Resident Evil Five for the Xbox 360

 In my review of the last remnant, I began by saying that the game wasn’t all that good. Then I sang it’s praises for three pages. Here, I will be doing the opposite. Resident evil five is a pretty fun game, but the frustrations are many, and some of them made me want to throttle small children. So here we go, Resident evil…. FIVE!

The Premise

Chris Redfield has joined group called the BSAA who are responsible for trying to keep illegal bio-organic weapons (B.O.Ws) in check around the world. The shit has hit the fan in Africa and the parasite from resident evil 4 (Las plagas for those with short memories), has been modified by tricell (Umbrella 2.0) and is running amok. To make matters worse, the original T-Virus (Progenitor) is also present in this region. Chris teams up with the token black chick, Sheva Alomar and goes on a crusade of revenge and justice that will leave a lot of dead black people in his wake. Confused yet?

On this note, a point on racism.

WHERE THE HELL WAS IT!? There’s been so much fuss about this game being derogatory to black people that anyone would think it was being developed in the Deep South. What, was there a secret side mission where Chris dresses up in a white pointy hood and beats zombies to death with a burning crucifix that I missed?

Newsflash: Africa, for some reason, has a very large black population. Thus it stands to reason that if a zombie making parasite is on the loose (apart from Gordon Brown), many of those infected will be… well.. black. At no point did I see anything even approaching racism. Hell if you want racism, all the villains where white. The black guys where just the poor sods caught in the middle of whitey’s latest attempt at racial domination. For those who’ve played the game, notice how Wesker’s ouroboros virus never seemed to take in the indigenous population (Or anyone, even the white characters for that matter)? Maybe that’s where the racist tones are. Still, seems pretty weak to kick up a fuss about to me.

The co star (Sheva) was presented as a strong, resourceful and competent woman, every bit the equal of her male/white counterpoint. That said though, her AI was probably hammered out by the infinite-monkey Shakespeare company. But I’m getting ahead of myself.