Resident Evil

Despite a perfect opportunity to rest on his laurels - thanks to the rich, circuitous history of Capcom's video game property - Zach Cregger's take on Resident Evil instead represents a change in storytelling technique that better serves the filmmaker's abundant horror comedy skill-set. Weapons, with its varying perspectives on a town bereft of children, was piecemeal by design but Barbarian, the writer-director's breakthrough hit, undercut several finely composed horror situations by journeying elsewhere at crucial moments. In fairness, Cregger used these breaks to consolidate unease and layer in alternative threats but there was a nagging sense that, perhaps, these distractions were being employed to avoid having to commit to a specific resolution. Not so with Resident Evil, which stays locked-in with Austin Abrams' medical courier Bryan as he struggles, impressively, to transport a much-needed organ across a landscape crawling with incomprehensible, cartwheeling threat. 

Rather than suit-up with the specially trained police officers that the video game series usually revolves around, Cregger's hero is a pleasant tweaker braving iced, pitch black roads and incoming calls from a (justifiably) pissed-off girlfriend to deliver his precious cargo. As a pitch, this Resident Evil is very much After Hours meets The Thing (and, latterly, An American Werewolf in London) but it's worth noting that Bryan doesn't invite his misfortune through antisocial behaviour or duplicity. If anything - and certainly for a movie character - he's honest and respectful, particularly when dealing with situations that demand he take responsibility. A would-be hit-and-run becomes an extended comedy of errors with Bryan attempting to transport a defrosting zombie; while a run-in with a conscious, vulnerable infected sees Bryan willing to maintain the social contract, despite an obvious (even blaring) red flag. This latter detail - that bodies threaded with the film's curling, castellan contagion remain painfully aware of their degrading faculties - allows a certain poignancy to creep into proceedings while still playing with an audience's willingness to side with a narrative subject over the squealing meat puppets thrown in their way. 

Capcom Cup 11 by 哀ScReaM

Resident Evil: Extinction

While Milla Jovovich's commitment to catwalk cataclysm has never wavered, each of the Resident Evil films has tackled the concept of video game adaptation in remarkably different ways. The first instalment, directed by Paul WS Anderson, was premised on the ways in which the root survival horror games revealed themselves, both spatially and visually. So as well as investigating the big business malevolence (literally) lurking beneath old money estates, Anderson's film also lifted the locked perspectives of the game's fixed camera angles. Only now the omniscient point-of-view was not that of the players steering these characters through the rotting dangers but that of the impassive computer intelligence calculating how to exterminate this biological infestation. In its best moments - particularly an opening sequence where offices packed with corporate climbers are ruthlessly liquidated - Anderson's film plays like a covert adaptation of Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream; the pillar on which all tales of seething, mechanical hatred are balanced. 

Resident Evil: Apocalypse, obsessed as it was with lionising the minutiae of Capcom's work, seemed to be more of an attempt at big screen veneration for this already successful brand. Despite its ambition, Alexander Witt's workmanlike idolatry proved to be less exciting than that managed by George A Romero (originally in the frame to direct his own big screen Resident Evil) with his 30 second long television ad for the second game in the series, Biohazard 2. The approach taken by Russell Mulcahy's consistently good-looking Resident Evil: Extinction differs again, marked by a willingness to translate the grammatical experience of video games rather than just broad events or fan-pleasing iconography. Extinction cross-contaminates bleached glimpses of an infernal, post-apocalyptic desert with pastel make-up interiors and creative inflections lifted from Japanese, post-humanist animation. Dramatically, Extinction revolves around dangerous encounters with various undead hordes, all visited on the film's dwindling collection of human survivors. These enemies all originate from an unclear or flimsy source, as if spawning in thanks to some unseen trigger. In the case of a setpiece that takes place in a Las Vegas that has been reclaimed by the desert, sprinting horrors issue ceaselessly from a shipping container that couldn't possibly contain this many creatures. 

