Saturday, March 15, 2008

Boulder Dash

Everyone is excited about the upcoming new Indiana Jones movie, myself included nothing beats watching an old school action adventure movie with plain old-fashioned stunts, none of that CGi nonsense or wirework crap. It seems Shinji Mikami is a pretty big fan of Indiana Jones too, as both of his Resident Evil games featuring a boulder chase sequence when the character has to escape from a running boulder much like in the first Indiana Jones movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark.

While these scenes were memorable and certainly not very much out of place despite being in a survival horror game, execution is a whole different matter. In the first Resident Evil, both the original PSOne and Gamecube remake featured pre-rendered backgrounds, making any chase sequence, such as this one a chore to play. In Resident Evil 4, since everything is rendered in real-time the boulder chase sequence could have been executed much better but instead it's reduced to a button-mashing sequence which only requires a quick reflex and some finger dexterity. Since both these sequences offer not much in terms of gameplay experience i really wonder if it was inserted in merely as a tribute to Indiana Jones?

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