Resident Evil 2, first screen, by Kate Glasheen.

For whatever reason, I kind of fell out of gaming after the Super Nintendo/Genesis days.  I still played what I had here and there, but I had no idea what was happening in the market for a few years.  Out of nowhere, I asked for a Playstation and Resident Evil 2 as my 15th or 16th birthday present and it changed my f***ing life. I became a survival horror junkie from that point on despite how poorly I can handle being scared.

Resident Evil 2, path secret costumes, by peterbasmalord.

This is a quick map of the start of Resident Evil 2 with notes on how to get the Brad Zombie who drops the key to the alternate costume room! I think I first got this from a friend on my 11th Birthday and it was pretty much immediately my favourite game (replacing the first one!) still its up there in the top ten, would be amazing to get a remake. One with pre-rendered backdrops and puzzles and no motion controls!

[Josh says: awesome.  I love how explicitly this is a map of the path/process rather than a geographically proportional map of the territory.  With a fixed-camera game like the early Residents Evil that makes even more sense, too, since progress through the game is sort of a camera-angle at a time rather than a smooth traversal of a 3D space.]

Resident Evil, Spencer Mansion 1F, by Tom Slater.

Resident Evil is a game that I’ve completed many, many times, so the floor plan ought to be quite simple to remember. But then as I started sketching it out, it occurred to me that I wasn’t sure what I remembered from the Saturn and what I remembered from the Gamecube remake. Hopefully this is fairly accurate to the original.

There’s an L-shaped outside room with herbs and dogs that I know I’ve forgotten, and while I think most of the mansion’s rooms are accounted for, they may not necessarily found themselves in the right place or orientation.

The scale is probably wrong on a lot of rooms, but hey, it was the only way to fit my memory into a rectangle!

[Josh says: I’m sorry, Jill.  I think he’s…

The original Resident Evil was a profound touchstone game for me, very much my introduction to proper survival horror.  I spent an hour on my first go, unsupervised and with no context for the game; after that, I explained to the friend I was visiting who owned the game that I had got myself well and truly out of ammo and low on health.  He laid out the practical fact that I could either suddenly become perfect at the game, or start over and not shoot so damn many bullets at zombies I didn’t need to kill.  It was an enlightening afternoon.

I actually mostly-finished a scale model recreation of Spencer Mansion in Minecraft, back in late 2010 when I was completely sucked into the game, and it was a fun if complicated exercise in recreating a complicated space using not-very-well-suited architectural materials.  So this just kind of warms my heart.  I love the dogs on the right, there.]