Come this way, fans of pre-rendered backgrounds and pixelated blood splatters. There’s something waiting for you in the storefront of local online video game store, GOG.com. Resident Evil 2, the original 1998 survival horror, is now available to buy, download, and, yes, even play on PC.
It's currently available on GOG for £9, and features “improved cutscenes and subtitles” while also returning bonus scenarios for characters unlocked early on. For those who've forgotten, those are the two special races you can do with gas-masked soldier Hunk, or giant sentient soybean hunk Tofu. This port also appears to squash a few long-standing bugs. “Fixed issues with rooms 114 and 115 (missing text), room 210 (invisible newspaper), and room 409 (looping audio),” the blurb reads. Intriguing.
It's all part of a series of original scary zombie-killing games. Resident Evil 1 went on sale a few months ago, while Resident Evil 3 has also been listed as “coming soon” since then. This isn't the first time one of these games has come to PC, but it's now the easiest (legal) option when it comes to romping around Raccoon City with your big blood-stained bandage.
Old Resi 2 is a good appetizer if you've recently played the Resident Evil 2 remake. The remake plays with your memories of the late-'90s statue-pusher in a fun way. You can gingerly walk down the hallway of the police station's heavily embellished ground floor, muttering in your mental preparation that the first licker will soon appear above your head. But then… it's nowhere to be seen. It's only later, when you're lulled into puzzle-solving mode, that the monster appears on another floor, scurrying across the ceiling without any FMV cutscenes to calm your nerves. Well done, Capcom, you got me.
These small differences, set against a backdrop of largely faithful recreations of the original’s spirit, stand out more as fun games that shake things up than iconoclastic upheavals. As you can probably tell, I played a lot of Resi when I was younger, and I really like the remake. If the various rumors of Code Veronica and Resident Evil 0 remakes prove true, we might see some smarter modernizations. But even without that, there’s something valuable about going back to the source material, even if you never played it in the bright, freewheeling beauty of the 1990s.