Wii Game Review: Resident Evil Umbrella Chronicles, a "Must Not" Have

First and foremost, I was drawn to the Resident Evil series because of its story: the characters were great, the plots were great, the dialogue is usually bearable when you're not playing the original PlayStation release, and most importantly, it's a Class A zombie film without the political burden of George Romero. It was in many ways the PlayStation variant of Mortal Kombat, challenging the ESRB with its vivid depictions of zombie-based violence, hard themes, swearing, and dog-eat-dog scenarios. Therefore, when Capcom and Nintendo made a point to release Umbrella Chronicles, highly advertised as fleshing out the story between the games, I was enthused, excited, ready to burst.

Anyone who follows the game industry in any way knows that to follow rumors and gossips is like listening to a public school teacher trying to tell you about historically controversial events, a lot of misinformation, a lot of bias, and a lot of hopes and dreams that manifest themselves in one's fantasy that they interpret as reality with no real basis. Perhaps the biggest indicator of this was Team Fortress 2's constant misinformation campaign perpetuated by Valve, where the SDK Source and codes consistently made references to the game via Invaders, but none of the information you could find therein was reliable. In fact, what were considered to be "sneak peaks" at models turned out to have nothing to do with anything Valve was actually working on, but still many of these things passed as fact.

Therefore I opted not to follow much about Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles until it was nearing its release. One day at work, however, I felt my heart sink as I told my manager how looking forward to the game I was - when she informed me that it was set to be a rail shooter. I dropped whatever it was I was holding along with my jaw, and wanted to crawl into a corner to wail like a banshee, conjuring scenes of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective when he learned the terrible truth that Finkle was Einhorn, only this truth I learned was far less disturbing.