VALENTINE'S DAY

Capcom’s latest remake revives the thrill of the chase

- CHRIS SCHILLING

The chase is on. Shoulders hunched, her free arm clutching her injured stomach, Jill Valentine jogs down an alleyway strewn with junk. With every step, she’s putting more distance between herself and her pursuer. Or so she thinks. Suddenly, a large mass whooshes past her ear; she reflexively ducks and holds both arms up to shield herself. We flinch too, as Nemesis lands, skidding to a stop and turning to face Jill – and us – in one ominously swift movement. It takes a single step forward before launching a haymaker that sends her staggering backwards. We’re used to the whole bursting through-walls thing with Nemesis, even if his first arrival here leaves us with our heart somewhere near our throat. But this? This is new – thrillingly so.

You would think the best reason to remake Resident Evil 3 is the chance to bring back one of the all-time great videogame enemies. Indeed, Nemesis was so crucial to the series’ third instalment that, until 2017’s Resident Evil 7: Biohazard combined the series’ English-language and Japanese names, it was the only numbered entry to have a subtitle. That’s perhaps because it was first conceived as a spin-off, developed by a relatively inexperienced team as a last hurrah for the series on PlayStation, while a larger team led by Hideki Kamiya started work on the original – later aborted – version of Resident Evil 4 for the next console generation. Yet if the game was in any way lacking next to its predecessor, it had an ace in the hole: the Nemesis itself. Here was a pursuer as relentless as the movie villain that inspired it, T2: Judgment Day’s T-1000. You could say the original game is still the finest unofficial Terminator videogame ever made. Until now.