The dwindling of arcade population in the U.S. has been one of the most saddening things to me in the world of gaming over the last 10 years. However, what’s good is that these games’ spirits live on in the forms of videogame console software, allowing for nice replication of the experiences you’d expect from an arcade. Resident Evil: The Darkside Chronicles is, as you would expect, your typical generic zombie arcade shooter with familiar characters from the Resident Evil series. The levels within the game are recreations of previous environments from Resident Evil 2 & 4 (much like the way the Umbrella Chronicles recreated environments from Resident Evil 1 & 3.
Controls are as you’d expect where B is your trigger, weapons are mapped to different directions on the D-Pad, and A is used to either pick up items or also can be held down to pull out your knife for melee combat. While holding A, you can swing your Wii-Mote to slash the knife on screen. The game looked pretty good overall and I enjoyed the portions of the game that I played. He could not answer if it would be compatible with Wii MotionPlus but the build at the showfloor lacked it. Still, the arcade zombie shooting experience was worth my 10 minutes at E3. The game should be out by the end of this year so expect similar arcade gameplay to Umbrella Chronicles.
