My best friend in high school was a huge Nintendo fan, the kind that refused to play any other console. She was incredibly stubborn about trying new things, and mainly kept to a few key franchises. At some point she picked up a copy of Resident Evil 4 at launch, then forgot about it for nearly three years because it was too scary for her. So I usually spent my time at her place watching her play Super Mario Sunshine or Twilight Princess. Which was enough for me, since I got to live these games vicariously through her.

Once I had finally turned 18 and we could both go out, we’d usually pre-drink at hers while playing games before meeting up with other friends to go to Purple Sneakers…because we were kind of pathetic indie crowd wannabes. I remember the first time I played Resident Evil 4 very vividly, because it was also the first night I went to Purple Sneakers. I was flicking through Gamecube games on her shelf and came to one we’d never played together, she shrugged and said we were probably drunk enough to play it. I had recently finished Resident Evil Deadly Silence on my DS and was pretty keen to see if the other games were as good. So she popped in the disc and handed me the controller. From the second the game comes up with the violence warning, I was hooked. Leon’s sigh as he recounts the fall of Umbrella. The intro to that damn Spanish guitar song playing in the car on the way to Pueblo. Every tiny detail stood out to me. Even the voice acting was decent, and surprisingly hilarious without being obliviously hammy like the dialogue that plagued the first game. Then the game actually started, and I struggled. I had never played a third person shooter. I hadn’t even played a game that let you move the camera. I fiddled around for a few minutes, and once I figured out how to aim and manage the 180 degree quick turn, I was ready to get into it. Or so I thought.

These non-zombies, or Ganado as they’re known in-universe, were a lot faster than I was expecting. Even the first Ganado in the cabin managed to get a swing of his axe in before I knew what was going on. By the time I got back outside and a number of them approached me at once, I realised I might be out of my league. I was used to one on one stand offs in cramped hallways with auto-aim. Where the only options for aiming were up, straight or down. Where it didn’t matter where you hit the zombie, because they’d be down in four shots. Resident Evil 4 was so much more than that. Ganado ducked out of sight if you took too long to aim, they’d corner you in groups and they’d grab you from behind. You could take out their kneecaps, but they’d still fight back. When you threw the plagas into the mix, even a headshot didn’t mean victory.

The initial set piece in the village is still one of my favourite maps of any game, and a truly wonderful example of level design. From the moment you’ve barricaded yourself inside the house with Dr Salvador starting up that chainsaw, panic sets in and you’ve got to make a decision fast. Do you stick to blocking the windows and wait for the Ganado to charge? Do you run to the second floor to head onto the roof to pick them off from a vantage point? Do you head back to one of the entry paths and narrow the corridor so they can’t come from behind? Do you hide in the bell tower and wait it out? Very few games manage this kind of approach. Yes, Resident Evil 4 is a very linear game, but the different ways you can get from point A to point B gives you the kind of freedom that modern games won’t let you have, because it would get in the way of their precious cut scenes.

My first approach to the village was a poor one, since my friend had forgotten how she had passed it all those years ago. All she told me was to avoid the guy with a chainsaw. Oh boy did I follow that advice. Every time I managed to pick off a few Ganado and heard the rusty motor drawing near, I would run to the opposite side of the map to get away. This continued for a while, and after a few grisly beheadings, the church bell rang and I was safe. For a moment. It would take a few more encounters to grasp the flow of the game – enter area, get into a huge crowd fight, scramble for supplies and then comb the area for hidden treasures afterwards.

I breezed through the farm with relative ease, but then I came to the first quick time event – running away from a boulder down a hill, Indiana Jones-style. Another first for me, so naturally I died a couple of times before getting the hang of the timing. Then my friend gasped “I’ve had this game nearly three years, and I’ve never been able to get past that part.” So the tables had turned, and she decided to watch me play through the game myself. Eventually, she brought the Gamecube around to my place and said I could finish it in my own time. I lived by myself at that point, essentially house sitting for a year. My house was huge, and sound echoed off the walls. Playing Resident Evil 4 at night terrified me, and it wasn’t long before I was having nightmares where Dr Salvador would chase me through my house.

