Is it just me or is Chris Redfield's in-game partner, Sheva Alomar (pictured) a sexy woman? I'd never think of leaving Chun-Li but damn... the gamer in me is growing more and more... "vibrant" the more he sees Sheva Alomar. Alas, I digress.

I'm really not a big fan of the Resident Evil franchise, well, it's more accurate to say that I haven't really been an active player of the Resident Evil games. I started with the second one and I was scared shitless, so I stopped for a while. I thought about playing Resident Evil 3, and while I never did I still kept a general curiosity.

When Resident Evil 4 came out the first thing I said was, "Oh boy, next gen! Let me get up on this!" That's when I noticed that it was strictly for Gamecube (at first at least) and I sighed. So I dropped my shoulders in defeat and went to playing Street Fighter. Capcom hadn't let me down. When Resident Evil 4 came out for the Playstation 2 I was still in tears, because to this day my Playstation 2 has yet to work at the same capacity it did when I first obtained it. Saying all that, this leads to Resident Evil 5, the first Resident Evil I'm considering buying because I can, and it comes out for the Xbox 360.

I'm not exactly sure when the demo came out, but I downloaded it the day before yesterday and played it. That's why this is a first impression: it's initial observations. The first thing I always notice is the graphical quality. Even back on the Playstation I saw a bit of an advanced graphical quality. Oddly enough I saw that along a steady stream of multidisc Playstation games, but this one was... different.

Back to the demo at hand though, Resident Evil looks great. It's not too hard, I'm guessing, to make realistic looking humans at this point. Chris and Sheva (and I'm putting emphasis on Sheva) look fantastic, from the realistically shining hair on her head to her perverted fantasy inducing figure... wow, excuse me for that. The enviornments have a familiar feeling to them, as if you're actually there. Even as the wind blows there's a feeling of familiarity, scary familiarity. I don't want to feel too familiar in a place where people are being publicly executed, because I'm either a zombie or a future victim, more than likely accused of engaging in sexual intercourse with a woman like Sh... damn, she is a great character.

Let's move away from the graphics, wait, after this. One beef I had was with the death thing. Not Chris or, *sniff* Sheva, but the zombies. There was this wavy looking thing, it was... weird... but hey, it's Capcom. Capcom has a habit of delivering good graphics so let's go to the sound. Remember what I said about the wind? Here's what I want you to do, right now. Turn off all sounds in you can. Any sound you can personally manipulate, turn it off. Now just listen. Listen to the silence. That's the feeling I had at the beginning of the demo. Let me ask, do you know what immersion is? It's what you call a feeling of being somewhere you are not due to an outside source. Stephen King does it with his tales. Martin Scorsese does it with his films. Capcom has, at least as I've seen so far, done it with this game. I'll elaborate a bit further when I'm done with sound.

After I left the quiet, eerie safety of the wind blowing I jumped into the action of the game. I fired the pistol. I felt a bit bad. I fired the shotgun. I felt a bit worse. I ran out of ammo and took out the knife. I felt bad with every hit. Why? I identify to sounds, and it sounded like I was actually murdering zombies. Pistol bullets, shotgun shells, I could hear every bullet with the greatest of ease and I actually felt like I was murdering someone with the shots. Needless to say it got easier with time, but still, it was kind of harsh. There's such a thing as doing your job too well (Denzel Washington, Training Day) and to the extent I've seen that's the case with the sound quality of Resident Evil 5. The zombie's, or at least zombie-like people, had this scary quality to them. They sounded possessed AND knowledgeable. Nothing, outside of a woman searching for her baby's father with a gun in hand (don't ask), is scarier than a knowledgeable zombie that moans and wants to eat you. That's why it's best to shoot them dead. Blow their heads apart, and pratically acheive ultimate pleasure as you hear the head explode open. The sound of a bullet hitting zombie flesh and making a head split apart is music to your ears. Compare it to pre-808s and Heartbreak Kanye West.

Now, back to immersion. If you start playing this game and think for even a moment that you are alongside Chris and my future wife Sheva, or that you ARE Chris, then you are either crazy, close to insanity, or immersed. Immersion has already been defined above, but here's how I knew this game was immersive. I felt Sheva's pain when she had to watch the execution. I sensed the fear both gunners had when the leader saw them. The graphics had me thinking that the guy was real (shit, the way things are he's probably based off of a real person) and the sounds made me think I was next in line to be decapitated in a tactfully unnamed African village. Seriously, I swear there was some kind of blade on my neck when the axe wielding juggernaut (bitch) murdered that defiant man. Again, that's immersion.

We go now into the most essential thing: gameplay. The view has changed but the controls feel the same. I didn't like the way you controlled characters in Resident Evil 2 because I felt it was overcomplicated for something so simple. I like the traditional sandbox third person gameplay as opposed to the Resident Evil kind. I've been informed that Resident Evil 5 and Resident evil 4 share that gameplay mechanic. I don't mind the point of view, I think the over-the-shoulder look is great, really keeps you on your toes (which you need to be doing in a game like this) but I can't say the same for the controls. I'm not giving anything the benefit of the doubt or anything but maybe I'm just not used to it. Walk with the left thumbstick, turn with the left thumbstick, aim with the right one, get into aim mode with a shoulder button, reload by holding aim and another button, throw a grenade by hitting two triggers, hold one button to get into run mode, it seems unnecessary, overly complex. It could be possible Saints Row 2 lust I've just gotten back into, but if I had the chance I'd test out that method of movement and gunplay and compare the two more effectively. I'm not calling it bad; I'm just saying it's unnecessary.

Now, on to the aesthetics. Racism. *Sigh* Look, being a black guy myself, I don't see the big deal. Chris is white, the villagers are black, he kills legions of them and who cares? One, it's fictional. I'll 98.4% sure that this isn't based on real life events. Besides, how accurate would it be if Chris and my Nubian goddess Sheva were in an African village shooting at a legion of white people? It wouldn't look too accurate. Case in point, let it die, it's hardly a big deal. The villagers, at least a great number of them, are zombified, and in a sense that means that they were already dead. Besides that it doesn't help that my Lady Brown is light skinned. It doesn't rectify the problem a lot of people will see so much as empower it, but I'm still not complaining because from what I've played so far it's a great game, far from perfect but just past that mark for great. Even so, this was just a demo. When the full version comes out, and if I buy it, I'll be sure to provide yet another blog post, only it'll be a great review.

DiZ First Impression's Score - Resident Evil 5 demo: 4 Stars