Doomverse #28 - Weaponized Mayhem

Doom is known for many things. Many things have already been said about Doom and Quake, especially on Planet Virtua. What really matters for a lot of people are the weapons. The guns, the chainsaw, the Rune Sword, all of these are the focus for a great deal of the fans. Many of them have been used in multiple games and represented in other games. These titles have affected the gaming world as we know it. The Doomverse weapons roster hasn't just stood the test of time, but modern games are still trying to perfect it. Sure, you can say Halo did it better, but everyone's wrong at some point in their lives.

This is a list of the greatest weapons in the Doomverse, beit Quake 3 Arena or Doom Eternal. Some weapons have an improved version in later editions, some of them are featured once and then basically never again. These are the weapons that thrived under the pressure of being compared to another in the Doom Arsenal. Whether they create more destruction or just iconized Doom as a whole, these rose to the top. 

The Dark Age's Bonecrusher

The newest Doom game, at the time of this writing, had no shortage of cool weapons, but this is one that truly stood out. It certainly wasn't the "BFC". The Bonecrusher in both of its other iterations used this idea to a great degree. The thought of a skull being used to drive shrapnel into your enemies is just such a brutal idea and its upgrades made it quite the demon grinder. The Ravager was probably the best iteration out of any of them and I can only hope that it will be in future titles. Part of me doubts it, but one can hope.

Doom 4's Heavy Assault Rifle

The repeating rifle was not a weapon in the original Doom games, mostly because it didn't need one with the chaingun. Doom 2016 brought this about in probably the most boss way possible. It not only starts like a true Doom weapon, but throughout the game, the upgrades build it up to a legendary status that deserves to be on this list. You can upgrade the bullets to explode after impact, and it even eats through cyber mancubi like hot water through ice. 

 Doom 4's Chaingun

Fully upgraded and able to immediately begin spinning, this chaingun will take down any horde of demons and destroy a boss demon's hit bar. This chaingun gets an upgrade where it sprouts three different turrets which all fire at once. It overheats faster, but it also does more damage than it would in normal fire rates. This is enough damage to take down a fresh Cyber Mancubus. The gun itself is a one-machine barrage.

Quake 3 Arena's Lightning Gun

More deadly than the first Quake's lightning gun, this one reaches far and drains the opponent's HP within seconds. One big problem is that it does run out of ammunition fairly quickly. If you're fortunate enough to get a fully loaded lightning, it can mow down any group of fighters. It doesn't chain lightning enemies, that would be a little overpowered, but it doesn't take away from how the gun turned out. 

Quake 3 Arena's Plasma Gun

The gun that inspired Dark Age's plasma gun. Though it can be argued that it's not quite as powerful as the Doom 1 iteration, it is still such a satisfying gun to use when you start to unleash upon a single or multiple targets. It also has the drawback of not being able to fire up close without massive backfire. It is known as "melting your face". So, pick your poison between the two. They're both A Class Doomverse weapons.

Quake 3 Arena's Railgun

If you want one of the better aspects of Quake 3 Arena, you do a railgun fight. These guns are so easy to use, you just pick one up and put someone in your sights. If you want to be real stylish, you shoot someone with no zoom. That one small second to line up your sights can be the second where you get killed, so you need to be fast and this is the way to one-shot an opponent. It will even kill someone with a near miss and does tons of damage when grazing a target. Quake 3 and Quake 4 did it right.

Quake's Nailgun

If you want a more iconic weapon, it's hard to beat Quake's original nailgun. This is where they proudly declared "Nine Inch Nails did our soundtrack" through the NIN symbols on the ammo boxes. The nailgun and super nailgun will get you through many levels of Quake with glorious nail fire. The problem really is that their nail doesn't last, especially with the super nailgun's fire rate. 

Doom Eternal's Crucible

One of the biggest hype pieces from Doom 2016. This sword was introduced at the very end, and we finally get our own in Doom Eternal. It is an instant-kill weapon with very limited ammo, unless you're fighting the Icon of Sin. This sword will immediately slice huge demons in half, even the mini-bosses. Given this powerful weapon near the end of Doom Eternal was a gigantic help when the going got tough. It was as dependable as the BFG when you needed a quick death between a rock and a hard place.

Doom Eternal's Unmaykr

Introduced in Doom 64 and perfected in Eternal, The Unmaker, or "Unmakyr" in this case, is a weapon on par with the Big Fucking Gun. One good pull will destroy the largest demons within a few seconds. It sends multiple laser blasts all at once, which make any demon crumble under its weight, even the bosses. The feeling of unleashing this enormous barrage all at once is very satisfying. You don't need to upgrade it like you did in 64, it's ridiculously powerful as soon as you unlock it by doing all of the callenge stages. It takes a while to accomplish, but it is a labor of love for a fantastic weapon in your arsenal. 

Doom 4's Chainsaw

What sets this apart from the other chainsaws, is that it is an instant kill weapon that is not wholly required to be used. Yes, it is still made to revamp your ammunition by spawning it from your victim, but it is not a need like it is in Doom Eternal. The death animations you get from this have to be among the greatest glory kills in the entire game. The blood and severed body parts are worth its use alone, you never need to make it required.

Doom 4's Gauss Cannon

A standout weapon for many, many reasons. It's Doom 2016's answer to the railgun. Somehow, though, they turned it into one of the most powerful weapons outside of the normal fair. Two words: "Siege Mode". This mode will turn this fairly decent blaster cannon into a decimating powerhouse of burning terror! One single shot from Siege Mode has the power to take down Barons of Hell and turn them into piles. It is one of the weapons that reminds you how awesome the power fantasy can get. Turn mancubi and cyber mancubi into piles of organs at your leisure and have a ball. It is even better when you're able to move in this mode.

Rocket Launcher

Doom 1 did this right from the start and they rolled with it in each and every iteration. Rocket jumps, blast back, rocket battles against Cyberdemons, everything about this gun has some sort of iconic affect on its game. Quake cashed in on the rocket jump first and it has since become a staple of First Person Shooters as a result. It may be a bad idea to use it on Lost Souls or Pinkies, for obvious reasons but it's just so wonderful to fire one missile into a group to see body parts begin to fly. Rip and Tear, indeed.

