Resident Evil: Deadly Silence

Capcom's survival horror franchise arrives on the Nintendo DS.

In 2005 Capcom reinvented the Resident Evil franchise with Resident Evil 4, a game that has won its share of acclaim in the end-of-year awards given out by many publications. So why is it that Capcom felt it could basically trot out the decade-old version of Resident Evil for the Nintendo DS and expect people to think it was good? Resident Evil Deadly Silence (Deadly Silence ... a.k.a. DS. Clever, huh?) for Nintendo’s innovative little handheld shows no real innovation of its own. As I’ve pointed out before, there are games that really use the DS’ unique control interface and those that seem to just tack on a little touch screen functionality and fail. Resident Evil DS does the latter.

If you’ve played, or just read about, Capcom’s survival horror franchise it launched in 1996, you probably know the basic story of Resident Evil. You play as a member of the Special Tactics And Rescue Service, or S.T.A.R.S., Alpha Team. Your team is being sent in to find the missing Bravo Team of S.T.A.R.S. which was itself looking into some strange happenings around Raccoon City. You take on the personae of either Chris Redfield (hard difficulty) or Jill Valentine (normal difficulty) as they try to unravel the mystery of the missing team and an area that has somehow gotten overrun with zombie creatures.

As the game starts you’ll be prompted to either play in the Classic or Rebirth mode. Classic is just that: the classic 1996 game with only directional pad and buttons used to control the action. Rebirth is generally the same game but with certain elements thrown in that take advantage of the DS touch screen and microphone.

The classic game is really just a port of the PlayStation game with graphics so small that it can be very hard to tell what the devil is going on. In 1996 all the shortcomings of the original game were more forgivable simply because it was an earlier time and gaming in a 3D environment was still new. Resident Evil’s clunky remote-control-tank control interface was a necessary evil (pardon the pun) for a game that finally and truly had some scary soil-your-skivvies moments.

Unfortunately this is a decade later and we have seen a little progress in the way gaming is handled in a 3D environment. (I think we could make a good case that Capcom also saw the light, since it completely overhauled the RE franchise in 2005.) But here is the same crappy control we had in 1996 made worse by the small directional pad and tiny graphics of the DS. In some of the wider shots, it can be very difficult to see which way your avatar is facing, and since facing is the basis for movement in RE’s turn-left/right-push-up-to-walk-forward control layout, this can create some frustrating moments. Okay, I admit it: I wanted to smash my DS even more than I wanted to smash my PS1 controller 10 years ago.

Should you choose the Rebirth mode, you’ll be treated to almost the same game, but with some opportunities to use the touch screen and even the microphone to control limited elements of the game. In some random scenes you’ll be able to use your trusty stylus to slash at shambling zombies as they go for your grey matter. Other times you’ll use the touch screen to manipulate objects to solve new puzzles. In neither case is it really rewarding. The game still plods along and the touch screen and microphone interaction feels about as slapdash and glued on as it possibly could.

Another thing that bothers me is that Capcom did not see fit to make any accommodations in the game to take into account its new home. Handhelds are generally played where you have a few minutes to kill and might need to save at a moment’s notice to put the game system away. Unfortunately Capcom kept the same old system of having an ink ribbon in inventory and then finding a typewriter to actually save the game. I’m sorry, but that just shows Capcom was not thinking about the platform realities when they put this game together.

I suppose if there is a bit of welcome innovation in this title, it is the multiplayer mode that can be played by up to four players – if you are all in the same room and everyone has a copy of the game. But even the multiplayer is half baked, with players never actually seeing each other in the game – even when playing cooperatively.

As mentioned before, the graphics are not really that good. They look about the same quality as the PS1 original, but once they get displayed on the DS screen, they just come off looking poor. Of course the eccentric camera and its weird angels don’t help much either. On the audio front, if you liked the limburger cheese that passed for the original’s dialogue, you won’t be disappointed.

When push comes to shove, the only people I can really recommend this game to are people that just have to have a version of the original Resident Evil on their DS handheld. Everyone else should probably steer clear. In my opinion the 10-year-old game this cartridge contains just does not hold up in 2006 and the clear lack of consideration for the needs of the platform earn it a below average score.

This review courtesy of our friends at Gameshark .