Resi Cuatro.

About three years ago, the wonderful videogames show Consolevania* released a special episode to commemorate the release of Resident Evil 4. Now I love Consolevania, but I've never loved Resi, so I wasn't really that bothered by the special theme, and some of the jokes went over my head. It's a survival horror series, and I'm a big pissy wet blanket when it comes to horror, so I've never seen any reason to bother with the games. In fact, I played a bit of Resi 1 at my mate's house, and we just laughed at the shitty dialogue and terrible controls. Still, the review of the new game was so fantastic that I went out and bought it, played it a bit, then left it on the shelf, like a fucking fool. This year, I tried again, finished the game, and now I'm fucking hooked. It's brilliant, for many reasons all said much better in Rab's review. There is, though, one thing I've been really enjoying this week, and I'll tell you what it is - just wait a minute while I start turning the crank on a big, clunky analogy.

Sometimes, if I've really enjoyed it, I'll play a game through twice. Usually, the second play-through is almost as fun and a bit less difficult. Resi 4 takes this concept and gives it a turbo-charge. Fuck being less fun, it says, let's make it a fucking riot. See, over the course of the normal game, you have to carefully save money for better weapons, a bigger weapon case, firepower upgrades, and the like. When you finish the game and play again, you start with absolutely everything you earned the first time through. Just like that, the odds are now stacked in your favour. The enemies that seemed so resilient and scary the first time round now drop dead with one shot. Your treasure pennies can now be spent upgrading your guns to absurd power levels. The bosses who gave you all that trouble first time around succumb easily, and you can run through the game at a brisk pace, enjoying all the grand set-pieces with a fraction of the nervous tension.

And now here's that big, clunky analogy I promised: I wonder if my second year teaching will be like that second playthrough? If I do alright, and if they'll have me back, I can see myself staying at the school here for another year. I'd be starting again, but I'd have already seen the plot of the teaching year, even if I choose to play through it a little differently. I'd have a stocked arsenal of lesson plans that I can upgrade. All the bosses I fought the first time (observations, exams, parents' evenings) might succumb a little more easily. Instead of being scared by the hordes of enemies I had to face each week, I'd go into things with a little more firepower and a lot more confidence. And maybe the ever-present nerves and apprehension from the first year might give way to something approaching fun.

Of course, I should be careful with this analogy, because I'm essentially likening my students to parasite-infected monsters, and teaching them to mowing them down with a variety of high-grade weapons. It's a wanky comparison, not a literal one. That said, some of the fuckin' teenagers...


*Consolevania is a bit special: it's full of humour and love and bile and it deserves its own blog post full of praise one day. If you like videogames enough to have an opinion about them, you've got no excuse not to watch CV. It's free, for fuck's sake! If you've never seen it before, I recommend watching from Season 2 onwards, when it got good. You can download now, for free, at:
http://mirror.pixelated-ape.org/consolevania/season_2/
http://mirror.pixelated-ape.org/consolevania/season_3/
and visit
http://www.consolevania.com/
where Season 4 is in full swing, once you're up to speed.