Resident Evil 4 is back. For the 4th time. Originally released on the GameCube, then ported to the PlayStation 2 and PC, the question that most Wii owners will be asking themselves is not “Should I buy Resident Evil 4?” but “Why should I buy Resident Evil 4 again?” Read on for a brief overview of the game’s predecessors, so that newcomers can appreciate just how groundbreaking Resident Evil 4 was when it was first released, and then continue for a detailed comparison of every version of it, so that you can decide if the additions to the Wii Edition make it worth buying again - or which one to buy in the first place. And yes, I did (rather sadly) actually bother playing through every version of the game to write the comparison.

Anyway, Resident Evil has the distinction of being the longest running Survival Horror series of videogames, and is often credited with creating the genre in the first place. This is a point of great contention amongst videogame historians, because unlike most genres, Survival Horror is defined by its themes as opposed to what it requires you to do, making it hard to choose just which games fall into the category. For instance, you can be pretty sure that a Racing game will require you to, um, race. So it’s pretty easy to tell which games are Racing games. But what of Survival Horror? Just how much survival must take place, and how horrifying does it have to be? The short answer is that there is no answer, so unless a developer announces that their game belongs to the Survival Horror school, there’s no sure way of knowing.

And, perhaps, that’s why Resident Evil is said to have birthed the genre by so many - it was the first game to explicitly describe itself as Survival Horror. But whether or not you think it was the first in the genre, it was certainly one of the first games to genuinely scare people, and is undoubtedly largely responsible for making Survival Horror games as popular as they are today.

So what was it like? Well, all the main games in the Resident Evil series up until the 4th incarnation were based around the ethically questionable biological experiments of the Umbrella company, which always ended in zombie outbreaks that you had to escape from, whilst uncovering evidence to get Umbrella shut down. The actual game mechanics were based heavily on typical Action Adventure titles: you went around collecting items, and used them to solve various puzzles so that you could move on to new areas, occasionally engaging in combat with the undead to stay alive - the “survival” element of the genre. The “horror” part was mainly delivered by foes leaping out at you unexpectedly from time to time, accompanied by suddenly blaring audio instead of the usually moody and subdued soundscape.

And, initially, it was a winning formula - probably the reason why it didn’t change for so long. Indeed, the original Resident Evil was one of the main reasons why many people bought a PlayStation, and the GameCube exclusive remake of it helped sales of Nintendo’s lunchbox-look-alike massively as well. But, due to some unusual design decisions, they were always controversial. There are many such mechanics that people take issue with, but three main ones almost always crop up:

The first is the camera, which the player had no control over, and was programmed to cut to different angles when you wandered into specific locations. The changes were often dramatic - from an overhead view to knee height, from in front to behind, from your left side to your right side… as I’m sure you can imagine, a great deal of people found this extremely disorienting, which - it could well be argued - was exactly what the designers intended. The game is supposed to make you feel uncomfortable, after all. You know, horror and all that.

A more significant problem was that if you happened to wander into the wrong place whilst engaged in combat, the camera might cut to an angle that would obscure you or your assailant from view, which often made fights rather unfair. In the screenshot from the GameCube remake of the original below, Jill (the protagonist) can’t be seen at all. Which is a shame, since she’s right next to the zombie and it’s about to vomit acid on her:

Reason number two: the controls. Due to the camera changing position so much, a normal control scheme - pushing the D-Pad or Analogue Stick in a direction to make the character go the same way - would be virtually unplayable. For instance, if the camera was behind you and you held Up to walk towards something at the top of the screen, and the camera switched to be in front of you, you’d start going in the opposite direction. Therefore, the games employed an unusual control scheme which is often described as being like driving a tank: pressing up makes your character move in the direction they’re facing, pressing down makes them back away from the direction they’re facing, pressing left makes them turn counter-clockwise on the spot and pressing right makes them turn clockwise on the spot.

There, that wasn’t so hard, was it? You just have to remember that movement is all relative to where they’re facing: so if, for example, you were facing the left hand side of the screen, pressing up would make you walk left instead of up. The great thing about this control scheme is that no matter what the camera does, you’ll keep on going in the same way if you hold a direction, unlike what would’ve happened with a normal one as explained above. And because the camera jumps around a lot in Resident Evil, I think this control scheme is very useful. Then again, a lot of people argue that the controls are needlessly difficult, and that if the camera would just behave normally then they wouldn’t even be necessary.

And finally, reason number three: the backtracking. Unlike the average RPG hero, somehow able to carry hundreds of obscure trinkets around at once. The main characters in Resident Evil games can only hold a small number of items on their person. For instance, Jill - the heroine of the first game - could carry a meagre eight at any one time. So even if you only took the bare minimum needed to survive encounters with the evil beings you’d inevitably encounter (a gun, some ammo and a healing item) almost half your inventory was gone! And the other playable character, Chris, could hold a mere six items at maximum. Therefore, your item slots would quickly become maxed out. So what did you do if you needed a new item?

You had to trek all the way over to an Item Box (which, imaginatively, is a box you can put items in) and dump them off. Then run all the way back to the new item you wanted and pick it up. Of course, if you then wanted to use anything you’d put in the item box, you’d have to go all the way back to it again. And item boxes were always scarce. To ease the pain slightly, an item put in one box would appear in all of the others, but even so, a huge amount of time in the early games in the series had to be spent doing virtually nothing apart from running to and fro in order to pick up and drop off items. Most fans don’t mind this, but I think I speak for the majority of people when I say that I found the backtracking extremely dull.