Severed Limbs: The Resident Evil Offshoots

Resident Evil has been infecting video game systems since 1996. Despite that long bloodline, the core series is only up to Resident Evil 5. Don’t let that meager number fool you, however, as there are a plethora of necrotic installments which take place outside the franchise’s main entries. With Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City and the 3DS games on the way, we take you on a tour through the sidesteps of Capcom’s creepy series.

Lone Survivors

The early Resident Evil titles focused less on action and more on survival and enemy avoidance. Seeing an opportunity, Capcom filled the void with a handful of first-person games, allowing players to riddle their undead foes with copious artillery. Resident Evil: Survivor released in 2000 as a light gun-enabled shooter in Japan, but the peripheral support was dropped in the US version which resulted in an unentertaining mess. RE: Survivor stars Ark Thompson, a crashed helicopter pilot searching for his lost memory as he treks through an Umbrella-owned island. The arcade-only follow up, 2001’s Resident Evil: Survivor 2 Code Veronica, was an arcade light gun game that retold the events of Code Veronica through the haze of Claire Redfield’s dreaming mind. The final Survivor title, 2003’s Resident Evil: Dead Aim, utilized a d-pad enhanced light gun allowing players to explore an t-virus-infected cruise ship in third-person, then switch to first-person to line up precious headshots. The game follows anti-Umbrella operative Bruce McGivern as he attempts to take down a former researcher.

Creepy Chronicles

Top notch Resident Evil titles like Resident Evil: 0, Resident Evil 4, and the GameCube remake of the original eventually found their way onto the Wii. Two original titles also hit the motion-control console in the form of the Chronicle series – on-rails shooters that mainly retell the core games’ stories. Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, released in 2007, retells the events of Resident Evil 0, 1, and 3 but also includes a new quest starring Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield as they take down a Russian Umbrella facility. 2009’s Darkside Chronicles envelopes flashbacks of Resident Evil 2 and Code Veronica within a new story following Leon Kennedy and Jack Krauser as they search South America for an Umbrella-affiliated drug lord. The story predates Resident Evil 4, when the two were still comrades.

Online Infection

In 2004, Umbrella’s virus spread online in the form of Resident Evil: Outbreak. The game allowed up to four survivors to band together via the PlayStation 2’s network adapter and eke through Raccoon City at various times during the outbreak. One scenario requires the ragtag group to climb to a pub’s roof, leap to another building, then drop to street level and detonate a copious amount of charged explosives. The resulting tidal wave of exploding zombie bits will stick with me forever (that doesn’t wash out). Resident Evil: Outbreak File #2 hit the next year, and incorporated a feature that has remained absent in the series until the upcoming Resident Evil Mercenaries 3D – the ability to move and shoot. Across the two games, players visited unique locations such as a zoo filled with a zombie elephant and lion, a burning hotel packed with lickers, and memorable settings like RE2’s RPD station and underground laboratory. A pseudo time limit in the form of a rising infection level kept the action moving, with dilly-dalliers becoming controllable zombies if the virus reached 100 percent. Sadly, Capcom shut down the Outbreak servers in 2007, but thankfully online zombie-killing cooperation will be resurrected with Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City later this year.

Portable Pustules

The core Resident Evils are highly regarded for their impressive visuals, ominous music, and dreadful atmosphere. Those elements don’t translate well to portable systems, but that didn’t stop Capcom from releasing Resident Evil: Gaiden in 2002 for the Game Boy Color. The portable quest starred Barry Burton searching for a missing Leon Kennedy aboard an ocean liner saturated with the undead. The combat in this top-down adventure sported a timing minigame. Cell phones weren’t safe from portable RE either, as several biohazardous mobile games have released throughout the years. RE 3D: The Missions starred Jill Valentine and tasked players with completing several bite-sized challenges set in environments from the early games. RE: Confidential Report featured grid-based combat and took place in an Umbrella lab and school dorm. More recent mobile titles, including Resident Evil: Degeneration and Resident Evil 4, incorporate the over-the-shoulder aiming style the series has become known for. Most of these portable games include recognizable characters, locations, and enemies, but labeling these as true Resident Evil experiences is a stretch.

Sinful Cinema

You’ll hear varying appraisals of Resident Evil’s cinema counterparts depending on who you talk to. Non-RE fans see them as mindless entertainment, objective Capcom enthusiasts can separate the film interpretations from the game fiction and enjoy them exclusively, and die hard fanboys (like me) detest every frame of these Milla Jovovich abominations. The first Resident Evil film features a mansion, underground lab, and lots of slow motion wall kicks and CG enemies. The sequel, Apocalypse, upped the ante by throwing Raccoon City, Nemesis, S.T.A.R.S. and a mini-skirted Jill Valentine into the mix. RE: Extinction takes place years into the future with the majority of the U.S. buried under sand and crawling with undead. It incorporated Claire Redfield and Carlos Olivera into the story, along with enough Milla Jovovich clones to make sleeping at night a chore. The most recent film, Afterlife, has a bunch of the previously mentioned characters, along with the Majini and Executioner from RE 5. It was also in 3D, so if expensive, eye-gouging special effects are your thing, you might be able to overlook the lack of loyalty to the Resident Evil canon.

Unlike the awful Jovovich films, the 2008 movie Resident Evil: Degeneration was set in the proper RE universe and features the games’ trademark CG. Claire Redfield and Leon Kennedy join forces for the first time since RE2 to quell an outbreak in an airport. The movie is gorgeous, contains the original voice actors, and throws in an interesting plot twist. Definitely worth checking out if you’re a fan.

No Dead End

Resident Evil 6 hasn’t been announced yet, but RE fans still have a lot to look forward to. We’ve known about the 3DS’ Resident Evil Revelations and Mercenaries 3D since the system was revealed, and both upcoming titles look promising. Mercenaries 3D will deliver fast-paced arcade action, while the story-driven Revelations will bridge the gap between RE4 and RE5 with Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield as the leads. The recently revealed Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, due in late 2011, takes the series in an interesting, canon-shattering direction in which players work with squad mates to purge zombies from the ill-fated city. The partnership between Capcom and developer Slant Six Games is a new direction for the series, and continues the tradition of risk-taking offshoots. For Resident Evil fans, there has never been a better time to be surrounded by the walking dead.