Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles (Nintendo Wii)
Rated “M” for “Mature”
Relive all the horror of Raccoon City once again on your Nintendo Wiis. Capcom dusts off the shoulders of a few hundred zombies to bring you Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles. This time…the zombies are still undead.
For those unfamiliar with the Resident Evil/Biohazard series, it’s a story of a corporation, Umbrella, that developed a virus to make bio-human-type weapons. An elite team of agents known as S.T.A.R.S. investigates a mansion where an outbreak had occurred. From there, zombie and other mutated melee ensues. Now there is obviously more of the story, but Umbrella Chronicles wraps up a few of the main points that are vital to the game and ties it in as a rail shooter. What’s better than shooting zombies? They feel no pain, they just stop moving due to the weight of lead in them or loss-of-head syndrome.
You play through Resident Evil 0, 1, and 3. There’s more after that as you journey onward on a few side missions and extra missions to help further the plot of the series. You take on Umbrella and their creations and even go on the other side of things as Wesker and find out what he had been doing the whole time and what his plans with Umbrella were. Most missions have you choose between one of the 2 main characters from each game installment. 0 has you playing as Rebecca and Billy during the train incident, 1 has Jill and Chris investigating the mansion, and 3 has Jill and Carlos as they escape Raccoon City. Other parts have you doing a few solo missions as Rebecca or Wesker and then things get tied together again with the couple that started it all, Jill and Chris.
For your Wii adventure through zombie town, you have your trusty Wiimote and/or Wii Zapper to do all the dirty work for you. Since this is a rail shooter and not the survival-horror theme that the series made famous, controls aren’t tough. Pick up your guns, point at what you want to stop killing you, pull the trigger a few times, and that’s it. Headshots are still encouraged, but sometimes harder to pull off with the influx of undead and other species thrown at you (seriously, you will come to a point where maybe 20-50 Leapers or Monkeys are laying on the floor in front of you). Also added were Action Button sequences Resident Evil 4 made famous. Be quick because a failed push of the correct button or shake of your gun can lead to your death.
Along the way you can pick up familiar items from Resident Evil such as herbs for health, more guns for zombie eradication, and files to learn/relive the history of the franchise. Your main pistol will have unlimited ammo, but other guns are limited to how many bullets you have. And don’t forget to reload (it’s almost like a real gun). Herbs and first-aid sprays are essential since you share one life bar (1 or 2 players).
Done away with are puzzles that were always strewn throughout whichever zombie-filled heckhole you were in. The game is very heavy on the shooting of things and that’s not a bad thing. And if you are a fan of the series then everything you see will be a delight as you relive the horror you already went through once before. Just now you get to blow almost all of it up. Almost every single enemy and boss featured in Resident Evil is here, All the locales are kept intact and nothing has changed to better fit the storyline.
You don’t have to have played Resident Evil before to enjoy this one. While it adds an extra bit of joy if you had, anyone can pick this one up (if your parents let you if you’re under 17) and get into it and know what Resident Evil is all about. Things are tied together with the inclusion of new content dropped in. And as much as the scare factor may have worn off for this one, shooting zombies has never been as fun or tough like this. Whether you are by yourself or with a partner or group of friends, you will enjoy this version of a Resident Evil rail shooter far more than the Dead Aim series.
And Wesker’s pretty evil and powerful too.
4 out of 5
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Trauma Center: New Blood (Nintendo Wii)
Rated “T” for “Teen”
*Warning: This game DOES NOT make you a better doctor.
Atlus, the company that brought you the gritty stories of the Shin Megami Tensei series and the musical delight of Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, brings another installment in their doctor series with Trauma Center: New Blood. Sanitize your Wiimotes and nunchuks and prep the O.R. Trauma Center brings doctor issues from the hospital to your room. Don’t expect any long-winded fantasies that have nothing to do with the plot here. The root of Trauma Center is in helping patients.
New Blood is similar to Second Opinion. You operate the same way with the Wiimote. Your nunchuk provides a wheel of operating tools for you to use. Use your antibiotic gel, cut open the patient, find the problem, deal with the problem, keep the patient’s vitals up, close up the patient, gel up the stitches, apply the bandage, and move on to the next patient. Good, yes. Bad…not really. In this installment, they throw a larger variety of operations for you to do. Instead of repeating similar treatments every other patient, the ailments of patients has grown (maybe this city just has clumsy people). Whether it’s fixing a broken bone, excising tumors, grafting new skin for a burn victim, doing a liver transplant, removing bullets, or fixing a hockey player’s arm, the operations don’t feel redundant for most of the game. Sure you do have to do similar processes for most injuries, but at least your patients lead interesting lives to find different ways of getting hurt.
While the operating room is where you do all your work, there’s a very heavy story that ties all things together. You start off in Alaska in a small hospital and are asked to return to America. There you run into a new virus strand known as Stigma. You learn more about it, find ways to treat it, deal with normal patients, and are soon brought into Caduceus, a government funded organization for the betterment of medical breakthroughs. The heat gets turned up and Stigma is spread in different countries. You go and cure it because you’re a doctor.
Yeah…if you thought reading that last paragraph was kind of boring, then be lucky you didn’t have to listen to many minutes of it told through stills of your medical team and others voiced by a not-entirely-excited-and-sometimes-overexcited cast.
Stigma is the new GUILT. Man-created viruses of differing forms and differing ways to kill a human. This is where you either forget about normal operating procedures and concentrate solely on the virus or do a combination of both to keep your patient alive. Of course Stigma is nothing like any other virus so expect learning how to deal with it in weird ways and how to be more quick and efficient about it.
This time around you have are partnered with another doctor. Choose between male doctor Markus Vaughn or female doctor Valerie Blaylock. Neither plays different. It’s all you so it really doesn’t matter who you choose. The only difference between the two (other than being a doctor of vaginal or non-vaginal gender) are their uses of the ever famous Healing Touch. Markus has the standard touch of slowing down time to operate lightning quick. Valerie’s touch stabilizes the patient’s vitals preventing it from dropping. The bad side to that is that she can’t increase the patient’s vitals either. Either way helps stall a patient’s possible death. So however you feel like touching your patient, pick whomever you feel like.
Now with having two doctors in the O.R., you now have the option to play 2-players simultaneously. A great addition to the game with its ups and downs. While operations are generally hard and get increasingly harder as you progress through the game, having 2 doctors cooperate ups the difficulty in a few ways. One way is that some patient effects increase in frequency (hemorrhaging, blood pools forming, cuts opening, activeness of Stigma, etc.). Another is dependant on your partner. Most likely one will play lead doctor taking care of the harder parts of an operation while your partner handles the smaller bits of vitals, draining, etc. Good if you know what you’re doing otherwise you’ll need to tell your colleague to drain the blood and not shoot the pacemaker with a laser while you’re placing new modules in it.
Other than more types of operations, the inclusion of 2-player mode, tons of dialogue, and new viruses, the game is still the same as before. If you enjoyed it the first time around, you’ll enjoy it again. If it made you mad and frustrated because of its ever increasing difficulty, then you’ll have many dead patients on your hands.
4 out of 5
(The ones that found new homes that night and then all of them together.)
