Resident Evil 3 is still my absolute favorite RE video game. It is the first RE game I played on my first PC, right after the first RE movie came out, and it put me in a panic the whole time…except for that whole chunk of time I spent running in circles when I couldn’t figure out what I was missing that was keeping me from progressing. That was when I first learned about online walkthroughs.
While I really liked the remake from a few years ago because it was a new gaming experience with familiar elements, I still wish we had gotten a faithful update like the Resident Evil 2 remake. I would love to see the original Nemesis game refreshed on modern systems.
Revisiting the original game now on my GameCube, I can’t even imagine how many times I replayed it. My last “game completed” save was on hard mode, which means…I had infinite ammo for every weapon. Awesome.
That didn’t help much at the very start, when Jill Valentine is left surrounded by zombies after the opening movie. I had only an infinite handgun on me, and I was so not equipped to handle a throwback to the old tank controls. Holy crap did survival horror games play differently back then. At least this game introduced quick turn…which I ended up not using even once during the replay. You also get dodge functions, but I didn’t use those either. At least, not on purpose. At times when I was button mashing, they were triggered accidentally, and shockingly, it always worked out in my favor.
Once I made it to the first save room (RE3 still has the best save room music ever), I grabbed the infinite rocket launcher from the storage chest, and I was good to go. I just wish that you’d also get infinite printer ribbons. Ugh. I hate feeling nervous to save too often. As for supplies, this game is kind of tricky, because a lot of items don’t glimmer, so they’re not easy to spot. For instance, at one point I randomly decided to click on a pile of rubbish in the corner of a room and found another ink ribbon! That’s 3 save slots I could have missed out on, and apparently the person who wrote the walkthrough did, because it wasn’t mentioned at all. You best believe I immediately Googled all ink ribbon locations for the game and wrote them all into the walkthrough.
I love that RE3 lets you run through the narrow, claustrophobic alleys in Raccoon City. You can actually hear how evacuated the city is. So creepy. The distant moans of zombies carry on the wind, and occasionally you’ll run past windows that have zombies banging on the other side of them. Eek! The streets are extra unnerving in hard mode because there are a lot more zombies around, but they were no match for my infinite rocket launcher. And once you find the first map, you realize how helpful the RE maps were compared to the useless maps some other horror games offered back then.
The challenge for me was trying to keep inventory slots open. With only 8 of them and no telling which items you can leave in storage for a while, I often found myself leaving behind minor items that are major to me—like health! Argh! Thanks to my infinite ammo, what I didn’t need to worry about was the whole aspect of picking up and mixing gun powder to make ammo, which was first introduced in this installment of the series. The upside is that when you use an item and it isn’t needed again, the game prompts you to discard it, which is a weight off your shoulders.
The fun for those who played RE3 after originally playing RE2 first is when you arrive at the Raccoon City Police Department. There’s not much time to rejoice, however, because you immediately encounter that big bully Nemesis. EEK! This is the first time in the game where you get a “choose your own adventure” selection on screen. Following a walkthrough will help you make informed decisions as to how your game will differ based on the choices you make in these moments, and this is perhaps the reason I played the game so many times. I’m sure I meticulously made notes as to which paths I took each playthrough so that I could select different ones every time in order to experience all the game had to offer. Not to mention, I first played it on PC…then got the PS1 version for my PS2 to play on a larger screen…then upgraded to the Dreamcast version for tighter graphics…then did the same when I bought the GameCube. Holy shit, I’ve wasted so much money buying the same things over and over again.
Anyway, for this first encounter with Nemesis, there’s an option to completely avoid him, but with my infinite rocket launcher equipped, I opted to blow him away instead. That drops him temporarily, and you get to pick up a bonus treasure that he leaves behind. I’d forgotten just how many “choose your own adventure” moments add replay value to this game. The walkthrough I used was extra thorough and broke down the path choices and which one was “recommended”. In most cases the recommended one ensures you avoid a battle with Nemesis. However, those rules don’t totally seem to apply in hard mode. At one point, I chose the recommended option, in which Nemesis is supposed to get blasted through a window by an explosion so you don’t have to fight him. I thought I was in the clear after the cutscene and began nonchalantly exploring the room for supplies while Nemesis was draped dead over a windowsill…but then the monster music began and the bitch got back up and I had to shoot him with my handy infinite ammo rocket launcher. Man, this game is fun once you score that weapon.
