Jul/28/2003

The recent Australian release of Resident Evil 2 on GameCube has been met with little fan enthusiasm and even lower sales thanks to its less than spectacular port. While most gamers weren't expecting much from the port (assumed to be based on the 1998 Playstation release), most were bewildered to find out the game was actually a port of the Game.com version.

The Game.com was a short-lived monochrome screened handheld that had a limited release around 1999. The Game.com version of Resident Evil 2 was released around the same time, and was criticised by most reviewers for its 'Game & Watch' style gameplay and generally difficult controls.

They got all this onto one disc? Amazing.

"What the hell is this?" asked dissatisfied gamer Nick Crawford; "This shit looks worse than Gaiden." But Nick isn't the only one asking these questions, with many gamers apparently buying the sequel expecting something on par with the Resident Evil 1 remake.

"Why didn't they just remake it like the first game?" asked another discouraged gamer who purchased the Resident Evil 2 port.

"We considered remaking it for the GameCube, but we thought that might distract from the upcoming launch of Resident Evil 4 [coming 2004 –Ed]" said Tadashi Ito, the head of Capcom's product division.

He then added "And of course, it would have been an extra fuck-ton of work for us, so we thought 'why bother?'"

A red Game.com Pocket Pro, running Resident Evil 2

Well, fair enough, but why a port of the Game.com version? Easier to port than the Playstation version?

"That's what we thought too" said Mr. Ito, "But it turns out the Game.com version had a touch-screen feature, so it took us a while to remove that from the GameCube port."

This looks great on the GameCube.

Asked if this meant that the 80 dollar (Australian) GameCube port actually had fewer features than the black and white Game.com version, Mr. Ito replied in the affirmative.

Oh for the love of Jiminy..

-Blake