Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Worth playing"

Resident Evil 2 is a classic, and was one of the Ps One's greatest games. So popular in fact , that it was ported to the pc, Dreamcast, and the Gamecube. But when it was announced it was coming to the N64 back in 1999, it came as a surprise to many. The n64's dated cartridge format made it difficult, to next to impossible to play games with FMV (Full Motion Video), because of the extremely limited storage capacity compared to CD's. Especially Resident Evil 2, which had some fairly lengthy FMV sequences.

But lo and behold, using impressive compression technology, as well as a much larger capacity cartridge, Angel Studios and Factor 5 were able to port the entire game intact, FMV and all.

Resident Evil 2 takes place shortly after the events of the first game, with the horrible T-Virus having spread to the residents of nearby Racoon City. Leon Kennedy, a rookie cop on Racoon city's S.T.A.R.S. unit, is on his first day on the job investigating what happened to the city, when he comes across the zombie horde. He meets another survivor; Claire Redfield, the sister of fellow S.T.A.R.S. team member and hero from the original game, Chris Redfield. They become separated early in the game, and each character begins a desperate quest for survival, while trying to find out the origin of the zombies.

Resident Evil 2 featured a lot of improvements over the first game. While the story telling is still on the ridiculous side and the voice acting cheesy (though not quite as bad), it's a much better paced game with more action and creepy, jump out of your seat moments than Resident Evil 1. The graphics were also much more detailed, and the game was considerably longer. The n64 version even features stuff not found in any other version of the game. There was an option to turn off the violence and adjust the blood color to blue or green. There was a randomizer to move objects found in the game to different areas on subsequent plathroughs, if you beat both Claire And Leon's stories in the normal mode. There is a secret way to get alternate costumes for the games, and the they added 16 new text files called "Ex Files", giving you a bit of back story and helping to connect the events of Resident Evil 1 and 2 together. It even supports a high res 640x480 mode, if you had the n64 expansion pack.

Resident Evil 2 is an extremely dated game by modern day standards, and if you don't like (or are willing to put up with) the old school survival horror titles with fixed camera angles, tank-like controls, and an irritable and frustrating save/inventory system, you likely won't enjoy this. Also, the n64's cartridge format made the FMV sequences grainy and sound tinny, because of the compression technique. But this was still an impressive port job, and gave n64 owners at the time, their first chance to experience survival horror at its (then) finest. If you still have your old n64, and want to experience the nostalgia of 90's Resident Evil with a few extras, you can't go wrong with this game. It's a classic.