'Resident Evil 3' Might Be Mediocre, But 'RE 5' Reminds Us It Could Be Worse

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During our discussions of Resident Evil 3 remake on this week's Waypoint Radio, we take a look back at the response to N'Gai Croals critique of Resident Evil 5's announcement trailer, and the backlash it received. The conversation reminds us that hiring people from marginalized backgrounds isn't the end of a discussion, but the start of new ones. It's important for marginalized people to be allowed to speak to their history and be taken seriously. You can listen to the full episode and read an excerpt below.

This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wxeaam/resident-evil-3-vs-resident-evil-5-waypoint-radio
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where do i sign up for Rob Talks About Better Living podcast, i need it in this day and age. how do i onboard to better living.

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First it’s worth noting, yes RE5 is racist and very inconsiderate. The response to N’Gai’s commentary was ridiculous, and these are always worth remembering.

With that said, I just wanted to say I love RE5. Not a little, I love it A LOT!

For reference, I’m a pretty boring straight white guy, so for a few years I’ve felt a hinge of shame for my love of RE5. I mean, just watching the trailers in 2020, or looking up the tribal sections, it’s pretty obviously racist. For a while, I kept my love to myself, but that was after I knew something was wrong at all. What I mean is, I used to be one of those guys who thought RE5 wasn’t racist. I’d cringe every time so SJW brought it up, which as mentioned above wasn’t nearly as often as it should have been at the time.

Of course, I eventually grew out of that mostly thanks to college and the help of a dear friend. But once I admitted that it was in fact racist, then began the shameful years. The years of self-loathing for enjoying such an AWFUL game. Only a TERRIBLE MONSTER could even tolerate such an abomination, much less actually enjoy it! I kept re-telling myself these line, spiraling into sadness so easily.

Basically, your average case of privilege guilt, and I struggled with it for a long time. It wasn’t until just a year or two ago that I finally found my way out of it. I learned to accept what I enjoy, be critical, and remember that just because others might literally hate something you love, that doesn’t make you a monster. Honestly, even after I admitted RE5 was pretty racist, I almost slipped back to who I was before just from the self-imposed guilt.

And I know, this isn’t a revelation or profoundly insightful story. But I just wanted to remind peeps it’s okay to love something problematic, as long as you recognize the problems and expect better. I’ll always love RE5, I love the characters, I love that it manages a knife’s edge of a serious tone balanced against some Grade-A anime silliness, I love the cooperation and level design and QTEs and Wesker and the valcano at the end and so much more!

Basically, just be kind to yourselves :slight_smile:

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OWL-oh-ish-us, Rob. OWL-oh-ish-us Dawson.

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So yeah, if you want to play another VR game before you pack up all the cables you should really play Walking Dead Saints & Sinners. I keep telling people about it because so few people actually play it. It’s an immersive sim even!

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Wait, 0451 immersive sim or a Riendeau definition immersive sim?

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Here’s a link to a tweet that includes the Tasty video Cado was talking about. It is truly horrifying.

It makes no sense on any level.

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The transcript gets it right on point tbh. I’ve played through all of RE5 (and RE6), and it’s a fantastic co-op game! But it’s steeped in racist, xenophobic imagery, not to mention the colonialist and ethnocentric lens of the entire game. It was one of my first RE games, but I also played this probably way after it came out, and my friend and I were very aware of it as we moved through. It didn’t seem to us like something that could be missed or glossed over as you played the game, but ig that just shows how time moves differently for marginalized folks when it comes to this issue. I can’t imagine playing this game on release and not confronting the imagery it uses and what it uses it for.

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It was a huge disappointment to me because the RE series really has its roots not just in western zombie movies but in like Italian video nasty list flicks specifically. They did a great job taking these often tone deaf exploitation movies and making their own cool thing out of them. So like, after the settings we see in RE1, 2, and 4 they could have made something similarly awesome (and it’s not like there’s any shortage of movies of the time to draw from) but instead their main influence on the game was Black Hawk Down instead of a horror movie.

A huge mistake. It’s notable that all of the slower moments in the game and more monstrous enemy encounters are generally really awesome in it. They blew it by not committing to that more, especially when a big part of the game’s story is how everyone knows about mutant zombie virus stuff and how that’s just a thing people have to live with now that every corporation wants in on that.

It reminds of when Deodato went from Cannibal Holocaust, which is excellent, to Cut and Run, which is insanely fucking regressive but was extra insulting because of it going with the “hey it’s okay they’re just being controlled by an evil white guy see we’re not racist” shit that a lot of cannibal movies of the time did. Hmm…

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I’m having a hard time squaring “Cannibal Holocaust” with excellence. It has literal, actual, animal killings in it. I just can’t get down with that.

If you put the racial stuff aside, which is not easy to do, RE5 is probably one of my favorite co-op experiences of all time. Everything about how that game is designed on the action front is really, really smart. It has great risk/reward, it incentivizes coordination, and strikes a really good balance of crowd control between two people. It also ha my favorite QTE death sequence of any game which is the flying upside down Albert Wesker one handed neck snap.

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There was a period of time before release where RE5 was given an undue benefit of the doubt for the use of racially-motivated fear, that quieted down completely when people played it and discovered that the game quadruples down on that imagery to the point of becoming the film reel sketch from Key & Peele.

It’s about as awful as RE6 if not more so, it’s just considered better by virtue of not completely diluting the gameplay rhythms of 4 to the point of incomprehension the way 6 does.

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A friend and I had a blast going through RE5 and 6 coop. It’s definitely one of those problematic games that I enjoy type of deals.

Also I’m split on Nemesis in RE3R. Mr. X made things pretty darn stressful and it was great finding where the safe spots were but a whole game of a deadlier, faster Mr. X following you the entire time might have been too much. I’m sure I’m going to enjoy RE3 Remake but it sounds like it’s half the game RE2 Remake was. (It was my game of the year last year - it was incredible.)

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The devs call it a 0451-type game.

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DISCLAIMER: I haven’t tried any of this. I’ve never canned anything, which means I went into quarantine with zero mason jars or anything equivalent. So until I can get some jars delivered, I can’t say which (if any) of these methods work.

On the podcast, Rob mentioned having trouble finding non-sketchy methods for making a sourdough starter, and asked for pointers. I’ve been doing my own poking around regarding wild yeast starters, and as near as I can tell it breaks down into two categories: yeast water (intended to be a replacement for commercial yeast; based off of fruit), and sourdough starters (based off of flour).

In his book “Bread Revolution”, Peter Reinhart actually touches on both, and points to Debra Wink as being his source for his current sourdough starter seed techniques. A quick search brings up a 2-part article she published, centered around the use of whole grain flours and pineapple juice (or unbuffered ascorbic acid powder, if you have access to that) to drop pH and accelerate the early process:


Note that “accelerated” only refers to the first few days. If I’m reading the article correctly, it takes around 2 weeks and a good deal of babysitting to get a properly decent starter? (2 weeks is mentioned both in a reference, and at the end of Part 2).

If you’re curious about the yeast water thing, she also has a brief article about the science of that, though a bit lacking in practical detail:

There’s actually a bunch of decent videos on YouTube regarding yeast water, which I’m not going to link because this post is long enough, and (again) I haven’t been able to try any of it yet.