"I'M CHRIS REDFIELD, I'M HERE TO KILL YOU WHETHER YOU'RE BLACK OR NOT"...Would be a great way for Capcom to have kicked off the storyline in their fifth installment of their ever popular zombie genre. This subject has been covered somewhat tirelessly across the interweb in recent months but I wanted to stick my oar in, because I'm a tosser like that. Oh and I've had a go on the game.
That's more than can be said for Kym Platt, reactionary writer for a black-rights blog called Black Looks. Reactionary certainly is the word I'd use in this case, as the game hadn't even been released at the point of this post hitting the electrowaves.
"The new Resident Evil video game depicts a white man in what appears to be Africa killing Black people. The Black people are supposed to be zombies and the white man’s job is to destroy them and save humanity…
This is problematic on so many levels, including the depiction of Black people as inhuman savages, the killing of Black people by a white man in military clothing, and the fact that this video game is marketed to children and young adults. Start them young… fearing, hating, and destroying Black people."
Hmmm. I fear that if the writer of such overtly ridiculous remarks was faced with a horde of zombified white middle-class folks in a quaint Wiltshire hamlet and armed with a fully loaded Hekler and Koch, then her reaction might be akin to that of Resident Evil's main protagonist. Simply put, Capcom based their (coincidentally shit) zombie survival game in AFRICA, which (again, coincidentally) is full of Africans. Yes black people are killed, not only by the white character that you control, but your African counterpart Sheva also.
Oh and furthermore, there's a crapload of other monsters and WHITE OPPRESSORS similarly affected by the same gastric-flu pandemic or whatever it apparently is they're all going crazy over.
Its worth pointing out that a strikingly similar yet infinitely more realistic game came out with not even a whiff of anyone crying racism. Either way, the only thing in this video-game that upset my stoic sensibilities was its main character's inability to stop being the most buff person (computer generated or not) I've ever seen.
Alas, it wouldn't matter if the main character was Oswald Mosley and that every single person in the game that you killed looked like Barack Obama, because the games shit anyway.
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