The BFG 9000

They tried to make a BFG 10,000 more than once. One was a strange iteration from Quake 3 Arena, the other was a planet destroying beam in Doom Eternal that blows a hole into Mars. They were nice but nothing will replace the Big Fucking Gun 9000. One pull of the trigger kills entire hordes and does incomparable damage to mini-bosses if it doesn't finish them outright. Doom films have never gotten this weapon right, but it is thankfully handled very well in every other sequel. We're not going to go into the crossbow from The Dark Ages, there's only one super powered laser cannon that we want. We want the one they used to name an alcoholic drink mix. You know, the one that three clips a Cyberdemon. We want that one!

The Super Shotgun

At first glance, in Doom 2, this may just look like a normal double barrel shotgun. Well, not only does it take 2 shells in each shot, but it also has the capacity to kill multiple demons in one pull. There's no blowback, though, and hearing that meaty sound as you fire and reload is hard to top. Doom 4 brought it back in all its wondrous glory and outshined even the Quake iterations as a result. With uranium shells and the ability to double shot, Doom 2016 brought the super shotgun to a newfound glory through some of the most awesome upgrades imaginable. Eternal's super shotgun had a hook for chain jumping and that may have been an interesting novelty, but it ultimately did very little for the super shotty all around. One upclose shot from this gun should be sending demon parts scattering across the screen. If not, you're doing it wrong.

There are a lot more weapons to be considered, but these are a good start. Next time, we'll take a look at the weapons of Wolfenstein, as those are a list all their own. Doom has no shortage of metal that grinds demons into dust, and Quake drives some pretty hard nails into the coffin. They are often duplicated by others, but they will always be judged by the best.

Resident Evil The Final Chapter - Alice Ends

It is very sad to say that Resident Evil live action iterations never improved. All of them, up until the writing of this article, have never surpassed the decency of the first Resident Evil film directed by Anderson. The animated movies have a far better track record, but those are considered niche Resident Evil fan viewings. If you have any interest in the games, the animated movie series is far more worth your time. These live action films, even as stand-alone movies, only show the viewer how nonsensical and repetitive they become by the end. 

If you have been paying attention, you'll understand that Alice is the prime example of a Mary Sue. She literally is never seriously injured more than being knocked out, beyond a strategic loss of some fingers. Any screw ups she has are all minimalistic and survived with hardly a scratch. Her stunts are extremely unrealistic as a result. She becomes the cornerstone of this entire story, even when she only played a very tiny part in the beginning. She was in the Hive in order to infiltrate it and prove that they were doing illegal experiments. Beyond living on top of it in a strange undercover marriage story that makes no sense, Alice's role was basically meeting a contact and exchanging data. 

Now, in this story, she is everything and anything that is or ever will be important. They shoe-horn her into this horrific plot like she was everything that matters with whatever is happening. They even go so far as to [SPOILER ALERT] make her out to be the CLONE of a top share-holder of the Umbrella Corporation. She is now, suddenly, the daughter of one of the head scientists who was cloned in order to... live her better life because she has a rapidly aging disease that caused her to become sick and need to freeze hersel--- Okay, seriously, this whole thing just flew directly off of the rails. 

All of the sudden, Wesker's double-cross in the last movie was retconned. Not only was it retconned, but the powers he gave back to Alice are now fake and she's still a "normal human" who can do death defying stunts without fail and kill anyone and everyone. You know, just normal human things. Wesker's part in this is, once again, minimalistic. Why they even bothered to bring him back after he seemingly died in the fourth movie is an answer lost in time. He barely even matters in the entire film after being one of its most continuous villains, only to be killed by a door chopping his leg off. He seriously bleeds to death and that's it. 

They bring back the scientist from the third film who died and say that he was actually a clone. This one is for real, just trust us. He basically takes Wesker's role in this film and still does a very bad job of it. Alice continuously bests him in comically stupid ways and he keeps proving why they should have never cloned him or given him any sort of authority. Dr. Isaacs just has the cure for the T-Virus in his jacket pocket and it somehow can be broken outside and spread across the entire world, curing everyone and killing the zombies or something like that. However, if it's broken inside it will not go anywhere and be useless. The logic behind all of this is so flawed, it really makes the head spin. 

Anderson thought that if we just put a mindless time limit on how long the human race can survive, it would bring up the tension. Somehow, in X amount of hours, the human race is going to be killed by... zombies or the T-Virus or something. Anything to make the plot keep moving to some sort of goal. Then he thought that he could just retcon everything we know about Alice and say she is a clone now. Like, she's also got amnesia because she can't remember anything about her past, guy, just, like, deal with it or something. That's not a joke. Dr. Isaacs literally comes out and tells her that she can't remember anything about her past. This comes out of left field and has never been delved into. In the original movie, she was a double agent working to bring down Umbrella, now she has a super badass action hero past of not knowing who she is or where she came from because she was cloned from blah blah blah. 

For the sake of losing myself in a story, editing is not even something I try to pay attention to when watching movies. The plot and characters normally take the forefront. That is, if there aren't enormous, glaring issues. The editing will give you a headache with how quick and choppy it can get. When getting images for this review, locking onto a single shot was an absolute hair-pulling experience. There are flashing lights in dark spaces, especially if a gun is being fired and it is absolute migraine fuel. The acting has not been good for a few movies now, if it was ever considered good to begin with. However, that is the very least of its problems by this point.

