1) Resident Evil Remake
Capcom’s from-the-ground-up remake of the original Resident Evil has become the unofficial bar against which all other video game resurrections are measured, and for bloody good reason. I’m not sure (or willing) to hazard a guess as to how many of you reading this played the 1996 original, but I can guarantee right now that revisiting the genre-defining classic today is not in your best interests – Chris and Jill’s first run-in with the undead scourge has not aged well.
Even ignoring the eye-bleedingly crude visuals – it’s a given, after all, for a twenty-year-old title to look like an archaic artifact from human pre-history in comparison to today’s standards – Resident Evil‘s first outing serves as a stark, albeit hilarious, reminder that voice acting in games was more of an afterthought, rather than an integral cog in the storytelling wheel, back in the 90s, itself filled to the brim with several unintentionally hammy dialogue scenes.
Six years, as it turns out, can do wonders for the advancement of technology, and Capcom wasted no time in taking advantage of the opportunity that Nintendo’s then-latest hardware provided. For the 2002 remake, Ozwell E. Spencer’s undead-infested mansion had undergone drastic renovations in order to make it feel not like a rich man’s holiday home, but one that genuinely felt unnerving and unsafe, a suffocating atmosphere brought to life by incredibly intricate pre-rendered backgrounds.
Bolstered with new and cut content from the original – I still grieve for you, Ms. Trevor – re-recorded dialogue (which still isn’t great) and updated character models, the remake manages to retain the core mechanics that made the original so memorable but places them in a much prettier shell that, even now, more than a decade later, still looks wonderful.
Last year’s HD re-release for current-gen platforms, while not offering the same level of improvement between the 1996 and 2002 versions, further improves upon the series progenitor by upping texture resolution and providing a more modern control scheme, so that’s the one you want to shoot for if you’re looking for the definitive version.