No Rain, but Snow and Lightning

This is the first part of a two-part post on the recently-released Final Fantasy XIII – it's my impressions halfway through the game's story.

I wasn't sure that I would enjoy Final Fantasy XIII. This is a rather strange thing for me to admit, as I had played and beaten nine of the previous twelve games, as well as several Final Fantasy spinoffs. Though the Final Fantasy series has always been known for major changes between installments – each game features a new world, new characters, and a new battle system – some of the things I'd heard about the newest game left me wary. Most importantly, I'd heard that the new Final Fantasy was painfully linear and overly simple. There's some truth to these complaints, but I'm still enjoying Final Fantasy XIII as much as any role-playing game in recent memory.

When Final Fantasy XII appeared almost four years ago, critics and casual fans alike were struck by the game's remarkable nonlinearity, its proliferation of sidequests and hidden areas. One could easily beat Final Fantasy XII in under forty hours – this being a Japanese RPG, forty hours constitutes a shortish game – but there were dozens of hours worth of optional events and missions to complete. The first time Final Fantasy XII lets the player venture outside of a city, the protagonist is tasked with hunting down a few small monsters. Said beasts are easy to find and easier to kill, but if you wander too far from the entrance to the wilderness, you will find monsters so huge that you know you would stand no chance in combat with them. The game gently suggests that you come back later, say, after twenty hours of gameplay.

In Final Fantasy XIII, on the other hand, there are very few places one would ever want to revisit. It's not that the game offers ugly scenery or boring locations; it's just that most of the game's locations are so straightforward and simple that one inevitably does everything on the first trip. I've yet to beat the game, but I understand that exploration finally returns to Final Fantasy for the last few chapters. I do anticipate the Final Fantasy XII-style freeform gameplay, but at the moment, I am perfectly happy with the game's linear progression. While most role-playing games do provide a little more leeway for players, Final Fantasy XIII doesn't herd or push its players any more than games like Uncharted 2 or the perversely compelling Resident Evil 5. Like Uncharted, Final Fantasy XIII gives us enough good plot and good gameplay that we don't mind our lack of agency.

If I were reviewing for a major game site, I would have to provide a somewhat-detailed synopsis of Final Fantasy XIII's plot. I won't bore you with summary and scene-setting, but I will say that Final Fantasy XIII's story has been a nice surprise. The series' previous entry, for all its other virtues, had a fairly awful plot, a steampunk-Star Wars disaster. The game included Vader-like Judges, a Han-esque smuggler and pilot, an evil father, a kidnapped princess, and a less-intimidating Death Star. The parallels were so obvious and numerous that George Lucas should have sued Square-Enix. Final Fantasy XIII suffers from some ridiculous naming conventions – worlds called Pulse and Coccoon, a protagonist who calls herself "Lightning" – but the main the story is interesting. Not only that, it's actually managed to surprise me. Oh, and the Afro-bearing token black man is actually one of the more interesting characters! And looks as if he will survive the game!

Final Fantasy XIII is a very technically impressive game, but at times the accomplished graphics only serve to point out the game's aesthetic failings. I don't mind the character designs, though (as so many others before have stated) they tend to be a tad over-the-top. What really annoys me is the world design – everything is either sleek or ornate, but few of the buildings and structures have an identifiable function. Everything looks great, until you start to think about it. What is supposed to inspire a sense of wonder only elicits a sense of confusion.

The battle system of Final Fantasy XIII isn't nearly as strategic as some of its predecessors, yet its lack of subtlety doesn't really harm it – this is the most visceral of Final Fantasy combat systems. Though the AI controls two out of three characters in a player party, the player can control which "paradigms" the AI players will fill. Mid-battle paradigm switching is quick and necessary; you will die if you're too slow going to a healing paradigm or "debuffing" especially strong enemies. Though Final Fantasy XIII may not offer all that many options to a player, the game nonetheless demands far more attention of its players than most of its genre. As in the underrated and poorly-named Final Fantasy X-2, wandering attention will ruin you.

I wouldn't recommend Final Fantasy XIII unreservedly; it's not a perfect game, and some of its conventions can annoy. It's not a game one has to play ironically, but it does require some patience. If you like Japanese role-playing games, you will almost certainly have fun with the new Final Fantasy. It's a fine, fine game, if you like that sort of thing. I do, and I look forward to spending many more hours with the game. Perhaps portions of these impressions have sounded slightly cool on Final Fantasy XIII – but it's the best thing I have played for months.