This was a chore to get through. Paul Anderson said that he was going to have Alice die at the end, but ended up not doing it because he... said he did things to make the ending so emotional. Emotional. Paul needs a dictionary or something with very detailed descriptions of vocabulary words. There is literally nothing emotional about any of this. I barely even remembered that Claire Redfield somehow wandered her way aimlessly into this movie. To be honest, I don't even remember if it was Jill or Claire. They're both so superfluous to everything going on because Alice takes up the screen with no room for other characters. Her emotionless journey, coasting through the world on stunt wires, culminates to nothing more than a very long and pointless search for a cure that apparently doesn't work immediately. That's right, she breaks the vial outside so it can travel across the world "but there's still so much to do!" Well, that's nice. I hope it reaches the people before they are savagely ripped apart by undead things or mutations of a horrific nature. 

There was nothing about this movie that even came close to entertainment. You are far too transfixed by the nonsensical plot, eye-gouging editing, Mila's lifeless portrayal of a wooden Mary Sue, hordes of easily avoided zombies and pointless plot devices showing up on the screen before being discarded for more wackiness. This isn't a chore to get through, it's downright brain torture. This entire series lost the plot and just decided it was cool with that, because it did it again and again and again. It's really no wonder that both Mila Jovovich and Paul W.S. Anderson fell far out of favor in the film industry after this travesty of a series. Monster Hunter did not turn out any better because Anderson decided to put his wife front and center, again, and ignore everything he didn't like about the games, which was everything, apparently. We may have gotten one good film in the beginning, but this whole decade of trash movies and storytelling was not really worth it. Thankfully, the series is Virtua Dead. 

Resident Evil Retribution - It is Time to Stop!

At this point, it was more than obvious that Paul W.S. Anderson had no idea what he was doing with this franchise. He handed the project over to others, retconned massive plot points, erased characters with little to no explanation and gave Alice every single superpower under the sun. Whatever the plot ran into, either make Alice more powerful or cause something lucky to happen. Retribution was supposed to take place right after the battle on the ship, but everything that happened on the ship is hereby gone. Yeah, the Redfield siblings are not present anymore, nor is K-Mart. At this point, they are putting whatever they think is clever or conveniant into the plot and rolling with that. 

For some reason, everyone just changes factions and serves the enemy for this one single movie. This is the only movie where Wesker is seemingly on Alice's side and for some reason, the Red Queen is trying to kill her along with the human race. Now, we see the simulations that they alluded to before to see that they're all filled with clones. Yes, we're going back to clones and we're bringing back old characters who died in previous entries. Michelle Rodriguez actually has a starring role, but as two different clones, one of them being evil. 

For one reason or another, Alice is captured in another Umbrella facility, mostly naked blah blah blah. We've seen this so many times, it's not even funny anymore. She runs into Ada Wong, who is actually rather decently portrayed. She's almost kinda like her video game character, so that's something. In fact, we have a lot of characters from the video games in this film. We actually have Leon, and even Barry makes a small appearance. Jill is here, but she's mostly a villain being mind controlled to hunt Alice with a bunch of Umbrella Corp guys. 

Alice has no powers in this movie because Wesker shut them off with a syringe. Half of the things she does in this movie is superhuman, but she's supposed to be a normal human being like she was in the first movie. She does not act like a human being in any conceivable way throughout this entire film. She finds a clone daughter in the simulation. Yes, Alice has a daughter between her clone and a clone of Carlos from the second and third movies. This little girl follows her through half of this movie, but is never seen after the credits roll. Yes, she is yet another deleted character. Pour one out. 

The Red Queen is one of the worst aspects of this entire film, as odd as that sounds. She represents everything wrong with this movie, as compared to the first installment. Like I said in that previous entry, I actually liked it to some degree. The Red Queen's CGI was very dated and looked awful, even for back then, but it looks a ton better than how she turns out here. Here, she just looks more realistic, but also more fake at the same time. The affects are completely changed for this, almost making it seem like it's a different character entirely. That would have made much more sense than trying to tell the audience that this is the same character we met then. Not only does she act differently, but she also changes the meaning of her catchphrase "You're all going to die down here", and effectively killed that catchphrase from this point on. The delivery was off, and brought in at the most awkward times and they treat it like some clever callback, which it isn't. Now, she is out to kill the human race, where she tried to save it in the first movie by cutting off all of the zombies from getting out of the facility. Whoever wrote her part in this movie needs a nice hard demotion and a lesson in writing dialogue.

More nonsensical action sequences and army zombies firing weapons happen while half of the Umbrella Corp characters come to save Alice from the simulation. Again, Wesker is helping her through the facility to escape because he needs her to fight against the Red Queen.... again, for some reason. None of this has any build up, there is no point to this plot and it's all apparently just poising the characters for a double-cross that never comes. It's all just to facilitate a bunch of giant zombies bombarding streets of pointless simulations because Umbrella is bored and can apparently piss billions of dollars a day on seeing what happens when clone civilizations get the T-Virus. Surprise surprise, they all start dying and panicking. 

Most of the characters die, and even if they don't, many of them are never seen again in the final film. Anderson and Jovovich kept hyping all of this up like it comes to some awesome conclusion, but anyone who has been paying attention to this "movie series" can easily see that these were all aimless, mindless action movies that have little to nothing to do with one another. How can there be an awesome conclusion when nothing about them coincides with the other or builds to any sort of endgame? It still baffles me that Anderson had the gall to say "Since the beginning, I knew that the movies would end with the Hive". Paul, no you didn't. You had no clue where this whole thing was going to end, you just kind of thought that going to the main facility from the beginning would be like "poetry because it rhymes". Trying to pass off any of this like it had some sort of plan or story structure is laughable at best, pathetic at worst. The movie has some decent effects and a few cool, effective action sequences. Beyond that, it's mindless gibberish that thinks it's a real story, but it's Virtua Sadness.

Resident Evil Afterlife - Downward Zombie Spiral

So, after the decent entertainment of the third movie, the story gets dumber and more nonsensical. This is when the movies really started to go belly up. This is when it became clear that Anderson didn't know where he was going with the film series. All of the potential from the earlier movies is brought to a brick wall where they set things up only to cut them off before the payoff. Where the third movie brought about a clone army, this fourth entry kills them at the very beginning. 

