I just started up my Gamefly subscription again, which means I’ll be going through a bunch of games in the next several months. I kind of use Gamefly as an extended demo system, trying out whatever looks interesting. If I don’t like a game at all, I send it back immediately; if I like it a lot, I send it back pretty quickly and plan to buy it; if I like it but don’t love it or don’t see myself replaying it a lot or spending a lot of time on it, I keep it until I’ve played as much of it as I want. In the interest of keeping my writing in gear, I’ll try to throw up some informal reactions to games as I play them, whether I play the whole thing or just pop it in and immediately decide it’s not for me.

First up, I threw Resident Evil 5 in my queue, since it’s October and I figured, why not start off with a horror game, plus despite enjoying all the movies I’ve never tried any of the games, so I thought it’d be fun to check them out. (Note: Resident Evil 5 is the only RE game available for the Xbox360, at least that Gamefly had.)

Well, it wasn’t fun. I played basically one level, playing Chris Redfield and accompanying some girl through a banana republic type country, shooting a few zombie mutant things as we went. But the game mechanics, specifically the fact that as soon as you aim your gun you come to a dead halt and cannot move, were so frustrating that any enjoyment I hoped to get out of the game pretty much evaporated completely. Add into that the fact that you have to keep your partner alive (I hate escort missions in any game; hate ‘em) and I opted not to continue any further. There are too many games with mechanics that make sense to waste time on one where I’m frustrated beyond belief every five seconds.

It was nice to see the giant, axe/hammer-wielding mutant that showed up for no reason in Resident Evil: Afterlife in his original environment. I don’t know if they explained his existence or not, though. Finding out wasn’t worth the headache of continuing to play the game.