Impressions: “Resident Evil 3.5 Code: Madman” (Fan Game Demo)

Although I mentioned this one recently, I thought that I’d take a slightly closer look at ShiguWorks’ 2017 “Resident Evil 3.5 Code: Madman” fan game demo. This was something I stumbled across whilst searching the Internet Archive for anything related to the 2003 “Hook Man” E3 footage (warning- flickering lights) of a – very different – unfinished early version of “Resident Evil 4” (2005).

The version of this fan game demo on the Internet Archive is presented as a disc image, which means it has to be burned to a DVD in a specific way before the game itself can be accessed and copied across to your computer. This was a bit convoluted, and I’m sure that there’s probably a direct download of the demo somewhere else on the internet. Especially since it is less than 300mb in size. Still, it was certainly a blast from the past to have an actual physical demo disc 🙂

Yes, it was one I had to cobble together myself. Seriously, I miss when proper demo discs were released with game magazines….

Anyway, let’s take a look at “Resident Evil 3.5 Code: Madman”. This article may contain SPOILERS and the demo itself contains a FLICKERING LIGHT (albeit a fairly subtle one, at the very end).

This demo tries to imagine what part of the unfinished version of “Resident Evil 4” might have looked and played like. There isn’t really much of a story here, Leon shows up in a creepy old mansion and scary things start happening….

Well, if you do insist on “entering the world of survival horror….”

One of the first things that I will say about this demo is that it is brilliant 🙂 Whilst I spotted a few small technical flaws, it’s the closest thing anyone can get to a playable version of this intriguing abandoned game. No, it doesn’t contain any of the set pieces shown in the 2003 E3 footage, but it instead tries to imagine what other parts of the game might have looked like. This helps to keep it scary and unpredictable.

And, yes, this demo is scarier than you might expect 🙂 One of the cool things about the 2003 “hook man” footage is that the man behind it, Yasuhisa Kawamura, actually tried adding psychological horror elements to the “Resident Evil” series 🙂 The premise seems to be that Leon has been infected or drugged with something and, sometimes, the lighting will turn blue and scary things will start happening.

Woo hoo! Psychological horror 🙂

This fan game demo re-creates this “hallucination” mechanic brilliantly and, as hinted earlier, does some creative stuff with it 🙂

Whilst there is literally one token zombie for Leon to fight, most of the game gets rid of the usual suspenseful “Resident Evil” style horror and focuses instead on the type of unsettling psychological horror that is almost more reminiscent of the “Silent Hill” series 🙂 The world around you can change in bizarre ways and there’s also a brilliantly disturbing puzzle that you have to solve at one point too 🙂

“I mirror pain and death“. It may only be an unofficial fan game demo, but this is one of the best – and scariest – “Resident Evil” puzzles I’ve ever seen….

Yes, this makes the demo feel a little bit linear and set-piece heavy, with one clear path through the game and events that have to be experienced in just one order. It can feel like a hybrid between a proper survival horror game and a “walking simulator” horror game at times, but this is handled so well and is so brilliantly atmospheric that I still ended up playing it twice. Even so, this game will be at its best – and scariest – on your very first playthrough, when you don’t know what to expect.

As well as the lighting, a lot of this is due to the excellent sound design 🙂 Not only is the voice-acting for Leon surprisingly good for a fan game, but there are also some brilliantly creepy sound effects too. Not only does the one zombie sound louder and more fearsome than a typical “Resident Evil” zombie (I heard the moan from the next room and it genuinely frightened me), but there are other well-placed sound effects, and even a few cool references too – like a “Silent Hill”-esque crackling radio and a piano rendition of “Moonlight Sonata” too 🙂

Huh? Radio? What’s going… Ooops! Wrong game! This is “Resident Evil 3.5 Code: Madman”.

Not only that, some of the fixed camera angles in this demo (unless you choose to play with an “over the shoulder” camera instead) are really amazing too – with some of the ones in the main hall balcony not only using a dramatic “Dutch angle” but also clearly hinting where the player has to go next too.

