Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition (Part 3)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

Chapters 4 and 5 today? Let’s try. There’s a LOT here.

The Terminally-Kidnapped Girl

IT'S HOT IN HERE! Why does a castle in the modern age
need a foundry?

The last piece of the chimera insignia is at the end of a foundry over lava, accessible through a cart. I’ve stopped wondering what isn’t in Salazar's castle. The insignia is placed and the blocking columns goes away; Leon and Ashley access a second cart, taking them to yet another building. More exploration ensues, including areas where Leon can partake in “shooting range”-style minigames to earn bottle caps. Mostly bragging rights rewards. There's 5 of those and they’re alright, but I was focused on finishing the plot for these articles.

You can't even do anything with the bottle caps afterwards.
Can't even sell them!

Good thing those armors are old and break with just a few
bullets, huh?

Further down, the two encounter more suits of armor possessed with parasites, some of which animate and attack. This is the only section where this enemy appears properly, by the way.. One thing I noticed while watching the longplay I use for screenshots is that when you know what’s coming, you can easily tell Ashley to stay somewhere safe while Leon deals with approaching threats. However, when you don’t know, she’s by your side as you destroy various horrors, and she becomes another variable in the fight. Her smaller health bar makes her a prime target.

Ah yes, the classic difficulty spike of "Just throw more
tough enemies at the hero".

More traps around the castle, like a falling ceiling that can be stopped by shooting at four red lights. And what about that giant drill taking up a hallway? One tower contains a giant Novistador nest. As she ventures through that room alongside Leon, Ashley gets taken (again!!) by one of those flying insects. We chase her captors through a tower with a giant mechanism, over a long bridge, and into another castle area where we fight TWO Garradors. This game has a pattern with major mooks; introduce them in a fight with just one, have a second battle with another on harder terrain (like a small cage, or a tight ravine), and later, pit Leon against two of them.

Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition (Part 2)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

We’ve already gone through the basics, so I guess we can focus on the plot starting here – unless we have new gameplay elements coming soon…

Rescuing Ashley

If you need a better look at those... uh... growths,
go back to my title card in Part 1.

While making his way back to the village church, Leon finds Los Illuminados' insignia behind a waterfall. He had to kill a ton of Ganados to get to it, too; but it will let him open the church and save Ashley Graham. This chapter sees our first encounters with enemies who, after their head has been blown off, will have it replaced by a squirming creature popping out of their body with eyes, scythe arms, and limbs moving erratically. Those fucked-up things are the actual Las Plagas. In every crowd of enemies, there’ll always be a few that will pop out. These “heads” have long range due to their tendrils, so it’s best to stay away and shoot them; using the knife means being within stabbing distance, and they freaking hurt.

Las Plagas control their hosts, which is why Ganados have enough intelligence to devise simple plans like taking ladders to sneak into houses from the top floor or sneak behind the hero for an attack. These aren’t “zombies” by the modern definition of a risen undead. They’re zombies in the traditional voodoo meaning of people who've had all their free will ripped out of them. Yikes. I’d argue it’s even darker than zombies who are just undead or diseased.

These things can't even go "Gigante Smash!". 0/10.

Leon uses a boat to get back to the holding area seen before, and follows a different path that leads him to camps surrounded by cliffs. He witnesses a bunch of Ganados pulling out something large using ropes. The thing reveals itself to be an enormous, human-shaped monster, nicknamed El Gigante, which kills every Ganado that brought it out. Wait, how can Las Plagas cause the existence of monsters this fucking big??

Waggle to kill! Waggle! To! Kill!

Dealing enough damage to El Gigante causes its parasite to erupt from its back. Since the monster falls to its knees, Leon can climb on its back and slash at that weak point with his knife! This isn’t an easy battle, but El Gigante is killed. (For bonus points, if you saved a dog in Chapter 1, it comes back to help you in this fight.) Leon follows the trail back to the church, enters using the insignia, solves a color puzzle, and finds the girl’s cell. First mistaking him for her captors, Ashley throws a plank at him, but he explains that he’s there to save her.

Movie Review: Zootopia 2

Since I loved the first Zootopia so much, I knew I had to see the sequel in theaters as soon as possible. My verdict? It's a great movie overall, though I do have a few gripes with it. Beware: Slight spoilers ahead.

The story

We open merely one week after Judy Hopps (Ginnifer Goodwin) and Nick Wilde (Jason Bateman) saved the city from the Nighthowlers epidemic affecting the all-mammalian population of Zootopia, and successfully arrested its perpetrators. As a result, Nick was accepted into the Zootopia Police Department and became Judy's (work) partner.

