All You Can Carry

Resident Evil mini-games are usually a hit or miss.

For every the 4th Survivor, there is uhm, what is that Code Veronica mini-game called again?

RE Zero has its own mini-game called the Leech Hunter. I never gave this mini-game much of a fair shake until now.

It follows the first Mercenaries reward system. You want infinite ammo in the story mode? You got to finish Leech Hunter first and do it well. There are no countdown timer in this, your only challenge here is the inventory slot. You are tasked with collecting 50 leeches each for Billy and Rebecca within the training facility. You can't drop the leeches once you picked them up and each item slot can only carry up to 10 leeches. Obviously as you reached closer to 50 leeches, the game gets progreesively harder because your inventory gets tighter.

It's pretty challenging, never has inventory management in a RE game became so critical. Some players came up with the loophole of wiping all the enemies in the facility before picking up any leeches since there is no timer. Sure that could work but the danger is if you die in the middle of combat then all the hard work is wasted. Your leech count at time of death would be very little if you used this strategy. 

This mini-game is carefully thought out, you can only pick up the right color leech for each character. This prevents using Billy as the attacker and leaving Rebecca as the supply mule. You need to use both character as according to how the leeches are scattered and there are 3 random arrangements for the leech and weapons each time you play.

This is one of the better mini-games in the RE series. The RE0 game itself isn't all that great but bear in mind that REHD or any other RE game during this era never had any mini-games.

Nickel and Dime

After all that good feelings, it's time to talk about the ugly side of the game business. Unfortunately Capcom is once again the guilty party.

When Capcom started to unveiled the new bonus costumes for RE0 remaster, I was getting a little suspicious of how much effort they are putting in. After all, they basically phoned-in the new bonus costumes for the earlier RE remaster though that was understandable being their first major HD remaster title. For RE0, there was a major t-shirt contest where fans can submit their own design. Then there are the throwback costumes to the previous RE games. Unfortunately Capcom have decided to charge the new RE0 bonus costume as DLC.

This is a classic example of publisher witholding content to nick an extra dime from consumers. After all the game is already more than 10 years old and any new content should be deemed part of the remastering packaging. But looks like the basic $20 is just enough to cover their remastering fee and you need to pony up an additional $10 for the new costumes.


To be honest, the new costumes are a nice throwback to the series history.  I wasn't so fond of the fan design T-shirt idea as it seem out of place in this game. But the costumes from the past RE games got me nostalgic of the series. It's just too bad that's probably all we are getting for this year's 20th anniversary of RE.

A Zap from the Past

Now I already pointed out that Revelations 2 is very similar to Zero in terms of gameplay. That nostalgic call back is ultimately its main downfall. 

As RE fans are aware, there are two types of RE games – the early fixed camera angle games and the RE4 styled games. Zero lets you control your both characters at the same time which works well in the early fixed camera angle games. You could separate both characters and place them in in different rooms. You determine where each character goes and does what. In that aspect, the game is light years ahead of RE5 or Revelations 2. The two characters never felt like they were attached at the hip like in the latter games.

In Revelations 2, you can’t separate the two characters and one of them is helpless but not completely unarmed. You have separate inventory for each character even though they can never be apart and one don’t actually use firearms.Online co-op would have be nice though it’s hard to imagine how much fun it is controlling a character that doesn’t fight. Using the second character to wave the flashlight around is as boring as it sounds.

Capcom wisely put the RE0 remaster on hold as they didn't want to saturate the market with another game. In retrospect they should have just remaster Zero and forget about the lame Revelations sequel. 

Biggest Red Packet of This Season

During my Chinese New Year break I had the good fortune of receiving my copy of Metroid:Other M japan import just in time before the break. I had envision spending the next six of days of break completely devoted to the game in between the snacking and visiting relatives of course. That didn't really happened as I never imagined bypassing the region-lock on my Nintendo Wii would be so difficult. The english patch of Fatal Frame IV was so easy to use I naturally thought I won't have any problems getting this import to run as well. Nothing would work as Gecko and Neogamma refuse to load the disc though I had a little better luck getting them to run my Biohazard 0 GC Japan import. All long I had no intentions of getting the Metroid Other M US version not only because of the horrible box art but also I have learnt that it required a firmware update to 4.3U in order to run. I was still happily playing the Fatal Frame IV using the english patch on my 4.2U system so a system update was out of the question.

In the end the Metroid Other M japan import felt like a big red ang pow which I couldn't even open. On a more positive note I finally made good of my promise to add Vanquish to my collection even though it did come a little later than I expected. The beauty of it was I didn't have to choose between Vanquish and Dead Rising 2 after all as I managed to benefit from a bit of a price drop on both.