Further thoughts will appear on the blog once I've beaten the game.

Lost Innocence from Greene and Reed

On the occasions I review classic movies, I generally try to make the film in question, however old it might be, appear relevant. Today's film, The Fallen Idol, has been in film buff news of late, though not for happy reasons. Until recently, this fine movie was available as a Criterion Collection DVD. Last month, StudioCanal sold the rights to this and over twenty other films to Lions Gate. Criterion is known for producing just about the best DVD and Blu-ray packages on the market. Lions Gate is known for the Saw series and action films.

Now that I've made my small protest, let's get on with the review.

I decided to watch The Fallen Idol because it was the first of three collaborations between British novelist Graham Greene and British director Carol Reed. The second Greene-Reed production, The Third Man, is a masterpiece and one of my all-time favorite films. The Fallen Idol isn't quite so perfect a film as its followup, but it deserves to be far better-known than it is.

The Third Man's noirish backdrop is post-war Vienna, bombed-out, rubble-strewn, and poorly-governed. The city is so central to the film that it's almost impossible to imagine it taking place anywhere else; one cannot have The Third Man without ruined Vienna. The story of The Fallen Idol, on the other hand, could take place just about anywhere – most of the action takes place in a few rooms of an unnamed country's London embassy. The trips outdoors, though beautifully shot, tend to be fleeting. We see glimpses of London throughout the film, but it hardly defines the movie. Perhaps the film's constrained setting shouldn't surprise; The Fallen Idol originated in a Greene short story called "The Basement Room."

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Fallen Idol is its reliance on a child actor. Bobby Henrey was only eight when he starred as Phillipe, the ambassador's son. Phillipe is completely believable, and it's hard to watch him suffer and grow disillusioned, even if the film ends on a happier note than its bleak source material. Phillippe is a child and the screenwriters thankfully neglected to make him wise or coherent beyond his years; if the dialogue ever sounds false, I didn't notice. If anything, Phillipe can be too convincing – when he pesters or whines, the audience cringes.

Phillipe's titular "idol" is the embassy's head butler, Baines (Ralph Richardson), evidently the only adult to pay any attention to the ambassador's son. Baines is a kind man with a truly shrewish wife (Sonia Dresdel) and a beautiful would-be mistress (Michele Morgan). On a weekend when most of the embassy staff is out and Phillipe's parents are in their own country, the young boy finds himself involved in a domestic intrigue that ends in tragedy, scandal, and a police investigation. Phillippe witnesses (but misinterprets) a death, lies to the police, and generally receives a horrible introduction to the adult world. When his parents return at the end of the film, we see a look of cautious hope on the boy's face, but we doubt that he shall recover quickly. The original story, on the other hand, assures that the protagonist never got over his awful experience. In The Third Man, Reed and Greene play innocence for laughs and the occasional sigh. Here, they play innocence for tears.

Much like The Third Man, The Fallen Idol features remarkable cinematography. Much of the film is shot from low angles, giving us a "child's-eye" view of the proceedings. Phillipe doesn't understand most of what's going on around him; the camerawork helps the audience enter into his incomprehension and fear. With the aid of clever lighting, the embassy's main room changes from homey and inviting to sinister and threatening. When Phillippe first clambers down a fire escape to meet with Baines, everything is clean, white, and vibrant. Later, as Phillipe flees the embassy at night, the same fire escape, shot from the same angle, looks like a stairway to hell. In one powerful scene near the end of the movie, Phillipe runs alone and desperate through dark and empty London streets. The cinematography calls to mind the sewer chase in Reed's next movie, but in that film the fleeing figure deserves his fate. In The Fallen Idol, no one deserves the awful things that happen to them.

For all its brilliance, The Fallen Idol has a few important shortcomings. Most importantly, the endearing protagonist has a bad habit of disappearing; Phillipe is offscreen for far too much of the movie while the adults (inadvertently) decide his fate. Phillipe is the movie's viewpoint character, and the movie grows awkward when it strays too far from him. When Phillipe does affect the events that go on about him, his influence seems somewhat inorganic. There's also a little bit of over-obvious symbolism – Phillipe has a pet snake – that seemed a tad contrived to me. Still, its few stumbles don't harm The Fallen Idol too much. Would that more films provided so little to quibble about.