Not to mention that the game also uses the “dolly zoom” style camera movement found in part of the lab level in “Resident Evil: Outbreak” (2003) too.

Seriously, this camera angle is so cool 🙂

Seriously, it was so cool to play a game that looks like the castle level of “Resident Evil 4” (2005)… but with proper old-school fixed camera angles 🙂 It actually felt like the classic “Resident Evil” that I know and love 🙂

Seriously, to think that “Resident Evil 4” could have had these awesome camera angles instead of a boring “over the shoulder” one…

Being a demo, the gameplay itself is surprisingly streamlined. There’s no inventory screen and Leon also seems to have infinite ammo for his pistol too – albeit with a reload animation every eight shots or so. It was kind of weird to play a “Resident Evil” game without the series’ trademark resource management elements, but this streamlining helped to place more emphasis on the atmosphere and psychological horror elements though.

Like in the E3 footage, most of the game is played with traditional fixed camera angles and tank controls by default but, unlike in the E3 footage, the game switches to an “over the shoulder” camera when Leon draws either his pistol or knife (and he’s able to walk slowly whilst doing this). You can also go into the options menu and switch the entire game to an “over the shoulder” camera if you prefer. And, yes, this demo actually has a surprisingly detailed “options” menu 🙂

The blending of fixed camera angles and “over the shoulder” aiming also reminded me a bit of a game from 2005 called “Cold Fear” too.

Yes, you can’t re-bind keys and it took me a few seconds to work out the controls (most are fairly “standard” WSAD controls, but “left ctrl” is used to confirm choices on the main menu. The game recommends using a controller though), but the game actually allows you to run it at 640 x 480 on low settings which, on my computer’s Intel HD 2500 integrated graphics, actually allowed the game to run at a smooth speed 🙂

Performance was reasonably good most of the time, although I encountered a couple of annoying glitches. On my first playthrough, I fell through the floor at one point and had to restart the game. Likewise, the aiming in the game’s one combat segment is… inaccurate… to put it mildly. Plus, sometimes I noticed a weird delay when trying to close examination text too. But this is a demo and a fan game, so some rough edges are to be expected.

Yes, despite having a laser sight, this zombie is still difficult to hit sometimes. Luckily though, this version of “Resident Evil 4” is a horror game, rather than an action game 🙂

As for length, this is a demo. If you know what you are doing, you can complete it in less than ten minutes – but your first playthrough will probably be at least twice that length as you try to work out where to go and what to do next.

All in all, this demo is absolutely excellent 🙂 Yes, it has a few rough edges, but it’s a playable demonstration of another – much better – direction that the “Resident Evil” series could have taken during the mid-2000s. Yes, the actual “Resident Evil 4” (2005) was a masterpiece of the action genre and a seriously fun game that is endlessly re-playable. But, from a pure horror perspective, this low-budget fan demo shows how the series could have evolved whilst also still staying true to its traditions.

If I had to give it a rating out of five, it might just get a five.

Survival Horror Fan Games

Well, for this article in the second season of my “Horror Videogames Series“, I thought that I’d talk briefly about survival horror fan games. These are unofficial games, made and released non-commercially, that are based on well-known classic survival horror games.

I should probably include a GRUESOME IMAGES warning for any game footage linked in this article too. They’re horror games, what do you expect?

This is something I ended up thinking about after watching some footage of a modern fan remake of the opening segment of “Silent Hill” (1999) using the Unreal 5 engine. Yes it is early “pre-alpha” footage, but it still really impressed me. The later parts of it almost felt like a proper “faithful” modern remake of this classic game 🙂

And it’s hardly the only example of this sort of thing – another example is some footage I saw of a fan remake of “Resident Evil: Code Veronica X” (2001) in the style of Capcom’s more modern “Resident Evil” remakes. For an unofficial low-budget fan game, it looks really impressive.

This also brings me on to one of the main reasons why fan games exist. Both of these games are unofficial non-commercial fan projects because there isn’t really a proper official equivalent of them. Konami seems to have all but abandoned the “Silent Hill” franchise these days and, whilst Capcom are remaking older “Resident Evil” games, they seem to have skipped “Code Veronica” at the time of writing. Despite heavy demand amongst die-hard fans, these games seem to have been ignored – hence why some fans have have decided to take matters into their own hands.