Yes, through semi-decent CGI to bring multiple Alices to the screen, we see all of them die off immediately as they try to invade Umbrella Corp. Wesker takes out all of them and then takes away Alice's powers, of which are still poorly defined. Okay, so now she can't use telekinesis or super enhanced agility and accuracy. Throughout the entire film, she is still basically invincible. You'd almost suspect the decision to take away her powers was brought about after the scenes where she uses them were already partially shot. 

So, the real problem with this movie, aside from that jarring batch of scenes that basically retconned the earlier films, is that it is a shelter and place movie. Alice pulls off a terribly impossible landing on top of a building. So, instead of going off to find a new community in Alaska, it turns out that it was all some random ship off the coast of a zombie apocalyptic city. Zombies are all around this one building where Alice now finds herself with a whole bunch of refugees that will become entirely superfluous in the long run. 

This movie is probably one of the worst examples of horror movie tropes. There's a pervert, a sweet motherly lady who makes sandwiches, a mechanic, the one no one trusts and on and on and on. Every single one of them, aside from Claire Redfield, will be gone and seldom ever mentioned again. They even bring in Chris Redfield, and he's played by the guy from Prison Break. Wentworth Miller literally thought they were kidding when they told him he would be a prisoner who knows a way out of the building. Apparently, they thought the reference by itself was worth putting us through some of the most cookie cutter plot devices as a result. 

Even the coolest part of the entire movie is a bit of a downer, as we finally see a cool zombie known as the Executioner. This RE5 zombie makes a small appearance in the movie, and the doublebarreled shotgun Alice uses quarters as buckshot. As unrealistic as this is, it is still somewhat entertaining. I hope you enjoy this scene if you ever watch it, because it's as good as it gets. Beyond this, it's the obvious betrayals, zombie kill jump scares and slowly coming to the realization that MAYBE they should actually listen to the guy who says he knows he has a way out. It is mind-numbing. 

Throughout the whole thing, the seemingly unpowered Alice just kicks more ass and solves every problem until she needs to be dumb for the movie to last longer. All of this leads up to getting to the ship off the coast of the city. There's some idiot refugee that betrays the others and steals the plane so he can fly... to the ship and immediately serve Albert Wesker out of nowhere. That's right, Wesker is on the ship and now he wants to literally eat Alice. He says that he is infected with T-Virus powers... like Alice... just go with it--and he needs to take in her essence to regain control because... that's how science works... maybe? 

Either way, they fight the video game boss like an actual video game boss and Alice is the only one who exists in Resident Evil Retribution. Nothing is connected and even though Wesker seems like he died at the end of this movie, he didn't. No, his actual death is beyond lame and probably would have been more prominent here. Either way, even with the semi-decent effects and the awesome appearance of the Executioner, this movie is nothing and means nothing. It is a nonsensical segway into another movie and blatantly wastes its time in an uninspired zombie city building lockdown movie. Dawn of the Dead did it much better and this is just a mess. If you're still watching the movies by this point, you should know what lies ahead is so much worse. Virtua Nosedive.

Resident Evil 3 Remake - Death by Exasperation

We should be used to disappointment by now. Thankfully, I had never played the original Resident Evil 3, so I didn't have such expectations. I had played Resident Evil 2 remake, though, and I had those types of expectations. Either way, both parties were extremely let down. This game was missing something, a lot of something, and it was style. This game just was not that engaging. We barely even got a look at our character before her wall imploded with the attack from a giant zombie! Seriously, everything is just so condensed and noticeably shallow throughout this entire game. 

It has a lot of what made the RE2 remake work. It has a good UI that's fairly easy to figure out just from intuition, which is important. The real problem is that it didn't know how to pad out its runtime with anything extremely interesting. We start off with a dream sequence where Jill Valentine has the T-Virus and kills herself. Yes, quite shocking. Then we have the exact same thing happen, sans the T-Virus. Instead, we answer the phone and find out that the T-Virus is taking over the city. Before we can do anything, Nemesis knocks through the wall and becomes more of an annoyance than an imposing figure bringing fear to the player. 

He just becomes more and more annoying with the use of his tentacles and the use of his super-charged virus that makes the zombies harder with bug legs opening from their faces. Instead of becoming more interesting, the game just becomes more and more tedious. It was already annoying enough with the zombies coming out of nowhere to bite you while you're concentrating on another one coming in at you. This can be effective, but there needs to be more than that. It's really just a game of backtracking over a small area to do little tasks and get fetch quest items so that you can escape on a subway train. 

There were some seriously nasty parts, like when Jill gets some tendril shoved down her throat and she injests some disgusting bug parasites. This was horrifically nasty and we think it's going to affect her in some serious way, but no. You walk around, unable to run, until you turn on some machine and then she suddenly vomits it all up and carries on. Seriously, this was not cool. Seeing your character treated like this while having to fight off giant spiders, all for it to add literally nothing but a slight difficulty, it's a little insulting. 

All of this, paired with the annoyance of Nesmsis coming out of nowhere to pull you in with tentacles and hit you really hard, this game was a slog to get through. You go from the streets, to the subway, to the laboratories and it's all just so by-the-books at this point. It tries to add more interest with the zombie mutations but it's just more of the same. There really isn't much more to say. The main boss battles are lackluster with the last battle of Nemesis just being a constant process of wearing him down in different forms. It's not without its merits of an interesting battleground and cool rocket fire wearing him down, but it's not worth the journey. 

A lot of people noticed that this game was stripped down of a lot of gameplay from the original. I'll be playing and reviewing the original Nemesis, and I'm really hoping it's a better experience than this. The survival elements are all there. They keep you low on ammo and health items. It does keep you starving enough to choose your battles wisely and try and sneak past Nemesis as much as you can. Does this add much, though? No, it really doesn't. It just makes the game more frustrating while also being outright boring. 

