Cerise Magazine

October 2007 Issue

Features

• From the Editors
• Craft Check: Etched Glass Candle Holders
• Gaming in the Media: Gaming Blogs to Watch
• Market to Me: Race and gender in survival horror games

Interviews

• Blogger Interview: The Bloggers of Girl in the Machine

Articles

• Gender & Live-Action Role Play: Into the Tavern
  Author: Samara Hayley Steele

Samara continues her series on gender and LARP.

• Moving Gaming Forward: Having Meaningful Conversations about Social Issues
  Author: Latoya Peterson

Latoya talks about the failure to communicate between racial activists and gamers.

• Fatal Frame: Feminizing the Final Girl
  Author: Jenni Lada

Jenni discusses the ways in which the Fatal Frame series subverts the 'final girl' stereotype in survival horror.

• Shotgun vs. Skirt: Gender in Resident Evil 4
  Author: Diego Luna

Diego critically examines gender representation in Capcom's Resident Evil 4.

Gamer Stories

• Not my braaaaaainnns!
  by Olivia Luna
• Horrors, Together
  by Natalie Hill
• What’s so scary about a board game?
  by Andrea Rubenstein

Reviews

• Confessions of a Part-Time Sorceress
  by Robyn Fleming
• Resident Evil 4
  by Bonnie Moxnes
• Bioshock
  by Bonnie Moxnes
• Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan
  by Olivia Luna
• Retro Review: BurgerTime
  by Abby Wilson

Odds 'n Ends

• The Back Page

Want your article to appear in a future issue? Submit to Cerise today!

I’ve got a confession to make. I really like Resident Evil, but I’ve never played a single game in the series. I can’t. I’m too scared.

It all started when I was in sixth grade. I came home from trick-or-treating on Halloween and someone had popped in a VHS copy of the original Night of the Living Dead. It started out tame enough, but as the zombies began to crowd around the house with people trapped inside, I freaked. I was so frightened that I couldn’t even watch the whole movie; I ran back into my room and hid in the closet. But what I did see was enough to scar me: zombies have been my greatest fear ever since. That slow, shuffling pace–sure you can outrun it, but it’ll never stop. They just keep coming. You can’t reason with zombies. Nothing you say is going to stop them from trying to eat you. And that vacant, bloody gaze….*shivers* Yup, zombies are the worst.

So why do I like Resident Evil then? Well, call me a masochist, but I like it because it scares the living daylights out of me. Trying to escape from a mansion or city jam-packed with zombies sounds like my worst nightmare. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I have had a few nightmares where that was the central storyline. But, for much the same reason as I love roller coasters, I get a kick out of the adrenaline rush that comes from being terrified. And yet, I still can’t bring myself to actually play one of the games.

Part of it is the control scheme. I played through the Onimusha games and just couldn’t quite get the hang of the awkwardness that a 2-D character in pre-rendered 3-D worlds creates. I shudder to think what would happen if I tried to finagle my way through an early Resident Evil game. I want to be able to run from my zombies, not run into walls. If the Nemesis came charging at me I’d probably just drop the controller and flee the room.

Even if I couldn’t scrounge up the courage to play them, though, I was still fascinated with the series growing up. So much that I even read a few of the cheap, knock-off novelizations. My primary solution to this dilemma however, was to watch my brother play the games. I got all the enjoyment of being scared and watching the story unfold without actually having to run from the zombies myself. I even bought him Resident Evil 3 for Christmas one year, with the caveat that he could only play when I was around to watch. Of course, he insisted on playing at night with the lights off.

But Resident Evil, in a twisted way, has also helped me start to overcome my immortal dread of the undead. You see, I also like the movies. It’s reprehensible, I know. They’re terrible movies. But partly because they’re so cheesy, I’m able to watch them and, in doing so, I’m starting to learn to live with zombies. I won’t lie: the first few times I watched the original RE movie, I had to turn it off midway through and wait a little while to calm down (once before the first zombie even showed up on screen–the anticipation was too much!). But I’m at a point now where I can anxiously await the release of Resident Evil: Extinction (and yes, I know how wrong that statement is), where I can laugh at the ridiculousness of zombie babies in the Dawn of the Dead remake, where I can go to midnight showings of Land of the Dead at the movie theater and read books like World War Z for fun. It’s taken a lot for me to allow the zombies to break down my fortified defenses and turn me into one of their own, but I can happily say that Resident Evil has helped me move past the childhood trauma inflicted on that fateful Halloween night. Zombie apocalypse? Bring it on. My heart might still race at the sight of a zombie, and my knees may still shake (just a little!), but at least now I can look that zombie in the eye before running for my life. Now if I could just get myself to play a Resident Evil game. One of these days, we’ll see…