If you’re of an advanced age then you’ll probably remember the completely out-of-place face stretching screen at the start of Super Mario 64 (created for Nintendo by young expat Brit Giles Goddard while faffing about with some mo-cap).
Well, fast forward to 2019 and YouTuber DPO23 has created a series of videos that ramp up various characters’ facial animations in the Resident Evil 2 remake, echoing the existential terror and sheer hilarity we felt back when sproing-ing the elder Mario brother’s moustache around at the end of the last millennium. What a time to be alive.
Exercise caution if you’ve not finished Resi 2 yet, as there are some spoilers.
The cringe of it all. Somehow, the visual unpleasantness of stretching the beautiful RE Engine to its limit blends with the more subdued tone and genuinely decent acting of the remake to make you spit your tea. Case in point:
Even the usually cool and collected Ada Wong can’t escape from the plague of extreme Dreamworks face. Until Ada’s completely removed from the game, leaving Leon to emote with thin air. She must have gone to bingo.
Horrifyingly, DPO23 even decided to double-down on the animations and make the jump to 1000%. At this point it’s difficult to tell the difference between the zombies and the living. Oh, and now Leon’s turned invisible.
There doesn’t seem to be any logic or reason behind any of these excursions into elastic terror, but they do bring to mind the ineffable joy of messing about with the parameters of something beyond their intended levels. Or the Tufnel principle, as it’s also known:
Poor Raccoon City. There’s really no hope for it.
This post originally appeared on Kotaku UK, bringing you original reporting, game culture and humour from the British isles.
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