Boring, that's the real word for this game. Jill is a nostalgic character, but that's not nearly enough to carry the game throughout its entire run. There just isn't enough to keep it exciting. You're still just running around performing tasks while some people yell at you to get a train moving. Then you're in another laboratory with a bunch of new zombies and it does very little to keep interest. This game is just not worth the time and effort. Resident Evil 2's remake is far better and full of more interesting content, including the puzzles. This game is lacking a great deal in puzzles. The closest thing it has is a confusing part where you need to get the tracks working to get to the subway's destination. Maybe if they made Nemesis more like Mr. X, it could have been more natural, rather than him just popping up out of nowhere in random stints of the game. It is kind of funny when he punches random zombies out of his way, though. He's still a cool character, but this game just couldn't do him justice. Just try and keep away from him without wasting too much ammo. Also remember to drink your water.

Resident Evil Extinction - Escape from Retcon City

This movie is a perfect poster child for why you need a future plan for a movie franchise. There are so many things that were changed for this movie to work, but then subsequent titles after this film act like its events never happen. Either that, or they quickly clean everything up and forget about all of it. Why? Because someone thought it would be a great idea to just destroy the entire world and turn it into Mad Max 2. That's not a joke, the filmmakers were very prominently inspired by the Mad Max series for this entire premise. These two elements could work, but only if they were willing to stick to their guns. Spoiler Alert: They didn't. 

That's not to say that this is a wholly bad movie. This is actually pretty entertaining, but it would have worked better as its own standalone film. The entire world is now destroyed. Entire bodies of water dried up and the T-Virus killed 90% of its entire population. Alice is now Mad Max on a motorcycle, going through the deserts and sticking to areas where Umbrella Corp cannot track her. We are also following an entire group of survivors led by Claire Redfield. They go through abandoned cities and ghost towns to gather resources with which to survive. LJ from the second movie is still here, as is Carlos. Both of them are on the convoy and helping them with a bit of muscle to help kill zombies and protect their group. 

We see a lot of stuff that doesn't exactly contribute to the main plot. Mostly, it's just them killing zombies and dying from random attacks, especially from that of the crows. Both Alice and the refugees are separate for the first part of the movie until this fight with the crows and she helps most of them escape their attack. There are plenty of deaths, though, and it's clear that they are losing hope until Alice tells them about a possible refuge in Alaska, which kindles a little bit of optimism. 

However, Umbrella Corp is still looking for Alice, even going so far as to frequently clone her in hopes of multiplying her blood, which can be synthesized for a cure. Dr. Alexander Isaacs is head of this project, but he answers to Albert Wesker, who is making his real character debut in this movie, for some reason. It's not that he's not part of the story, but he plays such a small part that his big first appearance could have been saved for a better contribution. In here, he's just sitting in a chair and telling Isaacs "no" when he wants to send a team to take Alice. Isaacs ignores this answer and manipulates Wesker's voice audio to command it be done anyway. 

Some things are done quite well in this movie. Isaacs is a great villain, manipulative and sinister with no conscience for human life. For him, the ends always justify the means, and he wants to create a cure so that they can use it to leverage what is left of the populace and gain control over them. There are all kinds of things wrong with this approach, because all of the cloning and all of the power they use for their facilities should be used for resources since the world is, you know, basically dead. 

They even go so far as to create super zombies that they have limited control over. These are far more vicious than normal zombies as well as physically stronger. In the end, it doesn't matter a whole lot, they are still just walking dead people, they can just run a little faster now. This attack kills all of the remaining prominent survivors in the convoy, aside from Claire. LJ was infected by the T-Virus in an earlier scene, so he was dying the whole time and turns into a zombie because he hid his injury from them. This is rather hypocrytical of him, because he gave Carlos a hard time for doing the same thing in the second film.

They almost get to Alice and nearly capture her, but they fail and Isaacs is bitten by one of the super zombies who also has a more aggressive form of the T-Virus. With their entire convoy aside from just a few survivors now dead, the plan to reach Alaska is now to take a helicopter from Umbrella Corp after getting through an entire legion of zombies. One very high point in this film is when Carlos decides to sacrifice his life to give them an entrance. The last zombie attack left him infected with the virus and so he drives a giant fuel truck through them, and causes it to explode. Before it does, though, he finds a nice little rolled smoke and uses it to light the fuel. He has a nice little puff before the end. Absolute boss way to go. Proper respects.

Once Dr. Isaacs gets back to the base, he takes the anti-virus in large doses and this turns him into a tentacle tyrant. The special effects in this movie is hit and miss. While the crows in the earlier scene look pretty decent, the Isaac tyrant looks awful, especially when he actually uses the tendrils. It also makes no sense at all that Isaacs has Alice's telekinesis powers. The fight they have isn't terrible, and it brings back a nice callback to the laser hallway that killed most of the special forces team in the first film. This would have been a lot better if they hadn't already done so in the earlier Alice clone scene at the beginning of the film, but it was pretty cool to see Isaacs get chopped to bits from the grid laser.

During all of this, one of the movie's greatest weaknesses pokes its head up. The clones. These clones could have been a pretty cool plot for the next movie, but as you will see from the next review, this cool little gimmick is whizzed down their legs. We are given the promise of a cool war between Umbrella and super powered (somehow) Alice clones led by the real Alice herself. It is teased at the end and they do next to nothing with it. The entire plot point of these clones is rendered completely useless as a result. They spent all of that effort into multiplying Milla Jovovich and all of it was wasted. 

Another very large brick wall that this movie faced was the plot device of Umbrella Corp's control over Alice via computer satellite. Not only does it help them track her, but it also gives them her off button. They use this in two parts of the movie, one was done so that they could find her and sic zombies on her. The other turned her off completely... for a few minutes. Then she literally destroys their control over her with her mind. Somehow, even though the satellite is in space, she gains back control from Earth. This was a very badly used plot point that really should have been retconned between movies 2 and 3. It's not as if they didn't retcon tons of other things.

