vivi-n

-me trying to explain to my girlfriend that he's from raccoon city but the second word just came out of my mouth

i finished claire a last night. my first stream was an amazing time, and the police station part of the game is really tight in that "getting you lost several times" way while having a lot of totally incredible, surprising moments. the second half...doesn't quite manage to keep that height. it's still really good, but i was kind of surprised how quickly the game wound down. "oh, this is already a lab? i guess i'm near the end?" i said when i first stepped out of the room where claire leaves sherry...for a while i wasn't sure, the promise of unopened doors leaving me to imagine i was only like 1/3 of the way through the lab section at the start of the scene that ends with the alarms going off.

turned out the last few rooms i hadn't visited were really just single rooms and not hallways of their own...i was especially surprised when it came to the bug room, which really could've been a sick curveball setpiece near the end but i just kinda zapped the giant moth a few times. alas. still a phenomenal game that steps up the original in virtually every way, but not vastly better on the whole, i'm inclined to feel. just a bit. but that's partly because 1 was already so close to a perfect crystallization of its concepts that stepping up the presentation (which this game already does in a lot of ways) was one of the only ways i can imagine to really top it instead of making something quite different.

which i gather is what happened after a couple more tries at putting twists on the formula. i'll definitely stream leon b soon and maybe my playthrough of the opposite story as well, then likely take a break before maybe tackling cv and maybe nemesis? it's going to be really interesting to play 4 especially after all this time, and...surprisingly, i'm finding myself even really interested to continue onto the newer games, which i really wasn't sure would happen before i started all this

i beat resident evil last night. i remember that re4 was like...probably the most hyped game i can think of from around the time i was in high school, so i realized at some point that this was a series like final fantasy that really hit into the international mainstream/"AAA" market a long time ago. in retrospect, i guess i'd osmosed a pretty fair bit of this game despite having only watched very short amounts of any game in the series before, not just because it was well known and widely quoted but since some of the people i hung out with at gdq back in the day were avid runners. and when i turned it on the first time for 10 minutes to get just a tiny taste of what i was in for before streaming it, i thought "man, if people went wild over a game that works and sounds like this it's gotta be something really special"

well, what can i say? it sure is.

almost forgot my favorite part https://clips.twitch.tv/TardyHardMooseStoneLightning-L1Za_Uf5va_rhPUZ

gotta be real: i really want to play more resident evil. i ate dinner so i'll probably start the stream soon

y'know i've heard a lot of lines from this game quoted endlessly over the past couple decades but there was one at the end i don't think i've ever heard

this game was so good, i'll probably try to organize a few more thoughts (i wrote up a bit elswhere this morning). i'm going to play through 2 for the first time next!

(photosensitivity warning on the clip)