The Fallen Idol is an extremely good film, possibly a great one. It's painfully honest, well-written, and well-acted, but I don't think it's quite so compelling as The Third Man. You should see it, but watch Reed and Greene's second film first. Expect a review of the third and final Greene-Reed collaboration, Our Man in Havana, sometime in the coming weeks.

At the Heart of the Storm, Video Games Find Their Soul

This week brings my double-length post on the groundbreaking Playstation 3 game, Heavy Rain. Mr. Keeley will return next week with two posts of his own.

Heavy Rain is not a perfect game. It is an important game.

In fact, it is probably one of the most important games ever made. Not everything this audacious effort attempts is successful, but one very significant part is: It proves that video games are bursting with a potential to convey emotion like no other medium can.

I have wondered if I would ever live to experience a game so profoundly affecting that it could bring me to tears. Heavy Rain comes shockingly close. The game's early chapters are such a potent representation of a life steeped in despair that even the most mundane tasks gain astonishing weight; playing Ethan Mars (Pascal Langdale) in the wake of his son's death is heart rending. He has divorced his wife and lives in a rundown house with his surviving son. Initially, tasks like making dinner for the child may not seem like a compelling prospect – indeed, he will drag a chair to the cabinets and reach in for a bag of chips if you do not – but, the result makes it worthwhile: Ethan stares across the dimly lit kitchen and watches as the child silently eats his frozen dinner. The magnitude of Ethan's loss is suddenly apparent; the life has gone from his existence.

Video game storytelling has improved considerably over the past few years, but few games have truly made story their priority. With Heavy Rain, it is not debatable – the story is everything. Every action the player takes has some sort of impact on the narrative, however big or small it may be. It could cause the death of a main character or it could simply irritate the person with whom you are speaking.

It is essentially a crime thriller – all main characters ultimately find themselves on the trail of the sadistic Origami Killer – but it is decidedly character-driven. Writer/director, David Cage rarely passes up an opportunity to illuminate a character's inner life: A prostitute rebuffs your questioning about her late son, "You may be able to buy my body... but you cannot buy my son," and a detective stops to coddle a baby girl, "Take care of your mommy for me." Even the Origami Killer himself has a tragic backstory. There are a few incidental characters that are far too shallow and one main character's motivations are foggy but, considering the sheer volume of writing necessary here, Cage does good work.

Ethan is not the only playable character, either. There is Scott Shelby (Sam Douglas), the weary but amiable private investigator, Norman Jayden (Leon Ockenden), a drug-addicted FBI agent who is freshly assigned to the case, and Madison Paige (Judi Beecher/Jaqui Ainsley), an insomniac journalist.

The characters are manipulated by a largely contextual control scheme. Walking is the only exception. It is always done by holding down R2 to begin walking and moving the left analog stick to change direction. The mechanic is unwieldy, so it certainly takes an adjustment on the player's part, and it occasionally leads the character to spin around in place, compromising the player's immersion. Nevertheless, the game does not allow the player to move the camera freely, so the design of the walking mechanic makes sense, even if it does not always work well.

Most of the game's controls, however, are a stroke of genius. Apart from the walking, everything is contextual, meaning that players must react to onscreen commands. Dialogue options spin around a characters head and physical actions appear on the object to which they relate. It may sound tedious (indeed, countless games have made similar schemes just that), but Heavy Rain's developers have elevated the "quick-time event" to an incredible means of immersion. If someone is about to slam a door in your face, you stop them by swiping the right stick upward; if you have to climb a muddy hill, you must contort you hand to hold down a series of buttons, just as the character struggles to maintain a foothold; if you are rocking a baby to sleep, you must slide the right stick back and forth, delicately.

Precisely because there are no predetermined controls, the fight scenes in this game are far more intense than those in other games. In a scuffle, the player must scramble to react just as he or she would in real life. In fact, the controls constantly put the player into the thick of a scene's emotions. In stressful situations, even dialogue choices become complicated. The words spinning around a character's head shake and can become illegible as the tension reaches a breaking point. Also, make no mistake: The game will proceed if the player fails to make a choice, and indecision is often dangerous.

No moment is more stressful than those when a life is in the player's hands. Options frantically flash on the screen, characters start to yell, the music swells and, the whole time, the player is desperately struggling to weigh the consequences – consequences that will follow the player through to the end of the game. Even worse, none of these moments have a "right" answer. Heavy Rain goes to great lengths to ensure that moral choices are never black and white; at no time are this game's weightiest choices anything less than excruciating.

