When I compiled a list of all the video games in the Resident Evil franchise that I would have to play to experience the core canon, The Darkside Chronicles was the one entry that I thought I would have to watch on YouTube rather than experience for myself. It launched as a PlayStation Move-enabled title for the PS3, and while I have a working console I didn’t have the wherewithal to find a copy of the game and some working controllers.
PlayStation Plus to the actual rescue?
If anything, my getting to play this title—via streaming, which was as robust as playing it on the original hardware—was an excellent use-case argument for a one month subscription to Sony’s wildly overpriced games-on-demand service. There was a time when I swore up and down, until I was blue in the face, that these services (Xbox Game Pass, PS Plus; even Ubisoft+ and EA Play Pro to a lesser extent) were the absolute best values in gaming. And, I still think they are, but with a caveat: only if you don’t own many video games. I own far too many to make a standing subscription worthwhile. PS Plus was the first I let lapse six months ago—resulting in an over 122 Canadian dollar savings—and I’m prepared to let my Xbox Game Pass Ultimate sub die when it finally runs out in March of 2025. But, should a premium video game come along on either service, and I have the time to focus it down and finish it in a month or two, spending $20-40 on a sub to either service still beats laying out the insane $90 price tag that the big name publishers have decided their product is worth.
It’s not, by the way. Unless you’re shelling out for a physical edition that comes with a box of tchotchke that may appreciate in value over time, no digital download of any video game, anywhere, from any period, is worth more than twenty American dollars. You can chisel that into the granite face of my tombstone.
All this is to justify a month of helping Sony crawl out of the hole they dug for themselves with their Concord debacle. I was able to play this on-rails, designed for lightgun Resident Evil shooter on my PlayStation 5 with a regular controller. And it was torturous. Now that I sit here thinking about it, it would have been a huge brain move on my part to plug in a mouse. That’s a thing you can do on a PS5, yeah? If you decide you want to play this game for yourself, I recommend finding out. Failing that, do yourself a favor and get a hold of the original hardware and a Move controller. Playing this game on a standard controller was like trying to thread limp spaghetti through the eye of a needle for seven hours.
But the game is a massive bridge between games one, two, three, Veronica and four. I’d go as far as to strongly recommend that you don’t play Resident Evil 4 until you’ve at least somehow consumed the lore from Chronicles.
But is it a good game? I can’t say. I still haven’t played it properly.
2024.10.30 – 2024.11.10
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