I got through the village levels relatively unscathed, and had no idea the game wouldn’t end when I got to the castle. Suddenly this game seemed way bigger than I initially thought. So I jumped online and had a quick read of what I would expect. I made the mistake of reading about the Regeneradors. As soon as I entered the castle, I was petrified that I would have to fight one. Of course, I hadn’t looked at where they showed up, so I spent the entire time in the castle on the edge of my seat for no reason. That said, when I came across a Garrador for the first time and realised that I had to go up to it to trigger the battle, I shut the console off and didn’t play for three days. I could deal with enemies jumping out at me, but I couldn’t cope with the idea of having to initiate the fight. I begged my friend to come back over to play it with me and she obliged. There were quite a few of these moments in my first play through where I was almost too scared to continue. They were:

• When you exit Mendez’s house and you can see Dr Salvador in the distance, just staring at you.
• Every subsequent Garrador.
• Running away from the reanimated armour when you play as Ashley.
• The first time I found a Regenerador in the operating room.
• The first time I mistook an Iron Maiden for a Regenerador and ran straight into impalement.
• The writhing sack in the prison. You know the one.

I’ll be the first to admit that the first time I played Resident Evil 4, I played it on easy mode. Of course I would, it was a new genre for me and I wanted to enjoy myself. But what I didn’t realise was that by playing it on easy, I was missing out on whole chunks of the map. When I went back to play it a second time, and found that I needed an extra key to get into the main part of the castle, or that you could actually enter the hedge maze. It blew my mind that they had changed things for different difficulty levels.

I died a lot. I died in all sorts of crazy traps and trip wires. I was beheaded, stabbed, crushed, devoured, and at one point a Novistador melted my face off. This game really lived up to that violence warning at the start screen. Sometimes I would die intentionally to see if there was a new animation. Of course on the other end, it was always exciting to see if you could kill enemies in different ways. My favourite was in the castle, where you could shoot out a Zealot’s knees, and then suplex him to crush his head. I still get immense satisfaction from pulling that off, even after putting in well over a hundred hours into various ports of the game. Oh, that’s right. I’ve played Resident Evil 4 on the following platforms:

• Gamecube
• PC
• Wii
• Playstation 3

In my last semester at college, I was interning at Official Playstation Magazine Australia and the Deputy Editor at the time asked if I wanted to review Resident Evil 4 HD. I don’t think I’ve ever said ‘yes’ so quickly, or embarrassingly loud in my life since. I was kind of disappointed in the port honestly, and I still maintain that the Wii port was the best simply for the fact that it could mask how the graphics had aged much better. But I’ll still take any port over that god awful PC version any day.

While I mentioned before that the voice acting was surprisingly good, it was more that the characters had personality, rather than they were good actors. But that’s what I love about Resident Evil, you never forget you’re playing a video game. The plot may have been cheesy as hell, what with the cult, Leon’s one liners and Luis Sera’s awful pick up lines. Is there a game more quotable than Resident Evil 4? Maybe Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons of Liberty (I mainly just quote the Raiden/Rose codec call where they have that fight and Rose cries ‘A lifeless room… almost like your empty heart.’ Because WOW, that’s hilariously bad). I’ve almost memorised as much of Resident Evil 4’s dialogue as I have of Clueless’. The merchant stands out in particular, probably because of the repeated interaction you have with him.

“Whaddaya buyin’?”

“Stranger, stranger…now that’s a weapon!”

“NOT ENOUGH CASH…stranger…”

“Heheheh, thank you…”

He really should’ve gotten his own spin off. It’s really a testament to the quality of the game, where a glorified item shop has more character than the protagonist of its sequel. Oh, and of course Salazar. That “hmm, where is the satisfying sound of one’s impalement?” gets me every time!

If there’s one defining aspect of Resident Evil 4 that makes it stand out from its predecessors and every game that spawned from trying to copy it – it’s reiteration. By now, we’re all familiar with the failed prototypes of Resident Evil 4 – Hookman, Progenitor and of course, Devil May Cry. You would never find that many reiterations of a game before release now, because some stupid project manager would be forced by a team of marketing executives to have it ready to ship by 1/11 because they need to get in for the Christmas launches before Assassins Creed 15 comes out. Games are no longer given the time they need to be properly play tested and polished. But that’s another post in itself. I think that Shinji Mikami’s determination to make Resident Evil 4 stand out really paid off in a way that he probably wasn’t expecting. Did he know Capcom was re-inventing a genre they had coined themselves back in 1996? That they would set the standard for all third person shooters to come?

While Resident Evil 4’s formula may seem tried and tested now, it’s only because every major action game has tried to emulate its pacing and game play since. While the reliance on quick time events may not have been original (you can thank Shenmue for that), it was integrated in a way that didn’t jar with the storytelling in cut scenes. The jump scares that Resident Evil is so known for, would be copied to varying degrees of success in similar games such as Dead Space and the western developed Silent Hill sequels. Resident Evil 4 set the gold standard, and although I’m still a sucker for the earlier claustrophobia inducing, ‘super spooky’ Resident Evil titles – this game might be the perfect embodiment of the entire franchise.