You can’t keep a good zombie down. Or zombie game, for that matter. Capcom was quite successful last year with their port of Resident Evil 4 to the Wii, and they’ve decided to try it again this time with Resident Evil Zero. If you’re unfamiliar with the title, it was the first Resident Evil title developed exclusively for the GameCube (assuming you don’t count the remake of part one). Folks, it’s the Street Fighter II syndrome all over again.
Capcom is one of the most notorious companies for cashing in on its titles, and no incident is more famous than Street Fighter II. After the runaway success of Street Fighter II in the arcades, Capcom issued update after update in the form of new arcade games, and eventually home console ports. It became a running gag that Capcom couldn’t count to three, except with the Mega Man series, which was seeing about ten new releases a year at the time.
Now, it appears Capcom is doing the same with the Resident Evil franchise. All the sequels were already ported to the GameCube originally. Are they going to add Wii remote capability to each and re-release them? This might be interesting if they were all getting remade using the Resident Evil 4 engine, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Still, Resident Evil 2 and 3 are starting to show their age, so there is always the hope they might see graphical updates if they too get ported to the Wii.
Still, simply porting Resident Evil 0 to the Wii is pointless. The original GameCube release will work just fine. So, what’s new? It appears, obviously, that Wiimote control has been added, but exactly how it will work with the old style tank controls of Resident Evil is a bit of a mystery. Additionally, the questions of new content or enhanced visuals are also up in the air. Also unclear is whether this is a sign that Capcom is throwing Resident Evil support behind the Wii and whether gamers might see an original entry in the series on Nintendo’s little console that could.
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February 27th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
Well, this port is an easy cash in for Capcom, and maybe a way to say “We are not porting RE5 to Wii, sorry, but you get RE0, so cheer up will you?”.
Is it a bussiness smart move? well, based on the sales of UC and RE4Wii, it may appear so, but milking a franchise in the same way as Capcom did to SFII will lead to its demise or to reduced sales for future games in the franchise. I think RE0 Wii will sell around 250-350k copies if it does well, running on RE4Wii hype, and after that, fans and gamers will think they had enough RE and will move on to other M games or something.