Resident Evil

Time has been kind to the films of Paul WS Anderson, particularly those he made in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The writer-director's preference for expansive, often maze-like sets and dwindling human resources no longer registers as a shorthand cribbed from James Cameron and John Carpenter simply because no-one, not even those namechecked directors, are making films like that anymore. Compared to the digital costumes and endless computer-generated vistas on display today, Resident Evil is surprisingly tactile. David Johnson's camera is a member of the crowd, jostled by the leads and experiencing the strange, claustrophobic intimacy of a packed lift. These sweaty anxieties, of course, couldn't be further away from the polygonal purgatories found in the Capcom video game series that Anderson is adapting. There the player is very much alone; silence and isolation indicative of a win state that they have fought hard to achieve. 

That which was deemed undercooked or second-hand when this big screen blow-up was released is now easier to celebrate, in large part, because of how Anderson has woven a constant sense of physical (even chemical) vulnerability into the piece. Dramatically and stylistically, Resident Evil is built around hangovers; specifically the inconvenient memories that bubble up out of particularly oppressive narcotic funks. Visually though, Resident Evil is a film preoccupied with faces: Anderson and cinematographer Johnson shoot Milla Jovovich and Michelle Rodriguez in ways that are intimate and adoring, focusing on the soft hairs on their necks as much as their tousled fringes or pouting lips. In Resident Evil the halting rhythm of this male gaze is also a tool that tracks fatigue and the transformations creeping inside the film's more photogenic subjects, with Rodriguez the victim of the most drastic metamorphosis. Repeatedly chewed-on by grasping, yuppie zombies, her character eventually succumbs to the same snarling hungers. The pink mouth that the film previously lingered on is now presented as cracked and pale; peeled back to expose yellowed, snapping teeth. 

Resident Evil 4 - STEYR POWER

A couple of weeks out from a full release, Capcom have pushed a demo of their long-awaited Resident Evil 4 remake to online stores. Presumably the first ten or so minutes of the final game, this preview code allows players to steer a lumpy, drunken-feeling Leon S Kennedy towards an even creepier break-and-enter incident, before urging him on to a one-sided shoot out with an army of creeping Nannas. Fans of ancient GameCube trial discs might recognise this segment as being broadly similar to the teaser packed with a special Capcom edition of Japan's Famitsu magazine. Published back in 2004, that miniDVD allowed extra curious players an opportunity to break the innate loop of the sample level, spawning two distinct chainsaw maniac encounters. These double-leggers, and the currency their defeat conferred, were crucial if the player wanted to unlock the TMP machine pistol. Here, Steyr fans simply have to discard the contents of their menu-bound attaché case before entering the fateful village, then drop down into a refuse-packed cave. 

Mega Final Fight - DIPSWITCH

After having successfully shrunken arcade Final Fight down to a Mega Drive-sized cart file, fan devs CFX have, quite apparently, gotten drunk on their power. Not only have they added a scroll feature to the character select screen that reveals two brand new player options - Captain Commando and Maki from Super Nintendo exclusive Final Fight 2 - but extra moves have been added to the three original selections. Cody inherits elements of his Street Fighter Alpha 3 move-list while Haggar gains a meaty double axe handle-style strike. 

Final Fight Ultimate - 2P

Another look at CFX's Final Fight Ultimate, a modern fan project that squeezes Capcom's seminal coin-op down to a blast processing-friendly size. This latest clip shows off a gameplay mode missing from the SNES' 1990 adaptation (a Japanese launch title no less, which probably explains why the cart was a little feature poor): simultaneous two-player action. 

Street Fighter 6 - HANDCUFFS

In terms of instantly recognisable video game characters, Street Fighter II's World Warriors take some beating. Each one of the original eight globe-trotters were so perfectly composed that even the lightest remix (Hyper Fighting's colour swaps excepted) borders on pointless. Not that Capcom is happy to rest on their laurels. The company can't help burying their cast under affectations that players then can't wait to reverse, necessitating a trip to the app's online shop to pick up a classic costume. For instance, did Akuma really need a lion's mane in Street Fighter V? Similarly, after hitting on that cracking undead Ryu design in Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, was V's killing intent variant in desperate need of a pair of neon pink devil horns? So what wilful sabotage have Capcom cooked up for their sixth instalment? Aside from a Ryu that (in fairness) looks genuinely fantastic we have a Guile with the jawline and blonde facial hair of WWE's resident belt hoarder Brock Lesnar. Not awful then, but still not a patch on a Super X-era Daigo Ikeno pin-up. 

