Resident Evil has a special place in my heart, and not just because it's a stone-cold classic of gaming, a bona fide icon of the horror genre, and all that sort of guff.
No, I also have very fond memories of riding the bus home with the original PlayStation release of this particular game clutched tightly to my 16-year-old chest. I'd waited and waited, scanned every magazine and collected every nugget of information available over a very long gestation period. I couldn't wait any longer to get started at the Spencer Mansion. It was genuinely, possibly the most excited I've ever been about a game in the run-up to launch.
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Who could have known, amidst the excitement of that bus journey, that just 10 years later, just one teeny tiny decade down the line, this sort of incredible horror experience (which at the time had us all shouting "It looks like a f*****g movie!") would be available to play, and with extras to boot, on a dinky portable system? Not me, that's for sure. But that's what Resident Evil: Deadly Silence brought to the table, exactly 20 years ago today in Japan. Happy Birthday, you deadly silent scamp, you!
Even more surprising — and it's awful to do this to something on its birthday, but it is what it is — I really didn't enjoy Deadly Silence very much for a whole bunch of reasons. Yep, I just did that whole big, nice, positive preamble in order to dump even harder on a game. On its birthday.
By the time 2006 rolled around, and as timeless as it is, Resi felt decidedly old-school in its design and gameplay, and in presenting the OG PSX game as a base for the most part here, it really did take a lot of love for Resi to press on through a port that felt stodgy and rather bad to play, and that's before you even get to the smaller screen that sucked a lot of the tension out of proceedings.
Of course, it's easy to snipe from here, from the safety of a hill positioned some 20 years in the future, but even at the time, I distinctly remember this one feeling a bit naff, a bit pointless given we already had nice revamped versions of the OG Resi, and very tired on the gameplay front considering we'd all just recently(ish) recovered from Resident Evil 4.
Also, you must remember, at this point, we hadn't quite arrived at the critical retro/nostalgia inflection point for tank-control Resident Evil. It was too soon. It was just an 'old' game in 2006, and there were far better games to be playing, never mind better ports of this very same experience.
Alright. Enough putting the touchscreen knife in. Let's be nice. What Deadly Silence did add to the mix in order to strengthen its appeal was some slightly enhanced character graphics, a 180-degree quick turn, and a "Rebirth" mode, which utilised the console's touchscreen to jab at enemies with a knife in first person. So that's good!
Except the Rebirth mode wasn't good. Not good at all, in fact. Besides aimlessly jabbing at Zs, it also let you do some other trivial stuff like turning valves, which all felt a bit pointless and unresponsive overall, and so not really worth the effort.
However! Look. It was a portable version of a classic, and if you only had a DS, well, it was a solid enough way to experience a genre-definer if you really felt the need! Just eat your cake.
Played Resident Evil: Deadly Silence? Liked it, loathed it, or indifferent? [Hey, I liked it! - Ed.] Make sure to let us know!