Consequently, Heavy Rain is arguably the first game that has ever paid proper respect to human life. It is nearly impossible to think of another game that imbues the act of pulling a trigger with so much gravity; if Modern Warfare were this powerful, most players would be suffering from PTSD after one online match. This achievement in and of itself renders Heavy Rain a landmark. Its creators clearly saw an appalling lapse in the morals of most modern games – one that every gamer knows, but upon which few gamers dare to dwell. Within the game's story, this has considerable significance. Every main character in the game can die and, once dead, he or she will stay dead.

The branching storyline is undoubtedly a draw, but it does result in some issues late in the game. One or two scenes will seemingly reference events that never took place in your story, other scenes will appear to be stitched together, so as to accommodate your customized plotline, and certain subplots will go nowhere, presumably because they were meant for players who made different choices. Also, there are a few situations where the game forces the player to do something that should probably have been optional. Technical glitches arise in the later chapters, as well – musical cues misfire, textures pop in and lip synch occasionally flounders. It is all enough to make the game's ending its weakest part.

Depending on the choices you make, the denouement may do little to rectify things. It consists of a series of short, non-interactive scenes that wrap up each plotline. Some are hugely contrived, pointlessly breaching the game's tone. Other possibilities are considerably more satisfying, even if the experience still feels pieced together.

Still, Heavy Rain is largely a consistent experience. The atmosphere that this unnamed Pennsylvania city provides is a huge achievement. Rain is, predictably, constant, but it is also extremely evocative. (Mind you, it has real significance in the plot.) Whether it is the hiss of a downpour on a deserted street or the tapping of individual drops on a dirty windowpane, the sound design keeps the player immersed in this grim, lonely world. All of that is in addition to the great musical score.

Much of the intrigue of Heavy Rain's environments stems from the fact that most of these locations have never before been rendered in a video game. Yet that is hardly where their appeal ends; the game's visuals are invariably blessed with excellent lighting and art design. The Mars home in the first chapter (prior to any of the tragic events) is a beautiful work of modern architecture that uses open spaces to bathe the entire house in warm sunlight – maximizing the contrast in a game where every other scene is dimmed by thick clouds. Ethan's second home is far more grungy, but no less interesting to behold. It perfectly captures the deep grey of the light on a stormy afternoon and, while it certainly reflects Ethan's depression, it is still a believable home – a chalkboard in the kitchen lists his son's daily schedule in a child's handwriting.

Even less pivotal sets are striking; an alcove full of lockers in a train station is a cave of brushed steel and fluorescent light, and a mansion playing host to a party has more passed out cokeheads in it than pieces of furniture, but the abundance of candlelight and pillows gives it an authentically trendy vibe.

The player's experience in these locations is heightened even further by great camera work. The locked camera positions, both while the player is moving freely and when he or she is not, show that David Cage has an eye for composition. Even taking a seat on a whim leads to a series of shots that are wonderful – a long shot past pieces of furniture emphasizes the character's loneliness, or a close-up reveals the distant look on her face. It makes exploring the environments an unexpectedly personal experience.

Action-oriented scenes are equally well-done, using dramatic camera angles to heighten the impact, but never making it harder to play the game. Even effects like the Hitchcock zoom in surreal drug-withdrawal sequences and 24-like split screens during tense standoffs are used quite well. Many have criticized Heavy Rain for being more movie than game, but with someone like Cage at the helm, this is hardly a flaw.

In such a game, the performances are equally important. Heavy Rain bears mixed results in this area. The developers made a strange choice for this game: They cast French and English actors for a story set in Pennsylvania. Some of the actors' performances suffer due to this more than others. Leon Ockenden, as the FBI agent, is affected the most; his voice seems to flounder between ten different accents throughout the game, rendering his performance quite distracting. He has considerable trouble even pronouncing his own character's name and, furthermore, never manages to connect with the emotion of a given scene.

Pascal Langdale's Ethan also has a heavy accent but is, nevertheless, far more successful. His accent is at least consistent (Hey, Pennsylvania surely has a few immigrants, right?) and he gives a decent performance. Only in the early chapters, when he must repeatedly yell his son's name, does he become a bit comical, but this is the director's fault for not getting a larger number of takes. The other two leads, voiced by Sam Douglas and Judi Beecher, manage perfect American accents and turn in good performances. Madison proves a bit flighty during the course of the game, but Beecher provides a dry humor that brings the character down to Earth. Douglas' performance as Shelby is good, as well, sidestepping clichés and giving the dic an earnest, almost paternal, disposition.

