I WAS A FINE IDEA AT THE TIME

- Resident Evil 5 can be boiled down as such: Black Hawk Down + 28 Days Later + Resident Evil 4's gameplay + explosions - annoying female characters. In my mind, that's pretty good.

The complaints people had about the clunkiness of the controls in 4 still stand (and it's sort of more egregious in the wake of Gears Of War which allowed you to, gasp, move and shoot at the same time) and the inventory system remains bothersome. Still, the inability to move and shoot simultaneously gives the action/gameplay its own distinct, slower-paced, flavour which, at this point, is basically the only connection the classic Resident Evils that the game has.

Also, I'm sort of grooving on the story, as simplistic and cheesy as it is, I think that this plot could make a halfway decent action movie (at any rate, it would almost certainly be better than the actual Resident Evil movies). To address the whole "racism" issue briefly: there are certainly some colonial-era images present in the game's portrayal of the Africans (the "voodoo village" level is particularly bad in this respect) but the it's fairly even-handed about giving positive portrayals to balance things out (not just your sidekick, who's the whitest African ever I might add, but also in the black members of the military who help you out) and making it clear that the parasite is causing the behavior of the villagers (though the racial variety among the enemies is sorta weird, particularly the Greek-looking enemy type). And, let's be honest, no one's really taking this plot seriously anyway and the giant ogres and mutated squids should tell you that much.

My biggest complaint here is that the game seems to be straining to re-capture all the awesome moments from 4 by having an exact duplicate: both games having crazy chainsaw dudes, giant ogres and other such things. It's sorta distracting; that said, it's a lot of fun and I'm only about halfway through, so, hopefully there's a lot more to come.

- A wise man (intertainment expert Daryl Surat) once said that the only way to conquer something as vast and limitless as the Internet is to divide it into parts and conquer these parts. Well, I'm going to follow that advice. During the summer this year, I'm going to start a podcast with a friend which will mostly be about movies but will also cover some other pop culture stuff. I'm going to keep this blog going as a general lifestyle/pop-culture thing but I'm also going to start another one the purpose of which is, as of this writing, known only to basically one person. Suffice to say, it is a project that I am undertaking for a variety or reasons and one that, if it does not kill me, will make me so much the stronger. It will start sometime in late May, so, look out for it.