But, it isn’t all woe and gloom. Sometimes, survival horror fan games are made because they allow the designers to experiment with different things and try out “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” stuff. A great example of this is a fan game demo I played last year called “Biohazard Uncomplete“.

This is a re-imagining of the original 1996 version of “Resident Evil” as a first-person perspective game, and it is really cool. The designer of this fan game has absolutely nailed the “look” of the original game. Yet, playing part of the game from this perspective showed me a lot about why the original game was designed in the way it was. The most notable example of this is it’s pacing.

In the original 1996 game, a loading animation plays whenever you open a door. The screen goes dark and you see the door… slowly… opening for several seconds. This was partially included as a hat tip to an old NES game called “Sweet Home” (1989), but it was mostly there because the original Playstation didn’t have the RAM to store more than a few rooms at any given time. So, the console needed a few seconds to get the data from the disc when you moved between rooms.

Of course, in this modern first-person perspective fan game, the doors just open normally and in a realistic way. And it completely changes the entire “feel” and pacing of the game. As cool as it is not to see loading screens, they actually built a lot of suspense and helped to keep the game’s pacing atmospheric and slow. On your very first playthrough of the game, the animations also create an ominous feeling of mystery whenever you open a door too.

Still, it was cool to see what the game would have been like if it had been a first-person perspective game. And this “what if…” thing probably explains some of the more creative fan games out there. For example, sometimes people “de-make” games to see what they would have looked like on even older hardware – such as this footage of a Playstation 1 style version of “Resident Evil 4” (2005) – which, delightfully, also includes classic-style fixed camera angles too 🙂

De-makes are perhaps one of the best types of fan tributes, for the simple reason that they show just how timeless some of these games are. They are a really fun way for fans to show that, even on ancient hardware, these games would have still been amazing.

Even so, as awesome and fun as fan games are, the future of classic-style survival horror probably lies in the hands of more creative fans who have taken the time to come up with completely new and original ideas for games in this style. Some good examples of this include “Alisa” (2021) and “Tormented Souls”  (2021).

These original games have the advantage of being able to be commercially sold, which gives them more of a reach and a level of mainstream respectability than traditional fan games do. Their originality also makes them a bit scarier too since, whilst the style of gameplay might be familiar, almost everything else about these games isn’t. They have new characters, monsters, locations etc… Which really helps to re-capture the feeling of playing one of the classics for the very first time.

Still, survival horror fan games are cool nonetheless. And they’re also a testament to the power and proliferation of modern game development tools. Back in the 1990s and early-mid 2000s, ordinary fans wouldn’t have had the tools to make fan games that almost reach the visual quality of “AAA” games. And, let’s face it, back then most of us wanted to make something in this style. So, the fact that these fan games exist these days is probably the fulfilment of a lot of people’s long-held ambitions and dreams 🙂

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Anyway, I hope that this was interesting 🙂

First Impressions: “Biohazard – Uncomplete (Version 1)” (Fan Game)

Although this first “season” of my “Horror Videogames Series” will conclude at the end of the month (and I’m hoping to start the second “season” on about the 12th January – stay tuned for daily articles in the meantime…), I happened to stumble across this “Ink Ribbon” video about a “work in progress” demo version of a fan game called “Biohazard – Uncomplete (Version 1)” (2021). And, I just had to take a very quick look at it for myself. Here are my rambling first impressions after playing for about 15-20 minutes.

Surprisingly, despite being a modern 3D game made in Unity, the game actually ran on my computer’s Intel HD 2500 integrated graphics…. sort of. The framerate was about 5-10 FPS, it felt like I was playing the game in slow-motion and the motion blur effects seemed… a lot…. more pronounced than they probably should have been too. Still, it actually ran! On my computer! So, I have to praise the developer for this 🙂

Wow! There’s nothing pre-rendered about THIS! It’s fully 3D 🙂

As the title suggests, this is a fan game based on the original 1996 version of “Resident Evil”…. but with fully 3D environments and a first-person perspective.