As said before, this is a pretty decent addition to this series. It's far better than the second film because it takes itself more seriously. The problem, however, is that it is a Resident Evil movie and it does little to nothing for the entire movie franchise. This is a common problem from here on out and this is the last time that the movies ever reach the quality of "decent". Paul WS Anderson obviously had no idea what he was doing and was flying by the seat of his pants the entire time. He looked at the series, pulled a lot of the coolest elements but had no idea how to impliment them in a meaningful way. He thought he could put in cloning, the tyrant, Wesker, zombie crows and cool action scenes, and it would amount to Resident Evil. Well, it doesn't, and the series has suffered hard because of it. They made this movie pretty good on accident. They did not make that "mistake" again. If you have seen this series, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Virtua Bites. 

Resident Evil Apocalypse - The Audience's Nemesis

It used to seem like it was always a third or fourth installment to a series where people spelled its impending doom. Well, there are several instances when it was clear that the series lost the plot just in the first sequel. It happened with Beastmaster, Pumpkinhead, and The Joker. Well, it also happened to Paul Anderson's Resident Evil. The writing was on the wall, although it wasn't as apparent as others. Apocalypse wasn't an especially bad movie, but it did make especially bad decisions that would later come back to bite it on the ass. Their biggest mistake was most assuredly Paul W.S. Anderson deciding to start a relationship and eventually marry Milla Jovovich. Normally, these sort of things can be overlooked but in this case, it was clearly a very large detriment to the series. 

Every single decision made in this sequel and all of the impending installments had to service one thing: Alice's power and ego. She was the most amazing thing in this world, able to kill zombies without thinking about it and having an ego trip as a result. This all comes to a head when we are introduced to Jill Valentine, and she is never given a proper place to shine. She has her very awkward boss moment when she simply walks into the police station and puts two rounds into random people that she sees are transformed into zombies. This was jarring to say the least and painted a very good picture of what is to come in this movie. 

Every single other character, from the T-virus's creator, his daughter and even Nemesis, are all there to either be victims or villains. Jill tries to keep her video game character's cool factor, but she constantly fails and needs Alice to bring her out of it. Alice has to save the creator's daughter, Angela Ashford. Her father is being held captive by Umbrella Corp and she apparently needs to be saved while she is hiding in a school. Along the way, we meet such colorful character as a pimp who serves as a very poor comedy relief, then there are the members of S.T.A.R.S., with whom are almost all killed by Nemesis.

Nemesis is about the only character they actually got right in this movie, but that is also one of the movie's big downfalls when the climax takes place. The big baddy, with hostages held at gunpoint, commands Alice to fight Nemesis in single combat. Yes, Alice has grown so powerful and skilled that she can even meet one of the strongest undead characters in Resident Evil hand to hand and actually come out on top. It really goes to show you that the director just can't stop bringing his own personal life into his work. 

There is no reason that any of this should be the plot. The first movie got away with diverging from the video games because it actually had a fairly decent idea. The execution was shoddy, but it still formed a coherent enough plot and Alice was still just a regular fighter with trained skills. Here, she is overpowered and becomes a Mary Sue by the end of it because, somehow, her powers have become nigh omnipotent. Propping your hero up while bogging everyone down is already a horrendous practice, but this movie made her into near godhood. The way she runs through a window on her motorcycle with two machineguns and the way she literally defeats Nemesis with her own awesomeness became so boring! She was taken down, character-wise, while trying to prop her up as undefeatable. 

The plot suffers from random happenings all over the city, which could be a neat little sideplot here and there, but with the reporter who comes to make a name for herself, only to be killed by zombie children, and a random guy feeding his sister humans because she turned into a zombie, plus the sideplot with the random S.T.A.R.S. members dying all over the place and everything else happening, this movie feels bloated. It's very difficult to recall much of anything that happens in this plot, or what the plot is even about, because there is just so much to it. This is made worse with the fact that Alice comes in exactly when she is needed and defeats the obstacle with ease, while also saving people and moving on as if it wasn't even worth acknowledging. 

The real kicker is that the third movie is actually better than this one in many ways. It's still not that good, but it beats this constant trainwreck that doesn't seem to know where to draw the plot or how to even carry it through the movie. The ending only compounds all of this by giving Alice the ability to kill a random, innocent security guard through the security camera. No, I'm not making that up. She looks at a security camera, and the man watching on the other end has blood come out of every orafice in his face, seemingly melting his brain. She is somehow super charged after waking up in a science facility and killing her captors without thinking about it. Get used to that, folks, because this series loves to embellish her powers and make her out to be an unstoppable killing machine. The movies can't tell a coherent story and keep lining up ineffective villains who do their thing, say their lines and die because Alice wills it. It's a long 7 movie ride and it only gets longer from here. Virtua Sigh. 

Blood - Drained the Supply

When listing the original first person shooters, a lot of people will give them reverence as i they are legends. In many ways, they are. Obviously, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Duke Nukem 3D will be the first ones to come up, but then there will always be that wonderful one syllable title that comes up with such a mundane name: Blood. This will come with a bit of a polarizing reaction. Now, it's not quite as polarizing as Hexen, but it's also not quite as universally loved or even known as Duke Nukem. Blood came out in 1997, a year after Quake and it kind of got lost among the other titles of the time. 

Blood is extremely difficult for a number of reasons. The level design is very macabre, but also very imaginative, as there is an entire level where you derail an entire train and end up at an evil carnival. One very shining reason that this game is hard are the cultists. These hooded cultists come in the very first level and they carry machine guns and TNT. Put them on top of zombies with axes that may or may not die the first time you take them out, and you've got a sandwich that is very delicious but also quite hard to take a bite. 

This is nothing to mention the two crawling creatures, both rats and hands. The hands, by the way, are very possibly one-hit kills as they clamp onto you and strangle you. We haven't even gotten into the bullet sponge enemies! One guy with a white undershirt just spits green goo at you and then two types of gargoyles. Giant spiders, hellhounds, you get the picture, this game is a bit of a daunting task with the enemies alone. 

