Resident Evil (PS1)

Going a little old-school this week. Resident Evil was the game that launched a thousand survival horror titles. Of course, being the first (or at least the first widely successful) game, it's not perfect. One of the hardest things to survive is the so-called "tank" controls, in which pressing up moves you forward, pressing back moves you backward, and left and right turns you around. Which makes combat a challenge, especially since aiming from a third-person perspective is more of a guessing game than anything. (Seriously, crows should not be harder to kill than zombies.)

This is not to say that the game is unplayable, it's just that you'll be running around like a drunken sailor most of the time. Otherwise it's still a pretty fun play. You'll be doing a lot of backtracking thanks to the limited inventory system, but there are a number of creepy locales you'll visit (mansion, garden, mine, laboratory) and several different varietals of deadly creature to fight. And both the live-action beginning and voice acting are still so hilariously bad they're good. I'm not sure about the surfeit of other RE games released in the intervening years -- Code Veronica X sure was horrible -- but this one is still worth a play.

3 out of 5