I really love how this fan game actually preserves the visual style of the original game – even down to it’s GIF-like low colour depth and colour banding (although the banding seems slightly more pronounced here) . And, given how almost all efforts at “official” game preservation have centred on the – admittedly better – 2002 remake, it’s good to see someone keeping the memory and style of the original 1996 game alive too 🙂

Seriously, although the 2002 remake has graphics that are good enough to still hold up today, there’s something to be said for the quintessentially ’90s visual style of the original too.

Interestingly, the game sets itself up as a prequel, offering the player the chance to play as a member of Bravo team (namely Rebecca, Richard appears in a menu but isn’t selectable yet).

And, yes, from what I’ve seen of it, it is actually a prequel – since you can briefly catch a glimpse of Kenneth being chased by a zombie before a recreation of the iconic “first zombie” cutscene plays. Not only is the recreation based on the uncensored version of this cutscene, but Rebecca can also find a better weapon next to Kenneth’s mortal remains too.

Surprisingly, this moment is actually slightly scarier in first-person perspective. Especially since, in order to fight this zombie (and get Kenneth’s gun), you actually have to get really close to it.

One cool thing about this fan game is the fact that it keeps the “awkward” combat and suspenseful horror elements that the original game was known for.

Not only is Rebecca extremely vulnerable to damage but – whilst the knife can be used like an “ordinary” first-person shooter weapon (and, in a concession to fairness, is more powerful than in the original game) – the game still keeps the “stand still and aim” combat system of the original game for ranged weapons. You right-click to go into aiming mode and then left-click to fire. You cannot move whilst aiming. This helps to preserve the “survival horror” elements of the game and prevent it turning into a typical shooter game.

Seriously, it’s a small detail, but not being able to move whilst aiming is what makes “Resident Evil”… well… “Resident Evil” 🙂

Talking of the combat, another interesting detail is that – whilst fighting with the knife – there is a small chance of decapitating zombies. And, yes, this fan remake seems to be at least slightly gorier than the original 1996 game… but it still fits into the general “style” of the game.

Still, the switch to first-person perspective has some interesting effects. Because doors can be opened in real-time and there are no fixed cameras, the pacing and “feel” of the game completely changes.

It feels a lot faster and more “fluid” – which makes for compelling gameplay, albeit at the cost of the unique atmosphere and ultra-slow pacing of the original. Still, it is truly amazing to be able to walk around a fully 3D version of the Spencer Mansion – and I’m still astonished at how accurate all of the textures and the overall visual style of the game is.

This actually looks like something from the 1990s! And it’s in full 3D as well 🙂 This is amazing!

Interestingly, this fan game also seems to include a small amount of artistic licence too. Not only does the game begin outside the mansion, but there is also an additional scare involving the windows in a familiar location too. These changes are small, and they are clearly designed to work better with the first-person perspective too.

Of course, being a “work in progress” version, it isn’t complete. There are no ammo counters, and weapons get stuck in a reloading animation when empty. The inventory screen is still clearly unfinished. There is no saving system, no graphics/resolution settings, non-adjustable motion blur, no customisable controls (The controls are listed on the website in Spanish, but they’re fairly easy to work out if you’ve played FPS games. “Alt + F4” exits the game though) etc… But, for an early build of something seemingly made by just one person, this is still one hell of an impressive project 🙂

It would be unfair to give a game this early in development a review score, but – whilst there is still clearly some way to go – it’s an absolutely brilliant fan project 🙂 The original 1996 version of “Resident Evil” seems to have been relatively neglected in terms of “official” re-releases (there was one in 2006 for the Nintendo DS. And, although it’s easy to forget about, the 1997 “Director’s Cut” version of it appeared on the “PlayStation Classic” in 2018 too), so it’s cool to see an unofficial attempt at keeping this influential classic alive. Yes, the pacing and general “feel” of this fan game is different to the original, but it’s still really cool.