Then there are puzzles and secrets in the levels that cause a few complications, obviously. The great thing is that the secrets come in the form of spooky mansions, graveyards and crypts. Horror elements in this game have made it iconic among some of the more gothic fans of the FPS genre. You need to make sure you click on every gravestone and tomb you come across, as some of them slide in and give you ammo and health powerups. 

The weapons are quite unique among the original first person shooters as well. There is a machine gun, of course, but your melee weapon is a pitchfork. The mechanics also favor explosives, as they come in the form of TNT, remote mines, and even a can of hairspray that you can also use with a lighter for a flamethrower. The shotgun, however, is one of the better weapons in the game, especially when you get the guns akimbo powerup to have two shotguns. It has a good aim and damage distribution, being able to kill many of the smaller enemies with just one shot. 

One element where this game shines is the story and the boss battles. Now, does it make sense that the main badguy tried to kill you and failed only to make you more powerful to absorb you later? Not really. With so many henchmen and followers, he probably should have estimated that Caleb would grow more powerful than him. The Cerberus dog enemy, the boss gargoyle and the giant spider queen are all just flat out awesome to play and struggle against. It's a fairly safe bet that they can be defeated with the lightning gun, but these are where you expect them to soak up bullets like Officer Murphy. 

The graphics, for the time, were amazing. Early computers couldn't quite play it very well, but that was overcome rather well, as Quake was far more taxing to systems. Blood was still loved enough to invoke the remaster gods... twice. Yes, that's right, it came out again, twice. In fact, one of them came out just a few weeks before this article was written! Blood: Fresh Supply only came out in 2019, just six years later and boom! Blood: Refreshed Supply is released November 2025. 

Now, this is not a complaint, as it is clear that they did this in order to take all of the work they did from Fresh Supply. This allowed them to bring about versions of the game that includes all of the downloadable content and even some of the game mods they decided to make official. Marrow and Deathwish by themselves are well worth getting the new iteration of the game. This newest version is also quite a bit more stable than Fresh Supply, so this is a must have for all of you old school shooters. 

Blood is considered among the best in the genre. Among the original Doom Clones, it has a very steady fanbase. Well, now you can play it online again, and even get to know some of the new features. Blood is an acquired taste for some, but if you really want to get a taste of the original first person shooters, this is required playing. Just be sure not to turn the difficulty all the way up right away, not unless you want to be punished for something very bad. In that case, crank the Blood up to eleven! Virtua Blam!

Resident Evil (2002) - The Zomb Before the Storm

 Zombie movies have a very touch and go relationship with pretty much every genre there is. There are zombie romance stories involving zombies, obviously, kids zombie movies, zombie comedies, animated zombie movies and pretty much any other you can think of. The idea of a video game zombie movie was not a novel one. This could be the first one ever and it honestly wouldn't be that impressive. Video game movies still had the stigma of being terrible, and this was a bit of a sneaker hit. It wasn't a masterpiece of any sort but it was enough to earn it a cult following. 

The big problem with it for a lot of people was its extreme lack of source material in the script. Not only do we not get any characters from the game, but there's barely anything about a house. Instead we get more of a mystery science fiction thriller movie, in stark contrast to the survival horror featuring giant spiders. Mila Jovovich stars as Alice, and yes, there is a lot of Alice in Wonderland symbolism that leads to literally nothing. All of it stems from an earlier version of the script, where the Alice stuff actually had something to do with what was in the plot. They changed so much of it, that it hardly matters at all. 

Alice has amnesia, which is always a terrible sign with any movie wanting to do cheap twists. Seriously, the house puts "Forget everything" chemicals in the air for no reason at all. So, we're whisked away on the plot as a SWAT team from Umbrella Corp and lead them from the house, down into the basement where there's an entire headquarters doing experimentation called the HIVE. She's taken with her... "husband" Spence who is played by James Purefoy and they go through the facility, which is now completely silent. 

The SWAT team has no idea what the HIVE was working on because Umbrella never told them, they just deployed them to the location and thought they could figure it out on their own. Again, this makes no sense, but they go through and within minutes, most of them are dead. How did they die? Laser trap security systems. By the time we get to the zombies, there are two SWAT people, one of them played by Michelle Rodriguez. 

What follows is a lot of confusion. One of the people they bring along with them (played by Matt Addison) was involved, but only because he was looking for his sister. Alice soon finds out that his sister was her contact and now she is a zombie who is dead. Sad day. The zombie hordes and the zombie dogs are fun for the most part, and the lickers come into play at the end. For the time, the computer generated images are pretty good. They're nothing to write home about but they do their job and the artists blended it pretty well. 

The plot is full of truck-sized holes. Paul W.S. Anderson is not known for his stellar storytelling, more for slightly following the lore while telling a passable narrative along the way. Keeping to that narrative, however, will prove to be his biggest weakpoint when it comes to the Resident Evil series that this movie started. Sad to say, it was all downhill from here. The moment that this movie took the brother of the zombie sister and sliced him in the arm, the words "Nemesis Program" got people hyped for a sequel that would... fail to deliver. There was Nemesis and he was a prominent figure, but the execution... we'll leave that for the next movie review. Virtua braaaaaains...

Doomverse #24 - Weapons of Hindsight

Quake's creation is unique among ID Software's game library in several ways. From the very beginning, this game marked the very first time that a speed-driven, totally 3D game was made with full vertical and horizontal angle controls. They almost didn't go with the full mouse look. This was also the first time that John Carmack required help in creating an engine. He and Michael Abrash worked night and day in its creation, toiling through countless bugs, world holes and glitches throughout. Originally, the plan was to create a game where you are Quake, and you hold a hammer. There was a giant backlash against the hammer, and somehow it boiled down to a one-handed axe, hardly bigger than a hatchet. 

The idea was that this game was going to be a roleplaying style fantasy game with melee focused combat. There was such a different blueprint in the beginning, but John Romero was dismayed to find out that the complexities of creating his dream game just couldn't happen in the timeframe they were on. The game was already behind schedule and the chaotic creation of the game's engine and levels made the atmosphere already toxic. Instead, it was decided that they would bring about a full 3D shooter with a Doom style weapon arsenal. As fun as the original Quake sounds, let's be completely honest, would it have been better?

