Resident Evil: Outbreak
Resident Evil: Outbreak is the first game in the series to be developed with sixth-generation consoles in mind. Like OTL's game, it has a focus on multiplayer, with up to four characters able to be controlled at one time. Outbreak can be played with up to four players either locally or online. The game is a more action oriented, faster paced title, based on the earlier Operation Stormwind, with more weapons and combat and less of a horror focus (though there is still a survival horror element to the game). Unlike OTL's game, which featured five different scenarios, TTL's Outbreak features one long scenario with multiple levels and bosses. The game takes place during the events of Resident Evil 2, and follows a group of operatives consisting of scientists and members of the Raccoon City SWAT team. The game features eight different playable characters, with players able to choose between them. Like OTL's Operation Raccoon City, the characters have different roles, with some specializing in combat, others specializing in weapon crafting, others specializing in healing, etc. If playing with less than four people, human players can choose which characters the CPU uses, though there can't be more than one of the same character in play at a time. The game incorporates many of the locales from OTL Outbreak, including a hotel, a hospital, and finally, Raccoon City University. The characters are initially simply working together to survive, but they eventually discover a new mutation of the T-Virus that could cause the disease to spread outside the city, and must work together to stop it, possibly coming up against malevolent agents of Umbrella in the process. There are numerous enemies from classic Resident Evil titles in the game, including zombies and lickers, with a boss fight against a gigantic licker appearing later into the game. In the final segment of the game, the university, the characters discover that a mutation of the virus has been developed that could cause it to spread into the Earth's atmosphere, and must find and destroy the sample before it can infect the entire world. In a twist, after defeating the final boss and finding the sample, one of the players must choose to sacrifice themselves to stop the virus (if playing alone with three computer characters, the player automatically becomes the sacrifice, basically, it HAS to be one of the human players who makes the sacrifice, and if no one is chosen, the game chooses randomly). There are eight different endings, depending on which of the game's eight characters makes the sacrifice, though the basic ending is the same: the survivors escape Raccoon City, though someone is seen gathering a small remaining sample of the airborne virus (a setup for Resident Evil 4, which as of the release of Outbreak, has only recently begun development).
Resident Evil: Outbreak is initially released for the Sega Katana in Japan in January 2003, and for the Katana and Xbox in North America on February 17, 2003. It would be released for the Nintendo Wave in April 2003. The game sells quite well on the Katana, about twice as much as it does on the Xbox. The game's development cycle for the Xbox was littered with numerous problems, and the Xbox port itself, while a good port, features some minor glitches and slowdown, despite looking slightly better graphically than the Katana version. Though the Wave port is the best of the three, it's overshadowed by numerous other titles released for the Wave at the time, and so the Katana version of the game becomes both the best selling and most memorable.
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Ted Crosley: Okay, this is really cool. Jim from Capcom USA and Shinji Mikami have hooked us up with the first North American preview of Resident Evil: Infiltration.
Bill Sindelar: So, tell us a bit about Infiltration.
Shinji Mikami: *in Japanese, as Jim translates* This is the first Resident Evil title made exclusively for a handheld system. It plays like classic Resident Evil, but with a focus on stealth gameplay.
*The game looks a lot like the original Resident Evil, it's in 3-D, though the graphics are somewhat primitive, it's a tad worse than on OTL PSX, which is still really good for the Nova, looking like a more pixely, slightly less FPS Deadly Silence.*
Mikami: *in Japanese, as Jim translates* You are a special agent infiltrating an old Umbrella lab, in order to get evidence of the company's wrongdoings. However, this lab has been abandoned because of an experiment gone very wrong, and you'll encounter dangerous things as you sneak about.
Bill: So this kind of plays like Resident Evil meets Metal Gear, sort of.
Ted: Well, you already have to sneak around in Resident Evil... but here I can see there's a stealth meter and there's more options to move around.
*A male agent is walking around a corner, where two guards stand in a hallway.*
Mikami: *in Japanese, as Jim translates* Early on you'll just be contending with Umbrella security, but once you get into the inner parts of the lab to where the monsters are...
Ted: Things get REALLY scary, huh?
*Bill takes out two of the guards and keeps on going, he enters a room where there's a dead guard lying on the ground, as he turns to leave the guard's arm lifts up and shoots a tentacle into his back*
Bill: Whoa!
Mikami: *laughs*
Ted: *laughing*
Bill: That spooked me!
Ted: So are these guys with STARS?
Mikami: *in Japanese, as Jim translates* We're actually introducing a new group of heroes in this game. We'll see STARS, but the two groups have a contentious relationship. I can't say any more without spoiling. There's also a girl agent you can control in this game, but we're not showing her today.