The other half of the performances is the extensive motion capture work. It is largely excellent, especially considering that most of it is rendered on-the-fly by the PS3. Characters move quite naturally and allow Cage's great blocking to come through. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the fight scenes, which benefit greatly from having real humans' performances and not a set of canned animations.

Facial movements, on the other hand, still show the limitations of the technology. Most of it was captured straight from the actors' voice recording sections. As such, it is clear that a performance is constantly trying to come through on the characters' faces, but it is only occasionally successful; the technology often cannot convey the necessary nuance. Nevertheless, the character models are incredibly detailed and their faces are no exception. This game has far more close-up shots than most others, and suffers less for it than one might think.

This game has flaws, to be sure. Yet it is consistently successful enough to make its impact; there are moments of such raw emotion in Heavy Rain that they will stick in the player's memory for quite some time. This is not only due to their immediate power, but also because Heavy Rain opens up a wellspring of new potential for video games. (This, just months after we saw Uncharted 2 do the very same thing.)

It is natural to assume that "interactive drama" will quickly blossom into a new genre of video games, but I am far more excited to see how Heavy Rain's innovations impact the entire medium. This game overcomes countless challenges that other game developers have long been afraid to tackle – challenges that have been holding back the medium for far too long. In other words, every game that follows Heavy Rain will have little choice but to borrow from it and build upon it.

Trouble at the Tolstoys'

The Last Station wasn't quite the movie I was expecting; that's both a good and a bad thing. Surely, I thought, a film about a Dying Writer and his Moral Struggles would be dark, grim, and gloomy; The Last Station is not. On the other hand, I left the theater thinking the film could have benefited had the actors and writers shown a little more of the restraint that this sort of serious period costume drama is supposed to exemplify.

While critics are supposed to abhor introductory explanatory text even more than they despise voiceovers, I think The Last Station makes the right decision by opening with an epigraph and a few paragraphs of contextualization. While the movie retains some over-obvious explanatory dialogue about Tolstoy's radical philosophy and his disagreements with established religion, we're not burdened with too many improbably didactic conversations. The film establishes its story quickly: It's 1910, Tolstoy is old, sick, and a utopian philosopher. The Great Man wants to change his will and give his copyright to the Russian people. His long-suffering wife objects.

Though The Last Station's plot and – to be honest – the film's advertising revolve around the dispute between Count Leo Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) and his wife Sofya (Helen Mirren), the audience hardly receives these characters unmediated. Instead, we see the disintegrating Tolstoy household through the eyes of Tolstoy's new secretary and amanuensis, Valentin Bulgakov (James McAvoy). At times, The Last Station almost abandons the story of Tolstoy and Sofya for the romance between Valentin and Masha (Kerry Condon), but the film's ostensible purpose returns in the final act; Masha is almost entirely absent the last third of the film. Valentin, however, is nigh-omnipresent. He's miraculously present at just about every dramatically significant moment that occurs around the Tolstoys. Mostly he just takes notes and witnesses; it takes a frustratingly long time for him to actually influence any of the events that happen all around him.

Before seeing the movie, I'd read that The Last Station suffered from overacting. I'm not sure that the fault lies with the actors; rather, the screenwriters call for such extremes of emotion that credulity strains. Worse, I thought that many scenes were just wrong for the performers; Helen Mirren may be a great actress, but her presence is so, um, regal that it's hard to believe her smashing crockery and screaming. She does a fine job portraying Sofya slowly cracking, but she seems off when her character finally breaks apart. Plummer does well with what he's given, but we never gain much sense of his genius or the reasons for his philosophical convictions. Perhaps he just wants to be unhappy? The Last Station doesn't try hard enough to make sense of Tolstoy; something's missing at what should be the film's center.

More than one literary critic has claimed that the Great Russians are in fact quite funny, so I was pleasantly surprised to find that The Last Station is often quite comic. There's a running gag about Valentin's propensity to sneeze when nervous, a humorous Tolstoy bedroom scene, and a few jokes at the expense of Paul Giamatti's character's mustache. The Last Station, given its actors and subject matter, could easily have ended up tediously dreary. I'm glad it didn't.

