Resident Evil 5 (PS3)
They're coming to get you, Barbara.
3/12/2009 8:33 PM | 10 Comments | Page 1 of 4
What's Hot: No more antique-typewriter save system; Co-op works well when you've got a person with a pulse to play with; Shorter than Resident Evil 4.
What's Not: Subhuman portayals of Africans are offensive; AI-controlled partner not helpful approximately 60 percent of the time; Nothing here that you haven't really seen or done already in Resident Evil 4 (or Lost Planet).
Scott Jones
Status: Coffee makes me feel 4-percent sexier.
This game was reviewed on the Xbox 360 and tested on the PlayStation 3. No notable performance or video differences were noted.
First things first: I'm a big white dude. Aside from a small amount of Native American blood, I'm as white as white gets. So I'll say this as clearly and as honestly as I possibly can: As a big white dude, I was uncomfortable with the subhuman portrayals of black people in
Resident Evil 5. I remember -- cue the flashback harp music -- shifting in my seat during a screening of "The Birth of a Nation" as an undergraduate. I remember thinking that something was wrong with what I was looking at, even if I couldn't effectively articulate what was wrong at the time.
In watching "The Birth of a Nation," I felt like an accomplice to the film's sins, and I felt the guilt and shame that typically comes along with being an accomplice.
Boo.
I felt the same way while playing through
Resident Evil 5. If you've got a PC bone in your body, if you know the history of racism at all,
Resident Evil 5 is not going to sit right with you.
The game shifts milieus from Vague European Burg (where
Resident Evil 4 was set) to Vague African Savannah, but preserves the now-familiar over-the-shoulder vantage point from
Resident Evil 4. Thick-necked Chris Redfield, the protagonist from the original
Resident Evil, and newcomer Sheva Alomar are the dynamic duo sent to subvert -- you guessed it -- another bio-terror threat. Both are so ridiculously hale and hearty, they appear to have just finished high-fiving after doing wheatgrass shots.
The African zombies, in contrast, look underfed and hollow-eyed. Their lips are puffed and cracked; their bloodshot eyes practically bug out from their skulls. The physical contrast between the game's heroes and villains -- light skin versus dark skin (even Sheva, who's African, is light-skinned); civilized versus savage -- makes cutting down hordes of the infected with a submachine gun a complicated and troubling act.
Things get more troubling when a scream erupts from a nearby alleyway, and Chris and Sheva spot a white woman being practically dragged off by the hair by a zombie. Chris and Sheva give chase. When they find the woman, something has happened to her. She falls limply into Chris' arms. "Are you OK?" Chris asks repeatedly. The woman, of course, promptly transforms into a zombie. She has been infected.
Chris and Sheva are forced to destroy this abomination. It happens so quickly that you don't really have a chance to unpack what's going on here; you don't think about what you're doing until after you've done it. The logical moment-after question is this: What the f*** is a white woman wearing a thigh-length black dress doing wandering around in the middle of this nowhere African village? Did her plane bound for fashion week in Madrid make a wrong turn somewhere?
More poignantly: It's wholly unnecessary for Capcom to invoke dated racist tropes -- tropes regarding what black men will do to white women; tropes with none-too-subtle connotations of rape and transformation -- in the name of making
Resident Evil 5.
