resident-evil-4 posts

The Resident Evil movie series, while only loosely based on the Capcom survival horror series, have been pretty successful for its studio Sony Pictures. This weekend's release of the fourth movie in the series, Resident Evil Afterlife, has been no exception. The Hollywood Reporter reports that the film easily won the box office crown this weekend with a total of $27.7 million in ticket sales.

The amount was boosted by the movie's 3D release which raises the ticket prices for those who want to see zombies coming out of the screen. The movie reportedly cost just $60 million to produce and with this weekend's box office success it's likely that a fifth movie in the series will be made. Indeed (spoiler alert) Afterlife ends with a cliffhanger that would strongly suggest a new film is already planned.

Capcom has been making waves about their commitment to PC gaming, including a recent announcement that they would be joining the PC Gaming Alliance as a full member. However, their record to date on supporting PC titles is spotty at best. Games like Resident Evil 4, Devil May Cry 4 and most recently the downloadable title Age of Booty have been released for the PC months after their console counterparts.

VideoGamer.com has a new chat with Capcom VP Christian Svensson on why exactly this happens. Svensson basically says that it takes more time to develop a PC port of a game, particularly when it has content that is not in the console version. Testing of PC games also takes a lot of time, according to Svensson. He admits that on the subject of the timing of their PC game releases compared to console ports, "The sad news is we're not going to be consistent about it for a while. So while it's a message I'd love to get across we're not quite walking the walk yet." He also goes into some detail on their views of PC piracy, why they don't work with Valve's Steam service more and other subjects.

Developing PC games just by themselves can be challenging. You have to deal with not one but thousands of different hardware configurations along with updating graphics drivers, the unique keyboard-mouse interface and more. But what about when you develop a PC game that was originally made for a console like the PS3, the Xbox 360 or others?

Some PC ports of console games have been embraced by PC games like Gearbox's superior port of Bungie's first Halo game and more recently BioWare's PC version of Mass Effect. Yet so many other consoles games either don't translate well to the PC formula or fail to reach a wide audience even if they add content that is not in the original version. Today we take a look at the many console games that either failed as a PC game translation or failed to reach a high PC gamer audience.

Click on the image above to continue reading "The College Try: Failed PC Ports Of Console Games"

Capcom has been coy about plans to release Resident Evil 5 on the PC so far. While Resident Evil 4 was released for the PC last year it got slammed by critics for, among other issues, not providing mouse support. However according to a recent Eurogamer article a PC version of Resident Evil 5 is likely.

In the meantime, fans of the series can look forward to Resident Evil: Degeneration, a full length CGI feature film from Capcom and Sony Pictures. The film, which had a new trailer premiere at the San Diego Comic-Con last weekend, will be released theatrically in Japan and released on DVD, Blu-Ray and the PSP's UMD format in the US later this year. The trailer shows some impressive human CGI animation and character models and fans of the Resident Evil series will be glad to see regulars Leon and Claire around. Oh, and there are zombies..almost forgot to mention that.