Bill: This looks like a really cool, really fun game and I can't wait to get my hands on it. When's it coming out?
Mikami: *in Japanese, as Jim translates* It's coming out in Japan next month, and..... *looks at Jim*
Jim: It'll be at E3 and Capcom will announce a North American release date then. Probably this summer.
Ted: Can't wait! That's Resident Evil: Infiltration, coming soon to the Game Boy Nova.
-from the February 18, 2003 episode of G4's Blister
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"After a contentious development cycle that saw numerous rejected scripts and directorial changes, Resident Evil is finally hitting the big screen. The film entered production in early 2002 and will release on April 25th of this year. It'll be based on the first game of the series, that sees a group of STARS agents making their way into a mansion in order to investigate a series of gruesome incidents, only to become trapped with a horde of fiendish undead. Paul Walker stars as Chris Redfield, while Rose McGowan plays his partner Jill Valentine. Resident Evil is hoping to duplicate the box office success of video game adaptations such as Tomb Raider, Ballistic Limit, and Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, and is one of the spring's most anticipated films."
-from an article on Yahoo! News, posted on March 18, 2003
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February 24, 2003
After a trip to America to meet with North American Capcom officials and talk with some of the gaming press about Resident Evil: Outbreak, Shinji Mikami was back in Japan and back to work on Resident Evil 4, a game that had quickly come to consume most of his time. Initially, the game was meant to be a more faster-paced, action packed title, but the template for that had ultimately morphed into Devil May Cry. However, Mikami didn't want the game to be slower like the first three games, and he also didn't want the negative reception that Operation Stormwind had garnered. A more combat-oriented third person shooter seemed to be the way to go.
The problem was, The Covenant on the Xbox had broken a lot of ground in that regard. Many of its ideas had already been recycled into that generation's other shooters, and Mikami wanted to do something more innovative. Still, he kept coming back to his vision: a third-person shooter that featured a behind-the-player camera focus. The Covenant HAD done something similar, but with the camera further back and with more dynamic camera angles, a sort of in-between at the halfway point between Squad Four: Rebellion, another genre groundbreaker, and Mikami's vision for Resident Evil 4.
Mikami sat down at his desk and started to generate more ideas. Many of them focused on the supernatural: if Resident Evil 4 was going to be different from its predecessors, he wanted the game to have a more otherworldly type of feel, with his protagonist, which he'd decided was going to be Resident Evil 2's Leon Kennedy, confronting spirits and demons, perhaps because of a hallucination brought on by a new variant of the T-Virus (the airborne version from Outbreak). As he was brainstorming, Noboru Sugimura entered the room. After Hideki Kamiya's vision for the game had become Devil May Cry, Sugimura was brought on as a scenario writer, and had given Mikami many of the supernatural inspirations he had for Resident Evil 4's plot.
"Is everything all right?" asked Sugimura, noticing that Mikami was deep in thought.
"It's just troubling, how I can't focus on a clear vision for this game," replied Mikami. "I have so many ideas that it's difficult to choose only one, and I'm expected to come up with something shortly. We've already begun work but there's no real direction, we may have to scrap everything and start over."
"Well, are we still going with the supernatural focus for the game?"
Mikami didn't know what they were going with, but Sugimura's idea of a virus that gave Leon special powers was definitely intriguing. The problem was was that he was having trouble reconciling it with the more grounded mood of the series. However, he didn't want the game to be too much like The Covenant. He wanted something different than what Resident Evil had been before, but also different from what anyone else was doing.
"Let's go back to the girl," said Mikami, looking back at Sugimura. "What was your idea for the girl?"
"Well, the girl would be an Umbrella experiment... a girl who could control the T-Virus' influence on her body. A secret Umbrella bioweapon. A girl whose DNA they could replicate... propagate....so they could wipe out everyone else with the T-Virus but use the girl's DNA to create a race of new humans who they could then control."
"......"
Mikami began writing something down furiously on one of the papers on his desk. He drew up a sketch of the girl. He showed it to Sugimura, who saw it and recoiled.
"....what's she doing?!" asked Sugimura.
"She's using her power," said Mikami. The picture showed the girl, one half of her body was normal, while the other half was hideously mutated into a monstrous form, sending a massive arm spike through the mouth of an Umbrella soldier. He drew another sketch and showed it to Sugimura, in this one she was tearing Leon in two. "Leon doesn't have the power, this girl does, and in order to save the world, Leon has to convince her of her own humanity. Otherwise, she'll become the monster that helps Umbrella destroy the planet."
"Ohooooo!" Sugimura said, nodding. "I like that idea!"
"Well, most of it was your idea," replied Mikami, turning back to his desk and writing some more notes. "...let's come up with some more ideas together."