Trigger Happy
plant monster bars the way: go find some weedkiller that you can splash on it. You must collect three books, or some crystals, or combine some herbs, or get more ammo for your gun. The only difference is that instead of typing in commands, you directly control the movement of your character, select items and use them by pressing specialized buttons on the joypad.
Resident Evil is in this way somewhat less sophisticated than Zork or Snowball, or any number of classic text adventures. Nostalgia aside, the comparison is instructive because of the ways in which each game executes aspects of a story. Adventure games on first sight seem to be very close to traditional stories. They were, after all, in the same medium: text. And their descriptions of locations and scenes (often very well written) stimulated the mental imagination in exactly the same way that the prose of a novel does.
Yet even they did not tell an “interactive plot”: locations were all prescripted, and though you had certain freedoms to explore, you were still exploring a determinate, linear world. And just as with more modern games, the uses and combinations of objects available were only those that had been deliberately foreseen by the designer. Resident Evil, on the other hand, imitates a different medium altogether: as we’ve
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