Resident Evil 4

I think this goes for most 'older' gamers, who have things like jobs and friends to take up their time, but I never replay games. Half the time I don't even finish games because I lose interest, or it's been so long since I played whatever that I can't remember what I was doing in the game. So I think it says a lot for the quality and replayability of Resident Evil 4 that I break it out every few months and have another helping.

The old cliché goes that nothing is perfect, but I think we all would call certain games "perfect." There are quibbles you can quibble over when pressed to, but your overwhelming desire is to praise the game and play it again every time someone brings it up. For me, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, Fallout 1, and Super Metroid are perfect games, ones that I can replay on a whim and actually finish again because: 1) they're fantastic games 2) they're just the right length 3) they're pretty easy, and I'm a wimp.
Though I will fully admit to liking the Resident Evil games I had played, I always kind of knew they were awkward, clunky, and full of Japanese videogame bullshit that I can't put up with anymore. From the irritating save system to the poisonously bad controls (well, except for RE3, I guess) to the dumb inventory system (a shotgun takes up as much room as an herb??) to the shallow, shallow combat, it's incredible that I liked them at all. Resident Evil 4 does away with all of this, and is all the better for it. Instead of the usual "if you die, you go back to wherever you saved last" the game has various, unofficial 'checkpoints' you'll return to if you die. Sure, it's not quite the fast--and some would argue, cheap--"save anywhere you want as often as you want" system seen on PCs, but it's still better than 90% of Japanese games.

Also better than 90% of any games, Japanese or otherwise: the gameplay. There is something indescribably satisfying about RE4, all the way from the feel of the guns to the little hidden treasures you can find. Not only did they finally get the controls right (I still would like the ability to strafe, but I guess that would make it even easier than it already is), but they made it simply fun to move through the world and fight things. Before Resident Evils were slow and clunky, and now they were quick and smooth. One might even draw a parallel to George Romero's Night of the Living Dead zombies and those fast moving ones from 28 Days Later, but--let me put on my geek hat here--the enemies in RE4 aren't zombies. Not technically. But I digress.
The first word that comes to mind when I think of RE4's combat is "setpiece." But that doesn't mean much without context, so let me explain. When I think of great action movies--say, Raiders of the Lost Ark--I think of the great moments from them, not necessarily in a linear, plot focused way. The truck chase scene from Raiders is awesome. The Velociraptor/kitchen scene from Jurassic Park still makes me nervous when I watch it. And so on. RE4 is the same way. The boss fights are very creative, but they also have appropriate 'epic'-ness about them. Moreover, the various 'battles' you go through still ring true on my 10th playthrough, from the first villager wave you must withstand to the Last Standish fight in the cabin with Luis helping out to fighting through the defenses of the Los Illuminados while some dude in a helicopter is strafing and blowing things up. RE4 is a hell of a ride, as a movie critic would say, and it has setpieces from breakfast to dinnertime.

RE4 may not be a survival horror game, but I would still argue for it as an action horror game. A lot of the "survival" aspects of the previous Resident Evil games were artificial elements put in the game to make it difficult for the wrong reasons. The inventory system was terrible, and having to backtrack to the item boxes to juggle equipment, puzzle solving do-dads, and health items/ammo was just plain irritating and didn't add the "management of scarce resources" element that I think the developers were going for. RE4's solution is to give you an inventory system based on grid pieces--so an herb takes up two grid slots, while a rocket launcher takes up, say, 20. Then there's the absurd-but-clever addition of money and the various shopkeeper dudes you can visit during the course of the game, selling off worthless items, buying/upgrading weapons and equipment, etc. Of course this also gives the game further replayability, because you can't reasonably use every weapon in the game during each playthrough, so it's fun to try out a different shotgun or try out the TMP on this run.
Resident Evil 4 is also scary, at least it can be. Mention the Regenerators around me and my immediate impulse is to run like hell or scream. Oddly, I never found the Resident Evil games that scary. What fright they did provide was always "dog jumps at you out of nowhere!!" crap, which is cheap and easy. What RE4 did, other than adding some of the surreal/creepy-ness of Silent Hill, is to take the relentless Nemesis enemy from RE3 and give most of the enemies in the game his same ability to follow you through doors and keep coming at you. There still are doors that serve as loading screen transitions between areas which they won't go through, but for the most part the enemies will be hot on your heels all the time until you kill them or get far enough away.

I've made a pretty strong case for RE4's great gameplay, I hope, but there are some things that I'll still quibble over. (I think this is the most times I've used the word quibble in one update). Mainly, I guess, it's that the timed event/button press stuff is fun for awhile but quickly gets old. If you're playing the Wii version--and again, you really should be--then you get to do the kind of flopping and waggling that everyone personifies Wii players as looking like idiots for. It does add some interactivity to the cutscenes, but nowadays it frustrates me. I'm thinking of the knife fight/cutscene with Krauser, where you really have to be on time with your button presses or Wiimote shaking lest you die and then have to sit through all the talking over and over again.
There are some other small things I could quibble over (I promise that's the last time I use 'quibble' in this update) but they're mostly nitpicky stuff, like how some weapons are definitely better than others, and how the Mercenaries and other 'extra' modes are really cool but you won't play them much. Rather, the last thing I want to bring up is the cheap, cheap insta-deaths the game throws at you. I think I said this somewhere above: RE4 is a relatively easy game. I've never tried it on Professional difficulty, and I do die a lot even on the regular difficulty, but the kind of deaths I suffer are due to crap like failing the button pressing/timed events or the instant kill moves that some enemies--like the chainsaw dude pictured above--have. Because of the way enemies will drop health items/ammo depending on how badly the player needs them, you're very, very unlikely to run out of ammo or herbs, so practically every death you suffer is because you didn't hit A in time or those big blind guys with the giant Wolverine claws swung around in a fury and decapitated you. On the bright side, these losses of life and limb lead to awesomely gruesome and gruesomely awesome death sequences. I said this about Smash Brothers Brawl, and it applies to RE4, too: any game that can make losing just as fun as winning is pretty damn good in my book.

I've run out of things to say, and I can't think of a clever way to end this review. Basically, you need to play Resident Evil 4 if you haven't already. It's my favorite game of the decade so far, and I'm more than willing to call it A Modern Classic and have this sentence put on the gamebox with my name attributed. I'm waiting, Capcom.