Obsessive Gaming Challenges Part 2

Sometimes obsessive gaming challenges come premediated. Others come organically. I got into playing Resident Evil, the remake on PS4. I've never played any of them in the series before, but I have both that and Code: Veronica X due to a Humble Bundle I purchased years ago. I finally decided I needed to try it since I played Silent Hill and Parasite Eve and loved them. In fact, I enjoyed the RE remake so much that I wound up playing it a few more times in short succession and at some point will buy the first three on PC through Good Old Games. There's just something about the game design that clicked with me. I think it scratched that itch that Metroid-style games do sometimes, where you figure out where to find certain items to get you to certain places. It doesn't have movement-type upgrades like a Metroid would, but when you boil down the components, that's where you ultimately land.

Anyway, I eventually played through the game again with Jill on hard mode. It took a few tries before I was comfortable enough with the beginning to burn an ink ribbon on a save. Not having looked anything up about the difficulty level, I was concerned I would have a very limited number of saves, but it's surprisingly generous. In retrospect, I could have tried doing much less before taking my initial save. Instead, I had to skip past the initial cutscenes multiple times. Considering the amount of time that the version I was playing on took to load, I spent a lot of time waiting. It kind of made me feel like I was playing a PS1 game again. I ultimately made it through. Funnily enough, like Metroid-style games, I found the beginning of the game harder than the end, but that may have been because I tried to conserve a lot of healing items and ammo. It paid off big time when I reached the end. For my efforts, I unlocked Real Survival mode, which unlinks the item boxes (time to get that notebook out and keep track of where I leave things) and implements manual aiming. Geez! Not sure when I'll go back to that. I ended up playing the game three times in a row before I decided I needed to give it a rest. It'll be waiting for me when I get back, though.