Extra Lives Read Online Free Page B

this means is that, with every camera shift, your brain is forced to make a slight but bothersome spatial adjustment. The awkwardness of this baffles you. When you wanted Link or Mario to go left, you pushed left. That the character you controlled moved in accordance to his on-screen positioning, which in turncorresponded to your joystick or directional pad, was an accepted convention of the form. Yes, you have experienced “mode shifts” in games before—that, too, is a convention—but never so inexplicably or so totally. So far, the game provides no compelling explanation as to why it has sundered every convention it comes across.
    The dining room itself is stunning, though, reminding you of the flat lush realism of
Myst
, a personal computer game your girlfriend adores but that has always struck you as a warm-milk soporific. You have not played a tremendous number of PC games; it is simply not a style of gaming you respond to. You are a console gamer, for better or worse, even though you are aware of the generally higher quality of PC games. Anyone who claims allegiance to the recognizably inferior is in dire need of a compelling argument. Here is yours: The keyboard has one supreme purpose, and that is to create words. Swapping out keys for aspects of game control (J for “jump,” < for “switch weapon”) strikes you as frustrating and unwieldy, and almost every PC game does this or something like it. PC gamers themselves, meanwhile, have always seemed to you an unlikable fusion of tech geek and cult member—a kind of mad Scientologist.
    You glance at the box in which this game came packaged.
Resident Evil
. What the hell does that even
mean?
You know this game is intended to be scary. You also know that zombies are somehow involved; the box art promises that much. The notion of a “scary game” is striking you as increasingly laughable. While nothing is more terrifying to you than zombies, calling a zombie-based game
Resident Evil
is a solecism probably born of failing to fully understand the zombie. Part of what makes zombies so frightening is that they are
not
evil. The zombie, a Caribbean borrowing, is in its North American guise a modern parable for…well, there yougo. Like all parables, zombies are both widely evocative and impossible to pin down. Part of the reason you purchased this game was because you were curious to see what the Japanese imagination had made of the zombie. This was a culture, after all, that had transformed its twentieth-century resident evil into a giant bipedal dinosaur.
    On screen, Barry calls Jill over, where he kneels next to a pool of blood. (“I hope it’s not…
Chris
’s blood.”) He orders you to press on looking around while he completes his investigation. You are no criminologist, but gleaning the available information from a small, freestanding blood puddle would seem to you an undertaking of no more than three or four seconds. Barry, though, continues to ponder the hell out of that blood. You have two options. Leave the dining room to go back and explore the foyer, where Wesker presumably awaits your report, or go through a nearby side door. You take the side door. Anytime you go through a door in this game you are presented with a load screen of daunting literalness: the point of view reverts to an implied first-person, the door grows closer, the knob turns, the door opens, which is followed by the noise of it closing behind you. Considerable investment has been placed in a dramatic reproduction of this process: The knobs sound as though they were last oiled in the Cleveland administration, and the doors themselves slam shut as though they weigh five hundred pounds.
    The load screen complete, Jill now stands in a long narrow hallway. The camera looks down upon her from an angle of perhaps seventy degrees, which leaves you unable to see either ahead of or behind her. You turn her left, instinctively, only to hear something farther down the hall. You