Much of The Last Station takes place indoors in turn-of-the-century opulence, though there are several lovely outdoor scenes. The landscape – apparently German in real life – looks appropriately Russian, and a few scenes were evidently shot on location in Russia. Alas, there's one major barrier to suspension of disbelief: The protagonists' language. Much as I hate to admit it, I would have liked this movie more had it worn subtitles. There are many scenes where the English dialogue goes more or less unnoticed, but at other points the script uses far too many colloquialisms. Especially bad is a joke revolving around an English language pun...

I enjoyed The Last Station, but it's not a film I ever desire to watch again. The characters alternate between being too passive and too dramatic; one feels that the scriptwriters let down the fine actors. Though the material and the cast promise much, the film itself remains merely competent. The Last Station isn't dour or depressing, but it's hardly lively either. Perhaps I should have skipped the movie and just read the book?

The Masters of Uninvolving Gameplay. Sandwich.

Mr. Keeley and I have a running joke. We say that Resident Evil 5 is the only game we have ever played ironically.

It is not just the script; bad video game scripts are a dime a dozen. While Resident Evil 5's script indeed ranks among the worst, this game is inept on every level – from game design to art design to animation to acting. For decades, film fans have been watching terrible movies like Manos: The Hands of Fate or Plan 9 from Outer Space not merely because they tell idiotic stories but also because they are beautifully bad works of filmmaking. Resident Evil 5 is the video game equivalent; it is so earnest and so inept a video game that one cannot help but love it.

As Capcom releases the game's final downloadable episode this week, it presents an interesting quandary for a fan: What should Resident Evil 6 look like? Should the developers attempt to make a modern game – one where players can walk and shoot at the same time?

They risk losing some of the game's charm that way. I have never come to tears laughing at a game before I played Resident Evil 5. Every moment brings a new expression of just how stupid the game's design is. Why does a rocket launcher take up as much space in your inventory as an egg? Why is there a cover system that makes you stand up to heal yourself? Why does 90% of the dialogue consist of "Come on!" and "Okay!"? Why do zombies bounce between walls like ping-pong balls when you shoot them? Why is there a giant, ancient city underneath sub-Saharan Africa that is populated by zombies who operate elaborate booby traps, and also houses a multinational drug corporation headquarters?

At first, these questions frustrated me, but soon I began to see things differently. Watching a massive axe flying through my character and doing no harm, simply because I was in the process of picking up loose change, is not frustrating. It is an amusing sight to behold. Add in cooperative play, where one can share these moments with a friend, and a session of Resident Evil 5 often becomes uproarious.

Still, Resident Evil 5 was not made by a fertilizer salesman on a bet; the game was a multimillion-dollar production. This fact is apparent when looking at the game – character models are extremely detailed and effects like mutating creatures are excellent. So, while kitschiness can be forgiven to some extent, a big-budget series continuing down such a path would be difficult to excuse.

Resident Evil has been in this position before. Back in 2004, much of the gaming press was criticizing the series as stale and archaic. After all, the early Resident Evil games had a camera system that made walking in a straight line across a room one of the games' greatest challenges. The fact that the games still worked this way well into the 21st Century was a joke. But in early 2005, Resident Evil 4 came out and brought the series to the forefront of action/horror games. The player was granted freedom of movement that was more consistent with games of the time and quick-time events (Press B now to dodge the axe!) gave the game's cutscenes greater immersion. It looked like Resident Evil was back on track.

Naturally, when it took five years to release 5, expectations were running a bit high. Revolutionary sequels like Uncharted 2, Mass Effect 2 or Assassin's Creed II only took a couple of years to develop, after all. Yet what fans received was a hollow retread of 4 – a game that made few improvements and that proved many of its predecessor's innovations had now become clichés. (Every mediocre game is now riddled with tedious quick-time event sequences; they are a bane of modern gaming.) It also proved that, while 5's failures were often amusing in how miserable they were, the series would again be forced to evolve in order to survive.

I do not know what Resident Evil 6 should look like. I could create a list of suggestions but, really, what it needs are things that I have not yet seen. With the release of Mass Effect 2 last month and Heavy Rain yesterday, I feel as if the rule book for video games is being rewritten on a weekly basis. Video games are now more emotionally engaging than ever before – I let out involuntary yells as I leap out of collapsing buildings in Uncharted 2; my lip quivers as I play with my only surviving son in Heavy Rain. Today, video games clearly have the power to scare the crap out of me.

I want Resident Evil to make it happen, but it is up to the developers to figure out how that can be done. They can start by making a new game – not the same one I have already bought twice. I doubt that I will find another failure very endearing.