New life for the undead

Age of the Geek Column: I warned you last week that I probably wasn't done talking about "Resident Evil 2."
Turns out I was right.
I tried to come up with another topic for a column for this week, but if anything noteworthy happened I missed it because I spent the better part of my weekend surviving the monster-infested streets of Raccoon City.
As I wrote last week, I've been careful to avoid spoilers about any aspect of the game. A particularly difficult task during the final hours up to the game's launch, as differences in time zones meant my fellow gamers from across the oceans were already knee deep in zombies by the time my own copy unlocked for release.
It was difficult to stay off of social media on Thursday night, particularly as launch day hype swept the Internet, but I prevailed and was able to go into the game as blind as possible.
The effort was well worth it.
As obvious as it may sound, "Resident Evil 2" is a game that can only be played for the first time once.
For some games, the initial play through isn't that big a deal. A game with a good story will have a good story every time you play it. A game that's mechanically fun is fun all the time.
"Super Smash Bros. Ultimate," for instance, is largely the same experience from the first hour to the 100th.
With the Resident Evil franchise though, the first play through is always going to be unique.
It's a game series that invests heavily in the excitement of discovery and fear of the unknown. Every unexplored room has the potential to give you a new clue to solve a puzzle or a lethal threat. Or both.
My first run of the game took me seven hours of careful exploring and backtracking, slowly inching around every corner for fear that a new horror may be lurking ahead in the dark.
It was a great experience, and one that cannot be replicated in subsequent runs. Now I know the answers to the puzzles. I know where the monsters are hiding. I know which routes are safe, which enemies can be avoided, which items I need, and when I need them.
This is the beauty of the Resident Evil series.
The initial experience is slow paced, cerebral, and scary, but once you beat it the game changes into a race.
It stops being a game about jump scares and exploration and become a game about optimizing your route. The puzzle becomes figuring out what you need, what you don't need, and which routes will get you from beginning to end in the shortest amount of time.
Currently, my goal is to cut my seven hour run down to three. This should be relatively easy to do. After all, the current world record is sitting at just over an hour.
Every day new exploits are being discovered and strategies developed. Just this morning it was discovered that the first boss in the game, meant to be an early bullet sponge, can be quickly and easily dispatched with a simple knife. A task made easier for PC users by exploiting framerate variables to take advantage of a probably unintended bug.
This sort of thing is what gives Resident Evil games their long lasting appeal. Instead of being interactive horror movies, running through the halls of the Raccoon City Police Department with calculated precision can put the player in a zen trance.
In the wind up to the "Resident Evil 2" remake I played the 1998 original so many times that I started playing it on auto-pilot.
The jump scares that once terrified and enemies that threated to end the game became little more than background noise as I speed on through.
Now sure, most games feel different as you get better at them, but very few of them allow for such a dramatic change in experience.
Resident Evil: Come for the scares. Stay for the speedruns.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and can't wait to get back to Raccoon City.