ZombiePAGES.com

Source: http://www.australianit.news.com.au/

Now, with the Wii Zapper gun accessory and Capcom’s Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, Nintendo is moving to add its unique gaming flavour to that time-honoured genre, the shoot ‘em up.

If you didn’t guess it from the name, the Wii Zapper is a hard-cased shell that houses the wiimote and nunchuck and turns them into a gun that can be used to point and shoot at the screen.

It can be held with one hand or two, depending on whether the nunchuck is locked into the attachment or held as normal.

Holding the Zapper in one hand is the more comfortable option, as it is quite small, unwieldy and awkward to handle.

Luckily, this is how it’s used in Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles, and used well, as the nunchuck is your knife, and you find yourself wildly waving it around when you are swarmed by ravenous birds or covered with diseased leeches.

Because all the movement and progression is controlled by the game itself, all you have to worry about is aiming and shooting, which is good because the process of reloading and selecting can be a bit awkward and takes some getting used to.

The process of aiming is not as straightforward as just pointing the gun at the screen and firing. There is a bit of a technique to it, because you have to concentrate more on where the gun is in relation to the sensor bar, as opposed to the television.

Resident Evil overcomes this to a degree by having the reticle light up when it is targeting a vulnerable part of an enemy, such as the head of a zombie, but there are still occasions when this does not register correctly.

Once you have got your technique straight, there is a lot of fun in stopping zombies in their tracks by shooting their legs and then killing them with a headshot, or waiting until the fangs of a rabid dog are right in your face before you stop it with a fatal shot.

In fact, if shooting is all you are after, you don’t have to look much further than this incarnation of the Resident Evil series.

Where its predecessors placed just as much importance on the story line as the exercise of mowing down zombies (in fact it was good enough to create a couple of movies about), this aspect is distinctly lacking here. The plot, overall, feels tacked on and incomplete.

There are a number of storylines unfolding across a number of timeframes, which can be played with a number of characters, so the plot is hard to get into.

In fact the story feels as though it is more like a special features disc for the series, providing all the back story and interesting side notes, but not really adding anything to the plot.

I guess you could say this is also reflected in the title, The Umbrella Chronicles, as opposed to the next part of the series.

That said, the game does deliver those classic Resident Evil moments when your heart skips a couple of beats as you turn around to face the head of a zombie that looks like it has been chewed by a rabid dog.

It also recreates the sense of being stuck in a completely hopeless situation, in which it would be tempting to just give up and become dinner for the zombies.

Without an engaging and fast-paced storyline, this title becomes more of an arcade-style shooter in which you just kill bigger and badder zombies and mutated animals as you progress.

Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles and the Wii Zapper provide great shoot ‘em up value in your living room, but there is still a long way to go before either delivers a truly memorable gaming experience.