3. Resident Evil 2
The best Resident Evil game by far thus produced on any platform ever, Resident Evil 2 was the game that made me buy a PSX. I saw some friends playing it and I was so utterly enchanted I went out to buy my PSX and the game and a great love affair between me and Resident Evil was born. First off, there are two disks so you can play as either Leon or Claire. It has to be said that Leon has an easier time than Claire as he has better weapons and a better sidekick in the duplicitous Ada Wong. Although Ada does give Leon considerable stress and half of his dialogue in the game consists of 'ADA WAIT!!' At the end of Leon's scenario there is a fantastic moment where Ada 'dies' and Leon sinks to his knees, pounds the ground in anguish and throws the vial containing the virus out into thin air and proclaims "So this is what everyone's been dying for!". It is a moment of high camp melodrama. Claire has a worse time as her sidekick Sherry Birkin is a little girl who is an annoying brat and her weapons (apart from acid rounds in the grenade launcher) are weak. The game starts off in a highly stressful manner where you have to weave through a bunch of zombies in the street to get to a gun shop. This is one of the hardest parts of the game and if you can pull it off without being chomped upon, nothing else in the game will faze you. As far as enemies go - there are the requisite zombies, dogs, lickers, giant spiders and acid spitting plants. William Birkin (the father of Sherry) injected himself with the G virus and he is the big final boss who is rather easy to kill in the A scenarios. In the B scenarios, he is a bit more resilient. Also in the B scenario, you must deal with a type of Tyrant who is dropped into the police station. He wears a raincoat and stalks you. He is a pain in the proverbial. The game, in the best horror survival tradition, involves puzzles and exploring. My only complaint about this is that it generally involves a lot of back tracking and seemingly endless running around the same locations again and again. This is particularly evident in the police station, but the game moves faster as you get into the sewers. If you manage to complete an A scenario and a B scenario at a grade A or B, you unlock Hunk's mission in which you have to fight your way in a speed run through the game's environment which is filled with monsters to the brim. If you can complete Hunk's scenario, then you get Tofu - literally a piece of Tofu - who has to do Hunk's speed run with only a knife. I am not good enough for this standard of play but I have seen Tofu done on YouTube and it is amazing. On the PSX, Resident Evil 2 is the most successful port of the game, selling nearly 6 million copies. Its atmosphere, brilliant music and game play were praised by the critics although many of them thought that the voice acting was poor. The graphics were much better than in the first Resident Evil and so was the interactivity with the environment. Critics especially liked the physical attributes of the characters whenever they were injured as this gave the game some realism compared to its predecessor. However, a lot of people were unimpressed by the inventory box, the easiness and brevity of the game. I believe that the game is still highly playable to this day. No matter how many times you play the game you still get sucker punched by some stupid zombie pretending to be dead, or a zombie that lurks around a corner. As a game, it is pure survival horror, not the action packed Resident Evil 5 and 6. I think this accounts for its enduring popularity.