If you were making a video game Mount Rushmore, the first thing to do would be to phone your doctor and ask them to change your medication as you fear it’s affecting your mental state for the worse. After that, you'd have to consider a whole wealth of factors. Firstly, and most obviously, you'd want the games to be good. I mean, come on. But you'd also want to consider not just how good they were in the moment, but how influential they were overall, and what their legacy has led to. You'd want a collection of iconic games, a spread of genres, and the sorts of titles people really should play to round out their gaming catalogue. After all that, you might very well end up picking Resident Evil 4 before the new prescription kicks in.
I'm pretty wary of remakes as a rule. We have the capability of porting old titles to either the latest versions of the consoles that they launched on or to modern PCs easily, and while remakes can make the controls a little more user friendly and add long-overdue accessibility features, I don't like the idea of studios spending years rehashing the past so they can sell our memories back to us rather than creating something new. The likes of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, which completely reimagines the original game, get a pass, but I have less time for polishes and minor fixes.
I don't buy the argument that it opens up the game to a wider audience either, because that's a reason to make older games more accessible and raise their profile, not to charge us for the right to access our memories. Altruism is not at the heart of these business decisions. However, the first few months of 2023 have caused me to rethink my hardline view, because two of the greatest games ever are being remade for modern audiences.
The first is Metroid Prime, which Chad Metroid Enjoyer Eric Switzer and I have already made the case for everyone to take the time to experience. The second, as you might have guessed from the whole Mount Rushmore bit, is Resident Evil 4. I don't want to oversell Resident Evil 4 for anyone who might be gearing up to play it for the first time next month... but Resident Evil 4 is the greatest horror game of all-time and one of the most influential titles ever to grace pixels.
If you've played any action horror game, any survival horror, or any over the shoulder horror game in the past 20 years, you've been playing Resident Evil 4's ghost. 'But how can it be the best horror ever when Alien: Isolation/Dead Space/The Last of Us exist?' you might say. Those games would not exist without Resident Evil 4's influence. So many of the things we now consider standard were pioneered by RE4. There's a sense now that the biggest games will try to outdo each other with technical prowess, but back when graphics were more limited, necessity was the mother of invention and we saw the foundation of genres altered far more often.
And I don't want to hear anybody complaining that Ashley is annoying. Just shut the fuck up. Put some tape over your mouth. Let me guess, your least favourite word is 'moist'? Why don't you go outside and search for a personality in the long grass? I get that she's a little repetitive sometimes, and because everyone exaggerates her annoying qualities she'll probably be even quieter in the remake, but Ashley is not and was never a big deal.
I think we throw around 'masterpiece' too often in gaming, using it as a synonym for 'game I thought was quite fun'. But Resident Evil 4 is a true gaming masterpiece, a Rushmore-worthy masterpiece, and you owe it to yourself to play it. It's a slice of video game history and remains the pinnacle of its genre. We wouldn't have so many games that came after it, but more to the point, it's damn good on its own. If anything will get me to soften my stance on gaming remakes, it's the one-two punch of Metroid Prime and Resident Evil 4. For them to be worth it though, you all have to play them. For your own sake, you should.