sack over his head sawed through the front door and the barricade I had erected. He then bolted up the stairs at me and proceeded to bury his weapon about six inches into my neck. A moment later, he pushed the thing all the way through and I watched in absolute shock as Leon's head came off and fell to the wooden floor.
So, by my fourth try, I was getting desperate. I looked at my map and saw that my marked destination was a gate just up a small road between the tower and the two-story house. I decided to just cut out the middleman and run as fast as I could to that gate. I was not above being a complete pansy at this point and just running for dear life. However, my plan was a failure, because the moment I headed up that path I saw that godforsaken Chainsaw Man again, waiting for me. I managed to outmaneuver him, however, and made it to the gate before he could finish revving up his weapon. I pressed the A Button, attempting to open the barricade thereby escaping the area, only to be told that the gate could not be opened. Leon could feel villagers on the other side of the barrier holding it closed. Numbly, I did a full 180 and turned to face yet another decapitation at the hands of the Chainsaw Man.
Attempts number five through, hell I don't know, TEN were just as fruitful. I tried hiding in the cow barn, I tried drawing the villagers back to the village gate, I tried using stealth to completely avoid their attention. Nothing was working.
However, eventually, I spotted my saving grace. One small building that I hadn't even thought to enter until that point. The reason being because I had to cut through the middle of town to reach it, and there were about three villagers just sort of congregated in front of it. I bolted past the villagers, kicked open the front door and ran to the back of the house. There, I found a metal door with a padlock on it. In desperation, I shot the padlock and watched in glee as it fell to the floor. I bursted through the door and felt a wave of minor relief wash over me as I spied the back room. One entrance, no windows. Any attacker that came my way would have to come at me through that one door, and it couldn't even be sawed off because it was made of metal!
I then proceeded to back myself into a corner and trained my handgun at head-level on the door. I shot every last filthy villager that came through that door, but it just seemed like the onslaught would never stop. I killed about ten or eleven of them before the bell tower at the town's church began ringing. Once it did, the villagers suddenly turned their attention away from me and began wandering toward the chapel. The town was deserted in minutes, and as Leon looked around wondering what the hell was going on, the "Resident Evil" logo appeared on screen, letting you know that that was only the beginning.
Too badass to imagine.
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) Are you done with the game yet? I know it is like over 40 hours or something because I read a few blogs where they had been playing it all day for a day or two straight. Just wondering if there was an actual Game play time on it.
Linear Mode