Final Fight Ultimate - BLASTED

First look at a Final Fight fan project that shrinks Capcom's seminal coin-up down to Mega Drive dimensions. Although there's not much but menus in this clip, Edmo Caldas, Master Linkuei and Mauro Xavier's Final Fight Ultimate already looks about on par with the nearest equivalent adaptation, the 1989 Mega CD release, and conclusively trumps the period SNES cart(s) by allowing players to chose from all three street fighting characters. Although hardly a fair match-up, given the intervening decades of accumulated compiling know-how, it's still fun to see Sega's humble 16-bit system pushed to its limit. 

Street Fighter II': Hyper Fighting - COCAINE KEN

Everyone loves Street Fighter II': Hyper Fighting, right? Best game ever made. Here's the second of the Super Lore Boys' Corner Store Legends tournaments, a five hour championship bracket with competitors hailing from the game's golden age, including all-time legend John Choi, as well as newer hands, such as Zangief-on-main, VodkaGobalsky. Once a winner has been crowned, the organisers then run us through a few exhibition matches, with a special attention paid towards the bespoke palette adjustments made to this custom Fightcade enabled ROM. 

Thanks to TurboAnnihilator, every character gets an arresting, but tasteful, makeover. Highlights from the tournament include a greyscale Blanka who looks like he's snapped himself off a church built during the Middle Ages; a Dr Pepper coloured dictator dubbed Bipson; and, in a clear nob to the Violent alternative character from Switch exclusive Ultra Street Fighter II: The Final Challengers, a coked-out, radioactive, Ken. Keep your eyes peeled for a late appearance by LeRaldo's boxer, an absolute treat to watch as he elbows his way into specials or throws out 60-second charge Final Punches. 

Street Fighter V - PROJECT JUSTICE

After 20 years away Akira Kazama, the leather biker brawler from Rival Schools: United by Fate and Dreamcast gem Project Justice, is back! Scheduled for release sometime this Summer, Akira is a welcome addition to Street Fighter V's roster, recalling a time when Capcom were battering out hit after hit in fight-focused arcades. By now a long dormant property, Rival Schools is up there with Power Stone and Darkstalkers as a series begging for a modern follow up. 

Monster Hunter

Compared to his Resident Evil films, Paul WS Anderson's Monster Hunter - another loose adaptation of a video game developed by Capcom - wants for the unifying sense of unease the writer-director embedded in those later entries. Lacking any textual concept as strong as Retribution or The Final Chapter's satirical stab at corporate cannibalism, Monster Hunter is laid bare as a hodgepodge of disparate set pieces with each section operating at a completely different, and not always complimentary, wavelength. Monster Hunter is Anderson in channel-hopping mode; a magpie stringing together moments and movements from a variety of sources, all now swirling around Anderson's biggest gun, his wife Milla Jovovich. 

Jovovich provides a certain continuity with her fading Resident Evil franchise, not just in terms of actor deployed but also in how her new character moves and behaves. Artemis, like the self-assured Alice we saw in Final Chapter, is a leader of men; unflappable and quietly competent, her brilliance finally recognised by an intergovernmental authority then elevated to an official position of command. Naturally the grunts she oversees are quickly dispatched when their UN peacekeeping squad slips out of our world and into Capcom's. Their ballistic weapons are ineffective against the armoured hides of this realm's dragons - this explicit focus on guns as nothing more than useless (but still photogenic) mechanical movement means Monster Hunter never develops into the kind of technological slaughterhouse fans of GI Samurai or 2000 AD's Flesh might otherwise expect. 