To be straight forward, Quake created a huge culture of Deathmatching because of its very tight controls and fast paced explosions going off as you drive nails into your opponent. The melee combat would have a lot to live up to. Speaking of nails, that's a perfect place to start, not only did this game bring back the Super Shotgun, but it introduced the Nailgun. If that wasn't enough, they also brought about the Super Nailgun in the same breath. Putting NIN on every nail ammo box was also a stroke of genius. 

Among its well known weapons is the Thunderbolt, more commonly known as the Lightning Gun. Hazardous to use in water, but also slightly overpowered, the Lightning Gun brought about a decent replacement for the Plasma Rifle from Doom. If you need to take down a Shambler, use their own weapon against them. It's cool that you start with a Shotgun, but if that's all you have, I hope you know how to strafe. 

The Grenade Launcher is a case of acquired tastes. They're obviously not especially accurate, but the grenades do explode as they touch the enemy. This is also true for stupid, stinky ogre grenades! For some people, this is their pride and glory among the weapons. It has its advantages, as it does a ton of damage and has a chance of killing multiple targets in one explosion. 

It goes to show that, while they bemoaned creating essentially the same game while mastering Doom beforehand, Quake turned out to be a very different game. It has a similar arsenal, but the many minor differences stack up to a unique experience. While John Romero has stated that the Super Shotgun is his favorite Doomverse weapon, many have cited Quake's introductory weapons as their primary choices. These weapons have been updated and changed to fit future games to great effect. 

Quake 3 Arena was the game that really brought some of these weapons back in style. The Lightning Gun and the Grenade Launcher are prime examples of this, but sadly, we wouldn't be getting a new Nail Gun until Doom The Dark Ages. Once they brought it back, though, they brought it back with some serious lavish. The only weapon that never really saw a return was the Axe, which isn't much of a surprise, but it would have been nice to see in The Dark Ages at least. 

It is plain to see that Quake had just as much to do with the culture of the FPS genre in Arena Fighting as Doom did. It added weapons for future use and it brought a literal new dimension to the gaming scene back in the 90's while still having a strong following to this very day. The best weapon arsenal among these ID legends would be a laborious task, as all of them have their own balance and pros. The best way to appreciate these weapons is to figure out which ones you'd like to use when you're in a scuffle or an all out battle. Whether it be Doom, Quake or Wolfenstein, choose which weapon you prefer when faced with the challenge of destroying evil. Just remember to destroy it with big explosions and shells, lot's of shells. Virtua Buckshot.

Layers of Fear - Play the Scary Pictures

Happy Halloween, Virtua Ghosts! The Ghostly Month of Virtua SPOOOOOOOOOOOOOKIES!!! nears its end, but it's been a fun ride thus far. We're looking at horror in its rawest form today so let's SPOOK OUT!

 If there was ever an influence to first person survival horror, it was PT in all of its cancelled glory. The Playable Teaser for Silent Hills, which Konami seems to regret bumping off now, brought us into an actual world of creepy terror and showed us that games did not need to be especially long in order to get under your skin. While we lament its passing, we have been gifted with many in its wake. Layers of Fear took that premise and put it to some good use. Here, you're looking over a mansion that seems to have belonged to a painter, and as you find clues around this very creepy mannor, you begin to uncover just how obsessive one can get in order to create art. 

Layers of Fear brings you into those hallways with a sense of dubious caution, but there is a refreshing hesitance to it at first. This starts out as a slow burn horror game, making it to where the truly horrific things don't occur until you unfurl the painting that you will be putting together. Every single item on the list has something to do with creating the painting. There is skin with which to make the canvas and there is blood with which to create the red. 

It doesn't just go for jump scares, although there are a good number of instances as such. There are also burning and rotting rooms that you watch decay in front of you, sounds in the many crevices of the house, pictures that suddenly move and puzzles. Yes, this is a puzzler, but they don't get out of control with how to solve them. Usually it just takes walking around the room to find the instructions or it's just a common sense puzzle that brings you one step closer to the next item for the painting. 

The story behind the painting is interesting, but it does kind of out stay its welcome after a while. After about the seventh or eighth instance of someone being drawn to misery or killed in some horrible way it's basically "we get it, he was crazy, get on with it." The third act of the game is where this game starts to take a dip. The atmosphere has already reached its many peaks and valleys by the time you make it to the end. Some of the puzzles get monotonous in that they're not hard to solve, it just takes up precious game time in order to move on. One good example of this is when you're walking around one of the upper levels and phones keep ringing. The creep factor is hindered a bit by the fact that the same thing keeps happening over and over again until you start predicting the sudden scares of the game.

There are some brilliant instances of scares, like when hallways suddenly disappear behind you and now there's a wall with a tiny painting on it. The room with the record player that you need to play backwards is also a memorable addition to some of the better parts of the game, the earlier levels. It's also a lot better when you don't know what the painting is at first. As you bring colors to the canvas, the artwork begins to paint itself and you're left guessing what it could be. These are the better aspects of the game and the ones that work well with the story and scares. 

The DLC, however, only gets worse. You've already done the painting and gotten through the house, and now it wants you to complete a story book. These are some of the most mind numbingly boring segments of the game. By now, Layers of Fear has given you its best in the ways of survival horror, and these on-going scares and cinematic puzzles just stop doing it after a while. 

Layers of Fear is worth playing through to completion, but dealing with everything after that is a bit of a chore. It's worth revisiting the earlier levels to get the game's full effect, but after a while, you'll figure out which parts of the game are your favorites. There's still a lot of good horror material here and it successfully can be considered one of the better haunted house survival horror. That is much trickier than it sounds because many have attempted it. Give Layers of Fear a try, especially in the Virtua Month of Ghostly SPOOOOOOOOOOOKIES!!! Hope you all have a safe holiday and are ready for some of the colder temperatures. Remember to visit haunted houses responsibly and bring holy water.