Review: “Rachel” (Free ‘Blade Runner’ Fan Game/Parody Game)

Well, I was in something of a “Blade Runner” mood yet again and, during an idle Google search (whilst trying to decide whether or not to replay the classic Westwood “Blade Runner” game, or to continue playing another 1990s game I plan to review in the future), I ended up stumbling across a free “Blade Runner” fan game/parody game called “Rachel” [NOTE: The site starts playing music automatically].

(Oh, if anyone is interested in how I created the image at the top of this article – I drew the line art on paper, then I scanned it and added the colours digitally before using a simplified version of this technique to convert it into pixel art. After this, I used various other digital effects for the background).

Anyway, let’s take a look at “Rachel”:

“Rachel” is a short browser game by JeromBD that was made for an event in 2015 called AltJam. It’s intended to be a combination between a “Blade Runner” parody and an interactive version of the famous interview scene between Deckard and Rachel. However, instead of talking to Deckard, you talk to another Blade Runner called M.Graham Palmer:

Obviously, Palmer hasn’t used a Voight-Kampff machine before, because Deckard clearly states that the equipment isn’t affected by cigarette smoke. Seriously, it’s there in the film.

As you can probably see, the game itself uses 1980s-style blocky, limited-palette graphics. Whilst I can understand this decision from a creative perspective, I think that the game’s palette would have probably looked better if it was blue/green/red/yellow/black instead. I don’t know, all of the bright pink in the game tends to detract slightly from the gloomy, gothic noir atmosphere of the film.

Likewise, there is also an optional “scanline” filter that re-creates a low-quality CRT monitor from the 80s. As cool as this looks, it can get in the way of the game slightly and you’ll probably end up deactivating it fairly quickly:

The scanlines look cool, but the game is more playable without them.

As for the gameplay, you just answer sixteen multiple choice questions using the “x”, “c” and/or “v” keys. My guess is that these keyboard controls are meant to simulate the early personal computers of the 1980s. Although they’re somewhat before my time, from what I’ve read and seen, many games back then used slightly unusual letter keys for the controls. Even so, these controls take a bit of getting used to.

The animations and text in the game are also slowed down quite considerably too (to simulate using an old computer). Whilst this looks suitably authentic and helps to pad out what is a very short game, it can get slightly frustrating at times.

The writing in this game is something of a mixed bag too. Like in the film, the questions are an interesting mixture of silly questions, philosophical questions and intentionally disturbing questions.

Are you testing whether I’m a cannibal or a replicant, Mr.Deckard ?

Most of the comedy comes from the possible answers that you are presented with. However, although some of the answers are quite funny, the sarcastic answers tend to get a little bit repetitive after a while. Still, there’s at least one piece of brilliantly funny meta humour here:

Not to mention a very sneaky reference to Philip K.Dick’s “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?” too 🙂

Likewise, although the fact that someone has re-created this scene from “Blade Runner” is really cool, the fact that it was made in a short space of time is fairly obvious from the English translations in some of the text screens.

Writing something in another language is difficult enough, let alone writing well – so, I have to give the game’s creator credit for including English text during the limited time frame. However, the grammar and English translations in this game can be a bit clunky – but probably ten times better than if I tried to write something in my second language(eg: rusty GCSE-level French). Whilst you can usually tell what the text is supposed to say, it can be a little confusing sometimes:

Er….. I’ll choose answer one.

As for the music, it’s authentic 1980s-style computer game music. Not the souped-up modern equivalent, but actual 1980s-style game music. In other words, the music only plays one tone at a time and has a rather ominous dirge-like sound to it (reminscent of a dial-up modem after an extra-hot vindaloo). It gets top marks for authenticity, although it can get a little bit annoying after a while.

All in all, the actual gameplay in “Rachel” isn’t really that great. However, for what this game tries to be, it succeeds brilliantly! Seriously, I can’t imagine anything cooler than a game where you actually get to play as Rachel from “Blade Runner”. Not to mention that, although I’m more of a 90s gamer, the fact that someone has tried to re-create what a 1980s computer game actually plays like is astonishingly cool in it’s own right.

If I had to give it a rating out of five, I’d give it five for the idea and one and a half for the actual gameplay.