oh geez, just heard the news out of vancouver. ryan reynolds was torched to death by a beam of light from the heavens. yeah the report described him as being “only carbon now” which strikes me as a little insensitive but i guess that’s the modern world for you.
RE4 truly did not need a remake, it's currently my most crusty gamer take but now that I've watched some of the remake and gone back to the original I'm even more convinced of this. I'm glad it's decent and people are having fun with it but man, they fuckin nailed this game the first* try and it truly did not need a full rehash to change the visuals (higher fidelity but more restrained character design), pile more mechanics on top (parry system is cool, crafting system is boring), and to recast all the voice acting with non-union VAs (this has been the case since at least RE2 remake, shame on Capcom!)
The industry has such a weird approach to remakes where games that were almost universally regarded as triumphs for their time get an absurd amount of money and effort put into their remakes for marginal gains, and games that really could have used a little more help like Resident Evil 3 are instead doomed to essentially repeat their performance and have their remake quickly shoved out the door to keep the money flowing in while work continues on 4. REmake, the term used to refer to the remake of the first RE originally released on Gamecube, really set the bar in my mind for what a remake can be - Take the original team, give them as much of the original assets as you still have, and essentially give them a mandate to create the idealized version of their game that simply wasn't possible to realize back then. And REmake is, no question, the pinnacle of the classic RE formula. Neither 2, 3, or 4 have lived up to that lofty ambition in my mind, despite constantly being billed as such.
*The RE4 we got was like the third or fourth attempt at making the fourth entry in the series. The first attempt became Devil May Cry but there was also another one that was a lot more focused on the paranormal and wandering around spooky houses/castles, there's some footage of that floating around on Youtube.
I currently use Overcast, but for some reason it has become incapable of pulling any episodes of any podcast past February 3rd, I don't know how or why but I'm running out of TAZ backlog and I'm also going a bit mad from listening to these guys try to wrap their noodles around Blades in the Dark so I'm taking suggestions for third-party podcatchers for ios. I won't listen to podcasts on spotify on principle but if there's no other options I guess there's no reason I can't go back to just using itunes since it has to be on my phone anyways.
Saw a bit of the RE4 remake and I went from having zero interest in the game cause I played the original to death to having some interest because they specifically have a difficulty that's like "hey if you played the original to death you should just do this one", I'm a fan of when remakes acknowledge that they're remakes, whether it's mechanically like REmake moving around ambushes to specifically surprise veteran players, or narratively like whatever weird stuff they're doing with the FF7 remake(s).
Most of the other stuff grates on me though, like making Leon and Luis way less hot, making the Merchant a sidequest-giving chatterbox, and all the crafting/attache case mechanics they added.