Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles

Off the bat, let me admit to not having very much in the way of Resident Evil knowledge; I'm not a hardcore fan of the series. But while I enjoyed my recent hands-on time with two levels of Capcom's second on-rails lightgun shooter, Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, which takes you through re-imagined levels from Code Veronica and RE2 along with some original stages, I'm a bit surprised by the game's overall lack of suspense. Theoretically, it's creepy to walk around darkened hallways of abandoned buildings, but the effect is pretty much ruined when you're not on the edge of your seat waiting for the next zombie that may or may not jump out at you around the next corner. In the two levels I played, my character walked extremely slowly. On occasion, they'd sprint forward of their own accord -- hence, being on-rails -- but other times, they would just move forward at an excruciatingly slow pace. It's not that I don't have patience; it's just a bit jarring to walk so deliberately when the characters are speaking so animatedly and the background music sounds like a spirited JRPG fight theme. Not that that's a bad thing -- it's just incongruous. It doesn't do the suspenseful tone any favors either.

At some point, the Resident Evil series stopped being considered scary by the masses and became a simple zombie-shootin' action-adventure. So, it wasn't too surprising that Capcom tried to bring some of the scares back in the light gun-style shooter Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles. But there are still more classic Resident Evil games to revisit, so now we have Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, which still does a good job of keeping the "theme park ride" feel intact, and also improves on most of the little things that counted against Umbrella Chronicles. Still, a few issues remain that make the ride a little too rollicking for its own good. The main differences from Umbrella Chronicles mostly deal with the controls, and they're all for the better. First, there's no more manual camera movement with the Nunchuk's analog stick, which is fine, since it was often useless, if not easy to forget about. A more desired change is better weapon management. My biggest problem with Umbrella Chronicles was the ammo meter embedded in the aiming reticule, which Darkside fixes perfectly by just moving the ammo display below the characters' life bars in the corner of the screen. On top of that, the aforementioned Nunchuk stick now handles weapon switching. When in the inventory menu, you can arrange your weapons according to an up-down-left-right formation, and then you tap the stick in those directions to quickly switch between guns. It makes much more sense visually than Umbrella's simple vertical list of weapons, and is a good repurposing of the analog stick. Of course, you can play Remote-only, as before, but when it comes to convenience, I much prefer having the Nunchuk to handle the secondary stuff while my aim remains steady with the Remote.

To those who say the Wii doesn't have enough games for those over 17: you are so wrong. However, if you were to say there are too few M-rated titles that aren't on-rails shooters, we'd probably agree with you. That said, Dead Space: Extraction and House of the Dead: Overkill were among the best Wii games this year. Hoping to round out this trio of excellence in bloody, on-rails shooting is Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles, which we ...

Leon and Krauser fight for survival in South America in our latest look at this Resident Evil rail shooter.

We return to Resident Evil 2 and Code Veronica where those zombies just never stay dead.