However, this new partnership hasn't changed them much. The bunny is still impulsive in her dreams of making the world a better place and using her position as an officer to do so, and Nick is... well, as sarcastic as ever. The movie begins as Judy's attitude gets her team in trouble again for running into a mission before even hearing the briefing from Chief Bogo (Idris Elba) at the station. So, sure enough, their idea goes awry and they almost ruin the ZPD's plan. Even the ensuing car chase ends with them accidentally destroying a statue of Ebenezer Lynxley, the founder of the city, that was being placed to celebrate its hundredth anniversary. Lynxley is the inventor of the weather walls allowing the biomes to exist next to each other and letting mammals from all walks of life to be a part of this great city.

Investigating the van they were chasing, Judy finds dried skin that looks like it came from a scaled body. There was a reptile in there. However, due to her recklessness, her team is knocked off the case and told to stay away. And because there are clearly a few hiccups in the partnership, Bogo forces them to attend therapy sessions for mismatched PD work partners.

Resident Evil 4 Wii Edition (Part 1)

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4

This is an M-rated Wii game, so expect a lot of
family-unfriendly violence and horror.

This year, I had another Wii game in the plans, and as time went on, I wondered if I would have the time to play (and finish!) it in time. But! I got lucky; I finished the game, and now I can cover it. There are Wii games that I’ve owned for a long while now – almost as long as this blog has existed. Some games have waited in the collection, untouched, for nearly 10 years! One notable title in there is today’s title, the Wii rerelease of Resident Evil 4; I bought that one at a convention in… uh… early 2016. Yeah. I was long overdue to give it a chance. RE is one of those franchises I haven’t touched at all yet, and I recall that was my specific intention when buying that game, way back.

And yet, it took this long. But here it is! Finally! And I can experience this franchise through one of its best games! Only one issue: Since I don’t know much about the franchise, if this is the fourth (…technically sixth) game in the series, I probably need to read up on a bit of lore. But thankfully, not too much, as the story here is removed from much of the connections with the Umbrella Corporation, which stands front and center of the first three games.

However, we are still dealing with zombies (but not the type you might think), and we have the protagonist of Resident Evil 2 making a comeback, with a new role gained through his status as a heroic survivor. However, do note that I am covering the original version of 4, not the remake released in 2023; my research revealed that there are many differences between the two, some minor, some significant. I’ll stick to the story in the original.

One Hell of a Promotion

Let’s recap Leon Scott Kennedy’s backstory: On his very first day in the Raccoon City police force, the promising rookie ended up in the middle of a zombie outbreak caused by the Umbrella Corporation. Their experimentations on biological manipulation and viruses of all kinds had the side-effect of creating zombies, which broke out and attacked the Midwestern city. The infected destroyed everything, with Leon as one of the few to make it out alive.

Is just one guy really enough to save the President's daughter?
I mean, when that one guy survived a zombie apocalypse...
BTW, big thanks to the World of Longplays YouTube channel
for their playthrough.

For these efforts, he got a significant promotion; he was recruited as an elite agent for the US government, usually assigned to missions that involve similar cases of bioweapons and other bioterrorism. Sounds like a fun life. The events of RE4 take place six years after RE2, with Leon being driven through the woods of Spain by two local agents. His mission? Rescue Ashley Graham, the President’s daughter. She was kidnapped in the area, and he knows roughly where to look. He can handle this on his own, as long as he stays in contact with mission control Ingrid Hunnigan, who’ll send a helicopter as soon as the girl has been rescued. Leon is dropped past a wooden bridge, with one shack nearby and a remote village down the road. Ingrid helpfully sends him (well, you) a “playing manual” to learn the basics.

Hylics 2

I’ve covered many bizarre games, yet few caught my interest as much as Hylics. It’s not that complicated; it’s a turn-based RPG made on RPG Maker, nothing special there. What sets it apart is that it was entirely designed in Claymation – there’s been a lot of hand-drawn games, but ones created with clay characters and worlds are rarer (Wikipedia's likely incomplete list of Claymation games has 25 entries).

Even the Wayne bedroom is weird.

The art style you could get used to; but then, there was the bizarre plot, and how it was presented. Most unimportant NPCs’ text bubbles were randomly generated, Mad Libs style, and made no sense. And when something plot-relevant was said, it made sense, but used archaic or uncommon words to convey the message, leading to a whole other kind of confusion. That game is an experience, I swear.

And if the first game is an experience, then Hylics 2, also developed by Mason Lindroth and released on June 22nd, 2020, must surpass it… while also being a good game on its own, a tough tightrope to walk with absurdism. Can it pull it off? We’ll see.

When even the title screen sets the tone...

An interval of renovelled tempestuousness

(…Yes. I’m gonna indulge in that silliness.)

Good boy. I bet you can't wait to have legs.

In the first Hylics, our main character was Wayne, a crescent-headed guy. This game keeps it ambiguous whether we’re following the same Wayne, or one from a new generation of Waynes. In this one, we’re introduced to an Old Wayne, a wise mentor (maybe the previous protagonist?), and to baby-Waynes that are slugs on the ground, which our Wayne can pet like they’re dogs. “Wayne” is just a species in this world, that starts and ends as slugs, and is human-shaped in the middle.

It's only gonna get weirder from here.