So I felt like I needed some escapism during this period of virus infections.... so I'm playing a game about a virus.

I make good choices.

So I own Resident Evil 2, 3, and Code Veronica on the Dreamcast, and recently played through an A-B scenario of RE2...

Now, Dreamcast is probably the best version of RE2, next to Gamecube or Nintendo 64, and my favorite feature is how the VMU shows your health and ammo count without you needing to go into the status screen.

There's just one problem:

The D-pad on a standard DC controller kinda sucks.

Particularly, the controller is convex, which creates an issue where its easy to accidentally hit left on the D-pad when you didn't mean to.

I can get around this using an adapter for PS1 controllers, but then I lose the VMU functionality (my adapter has a VMU slot but plugging a memory unit in for some reason also prevents the game from starting... something it does for this but not for Marvel vs Capcom 2 oddly enough. I imagine the "Windows CE" thing has something to do with it).

I wish there was a way to get the best of both worlds--a better D-pad while still being able to look at an LCD screen.

......

So of course, one thing that brought Resident Evil back to mind was the recent remakes, RE2 got a remake last year and RE3's is due out sometime this year (there's already a playable demo of it).

I gotta be honest tho... while I haven't played these, I've watched lets plays and reviews and... a few things about the remakes (and honestly even the Gamecube version of RE1 from back in the day) strike me as off in a few ways.

In particular how they seem to be taking a more "darker and edgier" direction with the franchise. In particular I'm not a fan of Chief Irons' more openly villainous role in RE2, because one, I play Resident Evil to blow zombies heads off (phrasing), not to see corrupt cops abuse women and children. But for another thing... if you're gonna have that, I should then be the one who gets to take him out, not just have him be glomped by a random monster that had no idea who he was or what he did.

It's like... Resident Evil was always kinda silly, and that was always its charm, but now Capcom seems like they're trying hard to say "no no its serious horror!" But... its zombies. You can't have serious horror when your subject matter is zombies. Ghosty-goos or aliens yes, but zombies are just kinda inherently silly, and were even back in 1996.

At least, that's what I think. Thoughts?