Anderson's film instead beats a similar path to the character action games that briefly propose unlimited power before battering the player back to zero, burdening them with a different skill tree to grind away at. General Dynamics miniguns and shoulder mounted rocket launchers revoked, Artemis shuffles around a series of rocky safe areas, tending to her wounds and quietly plotting her next move. She is soon joined by Tony Jaa's expert archer, the two burning calories with pointless tit-for-tat before the comfort of human contact in a world of scuttling belligerents wins out. While Monster Hunter slowly pivots towards a computer generated, sequel teasing, mega-battle, it's this Hell in the Pacific (or Enemy Mine if we're ticking off big screen, played-to-death-on-television, Robinsonade) act that really shines. The section allows Jovovich and Jaa tens of minutes to approximate an organic détente with nothing but their abundant physical charm. Indeed there's nothing in the light show finale as entertaining as Jaa's instinctive revulsion at the butyric whiffs emanating from Jovovich's smashed-up Hershey's chocolate. 

Ghosts 'n Goblins Resurrection - ACME

Based on almost nothing, I'm a bit peeved that Ghosts 'n Goblins Resurrection doesn't have an art style laboriously patterned after the chromed luxury of legendary Famitsu family artist (and Maximo: Ghosts to Glory concept artist) Susumu Matsushita. Still, this watercolour picture book look has has a charm of its own, transforming the digital nudges of a precarious player into the over-ambulated comedy of a Tex Avery cartoon character. 

Capcom Arcade Stadium - GOING ALL-OUT

Rather than release individual emulation suites like Hamster have done with their superlative Arcade Archives series, Capcom are back drip-feeding DLC content packs for a freemium download. Exclusive to Nintendo's Switch, by all accounts, Capcom Arcade Stadium is a bells-and-whistles update of M2's Capcom Arcade Cabinet, released on PS3 and Xbox 360 in 2013 (itself a reworking of the PS1 and Sega Saturn's Capcom Generations series). No word if M2 are involved for this round of coin inserting. 

Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition - SEETHE

A ten minute look at Vergil's path through Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition's Legendary Dark Knight mode, a recurring fixture for series re-releases in which enemy counts go through the roof. Already an extremely good looking game (not just technically but aesthetically), the power of PS5 looks to have been put to use generating bodies to strike, and herd attacks to track.  

PlayStation 5 Showcase - Resident Evil: Village

Between the tumble-down houses, castle objective and a cheeky merchant, Resident Evil Village is looking very much like a conscious update of Capcom's Gamecube masterpiece Resident Evil 4. Say goodbye to your tank controlled Leon S Kennedy though, subbed out for an atmospheric, first-person harassment, as your player character dodges amoral cults and former allies alike.

PlayStation 5 Showcase - Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition

Hats off to Capcom, they know how to generate hype when they're re-releasing their games. The power of the next-gen systems is harnessed here to generate throngs of enemies; a standing-room-only horde, absolutely desperate to be beaten up. Presumably these ditherers are showing off a Legendary Dark Knight difficulty mode for Devil May Cry 5 Special Edition, a now well-established option for the series, when making generational leaps, that focuses on bombarding the player with monster spawns.

Street Fighter V: Champion Edition - UNITED BY FATE

Since Street Fighter VI is much further off than we suspected, Capcom have another season pass up their sleeve for Street Fighter V. Given that one of the PS5's big selling points is backwards compatibility, we might not even get a next-gen specific SKU of Capcom's divisive sequel at this rate. Still, at least the Osaka dev has finally remembered their wonderful Rival Schools series, drafting schoolgirl on a motorcycle Akira Kazama for V's forthcoming DLC.

DF Retro - Final Fight

The Digital Foundry gang take a look at Capcom's iconic brawler Final Fight, detailing the tech behind the original coin-op as well as the many ports and sequels that followed. Of particular note is the news that, for their Mega CD conversion, Sega slowed down each of the playable characters, clipping the overall movement and attack speed of the nimble selections. A similar sort of averaging out plagued the Mega Drive version of Golden Axe - specifically the hit box of the playable character's weapons. Tyris Flare's short sword and Gilius Thunderhead's massive broadaxe both hit with the same medium range assigned to Ax Battler's middle-of-the-road sword.

PlayStation 5 - Resident Evil Village

A former hero reintroduced as a home invading murderer? Someone at Capcom has clearly been spinning up their Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning BD. Due 2021, Resident Evil Village looks to mix the creeping first-person dread of Resident Evil 7: Biohazard with the miserable, tetanus opulence seen in Resident Evil 4. Can't wait.