Extra Lives Read Online Free Page A

service you terminated in a panic sixteen months short of your expected stay. Now you are back in your hometown, in the house you grew up in, feeling less directionless than mapless, compassless, in lack of any navigational tool at all. You are also bored. Hence the PlayStation.
    The live-action sequence has given way to an animated indoortableau of surprising detail and stark loveliness—like no console game you have hitherto encountered. Three characters stand in the mansion foyer. There is Barry, a husky, ursine, ginger-bearded man; Wesker, enjoying the sunglasses and slicked-back hair of a coke fiend; and Jill, your character, a trim brunette looker in a beret. A brief conversation ensues about the necessity of finding Chris, your fellow Alpha Team member, who has somehow managed to go AWOL in the time it took to step across the threshold of the mansion’s entryway. Soon enough, a gunshot sounds from the next room. You and Barry are dispatched by Wesker to investigate.
    The dialogue, bad enough as written (“Wow. What a mansion!”), is mesmerizing in performance. It is as though the actors have been encouraged to place emphasis on the least apposite word in every spoken line. Barry’s “He’s our old partner, you know,” to provide but one example, could have been read in any number of more or less appropriate ways, from “He’s our old partner, you know” to “He’s
our
old partner, you know” to “He’s our old
partner
, you know.” “He’s our
old
partner, you
know”
is the line reading of autistic miscalculation this game goes with.
    Upon entry into the new room, you are finally granted control of Jill, but how the game has chosen to frame the mise-en-scène is a little strange. You are not looking through Jill’s eyes, and movement does not result in a scrolling, follow-along screen. Instead Jill stands in what appears to be a dining room, the in-game camera angled upon her in a way that annuls any wider field of vision. Plenty of games have given you spaces around which to wander, but they always took care to provide you with a maximal vantage point. This is not a maximal angle; this is not at all how your eye has been trained by video games to work. It as though you, the gamer, are an invisible, purposefully compromised presence within the gameworld.
    The room’s only sound is a metronomically ticking grandfather clock. You step forward, experimenting with your controller’s (seventeen!) buttons and noting the responsiveness of the controls, which lend Jill’s movement a precision that is both impressive and a little creepy. Holding down one button allows Jill to run, for instance, and this is nicely animated. A pair of trigger buttons lie beneath each of your index fingers. Squeeze the left trigger and Jill lifts her pistol into firing position. Squeeze the right trigger and Jill fires, loudly, her pistol kicking up in response. All of this—from the preparatory prefiring mechanic to the unfamiliar sensation of consequence your single shot has been given—feels new to you. Every video-game gun you have previously fired did so at the push of a single button, the resultant physics no more palpable or significant than jumping or moving or any other in-game movement. Video-game armaments have always seemed to you a kind of voodoo. If you wanted some digital effigy to die, you simply lined it up and pushed in the requisite photonic pin. Here, however, there is no crosshair or reticule. You fire several more shots to verify this. How on earth do you aim?
    As you explore the dining room something even more bizarre begins to occur. The in-game camera is
changing angles
. Depending on where you go, the camera sometimes frames your character in relative close-up and, other times, leaps back, reducing Jill to an apparent foreground afterthought. And yet no matter the angle from which you view Jill, the directional control schema, the precision of which you moments ago admired, remains the same. What