#oneaday Day 887: RPD

Played a couple of hours of Resident Evil 2 Remake this evening, and am pleased to see so far that it appears to live up to the positive reception it had when it first released: it feels like a Resident Evil game while simultaneously also feeling pleasantly modern.

I am particularly pleased to see that the way in which you use items to solve puzzles and manipulate objects in close-up is still present; this feels like an important part of the "survival horror" era of Resident Evil, and it just wouldn't be Resident Evil 2 without it.

I'm not going to talk too much about the game right now as I'll be writing about it on Rice Digital as part of the ongoing Resident Evil Retrospective I'm doing over there, but suffice to say that it's been a good time so far — and I'm also very impressed with its performance on a base PS4, too; I wasn't expecting it to run quite so smooth and slickly, but it really does look great.

Instead, I thought I'd share a story about the original Resident Evil 2 from back when it originally came out. It's not a story with any real point to it and it's probably only interesting to me, but it's an important part of why Resident Evil 2 is such a fond memory for me.

Resident Evil 2 came out just in time for a long, hot summer while my friends and I were enjoying our time in post-compulsory education. After a year of studying for our A-Levels — and with another year ahead of us still to go — we were, of course, pretty keen to let our hair down in the summer holidays.

As it happened, my parents had gone away for a trip to the States to go and see my brother. It was my first time "home alone", and of course I did some things I regret that I got into a lot of trouble for, but that's a story for another time perhaps. The majority of that summer holiday was spent in the company of a couple of good friends who were pretty much as nerdy about gaming as I still am.

When Resident Evil 2 came out, we all picked it up, and since my house was becoming the default place to hang out, become intoxicated, eat Pot Noodles and play video games, that was the venue for us playing it a whole bunch.

As a tangent, I'll just point out at this stage that some weeks prior to the incident I'm about to describe, another friend had helpfully informed me that I "say the word 'cock' like a porn star". This led to the word "cock", being said like a porn star, becoming something of an unofficial greeting, term of endearment and general-purpose mildly offensive word between most of our friendship group.

Which leads us to the Resident Evil 2 incident. Our friend Ed had gone to bed as he hadn't been able to take the Frogger marathon we'd enjoyed earlier in the evening. Naturally, we left an active metronome outside his door to see how long it would take for him to notice. (Quite a while, as I recall… at least until we put the bell on.) My other friend Woody and I, however, we had been drinking, and we were up for some zombie action.

We began a Claire A playthrough. And after some initial laughing at the dialogue — "that guy's a maniac! Whhhhhy'd he bite me?!" — we settled into a routine of saying nothing but "COCK" to one another in the aforementioned style of a porn star. (If you want to recreate it for yourself, say the word "cock" while throwing your head back, placing a strong emphasis on the "oh" phoneme and a slight pause before concluding with the "ck")

This continued for approximately two hours as we played through most of Resident Evil 2 for the umpteenth time. To this day, I still have no idea why we started doing this, nor why it continued for quite that long. But it remains an oddly special memory to me, even though it's absolute complete and utter nonsense — and thus whenever I think of Resident Evil 2 on the PS1, I think of "Cock! Cock! Cock!"