When you enter the police station, the extra thrill of being back in your old stomping ground is that you get to enter a few different areas that were closed off to characters in RE2. Awesome. You do some basic exploring, item gathering, and zombie killing, and then Nemesis shows up again. Without a walkthrough, you wouldn’t know that you are actually finished in the police station at that point and should just leave instead of wasting ammo on him (if you don’t have an infinite rocket launcher).
Back on the streets, you now have to contend with zombie dogs as well as continue running around in circles not really knowing exactly what the hell you’re trying to accomplish. These games really did make you feel like you were absolutely without motivation most of the time, didn’t they?
Zombies become more prevalent, Nemesis shows up more, and you have some random puzzles here and there. You also have to pick up a lot more items, and even after you score an added satchel that gives you two bonus item slots in your inventory, you should read ahead in a walkthrough to see what you can leave in storage for later to free up some room.
As desolate as the city is, you don’t feel totally alone, because you meet several military guys along the way. Human contact. It matters. However, as you get deeper and deeper into the city, it becomes more maze-like, and more zombies, killer dogs, and bigger creatures start appearing, so the loneliness comes flooding back. The game also delivers some great jump scares just when you think everything is calm and quiet.
The moment you’ll know you’re near the end of the first part of the game is when Jill has to get a cable car running. Before you can even get to the cable car, you end up falling into a hole and land in a little corridor with a giant worm popping out of holes in the wall. The goal is to turn on three switches in various corridor offshoots to lower a ladder to get out of the hole. Problem is, the worm always fricking knows where you are. As soon as you enter a nook to hit a button, the worm hits you and knocks you out of the nook. It also takes a load of your health. Fuck. And the fixed camera angles make it almost impossible to see the worm when you really need to. Fuck. This little side section wasted so much of my damn health, and there was none to be found on the way to the cable car. I even tried blasting he bitch with my infinite rocket launcher, but I got the sense he’s indestructible in this segment. Not to mention, the only way to avoid being hit by him before I could lift my launcher was to stand outside the nook, at which point the camera angle would change and I couldn’t see if he was even in the nook anymore. I have a feeling he wasn’t.
Once you get the cable car running, holy crap does shit get hard. You end up at a clock tower, and there are more zombie swarms, killer crows, and those damn giant spiders.
Whenever you kill them, they release little baby spiders that swarm you and poison you. There’s one central foyer in the Clock Tower that has some blue herbs to heal the poison immediately without having to put it in your inventory first, but there is really nothing in the way of regular health. I’m not going to lie. By the end of this section, I was clutching my side and dragging my leg, with my health status in total danger mode, and it was at that point that I had to fight a Nemesis battle. Oh fuck.
I don’t know how I pulled this off, because in this boss battle he was shooting at me with a rocket launcher. The idea is to shoot back when he isn’t holding up the launcher. That also happens to be when he’s charging you. Somehow, I managed to zombie shuffle my wounded ass out of the rocket’s way a few times and shoot my own infinite rocket launcher at him as he charged me. Shot him twice and he was done.
Right then, you switch over to playing Carlos. Jill has been infected, and it is up to him to find a cure…without access to her inventory. The difficulty increases with Carlos. In infinite ammo mode, he doesn’t have the rocket launcher, just an assault rifle and a handgun. Obviously, I went with the assault rifle, because the enemies are insane during his mission. The only other thing you get for him is a set of 3 ink ribbons. Yay, because you find 3 more for him in another save room. Sadly, you can’t leave them behind for Jill once you switch back to her, but on the bright side, you should absolutely use them all.
You have one mission here. Go to the hospital and find a few ingredients for a vaccine. Unfortunately, there are lots of zombies, and lots of fricking hunters. I also noticed that if you have to load a save because you die, or in my case, because my aging GameCube kept freezing up, items like herbs are in different places, and you get different enemies despite retracing the same path you walked the first time.
This isn’t a long segment—you only have to go to two floors and just a few rooms—but the number of enemies makes this one a chore. However, as you leave the hospital, there’s suddenly a bomb on a 7-second timer. The door to leave is literally about ten steps adjacent to where you are standing before the timer cutscene, but you know how fricking disorienting those returns to playing after cutscenes can be. Worst of all, just as you are about to return to Jill, Nemesis appears in a bigger, badder, mutant form, and he chases you through doorways! The idea is not to fight him but to just run right back to the room where you left Jill, since it’s a save room and he can’t follow you in.
Once you are back to being Jill (video games have been woke and gender fluid for decades), you are in the final stretch of the game. The good news is that if you research where ink ribbons are in the game, you can score like 12 in total in this final section. I was saving left and right. It was awesome, and I still had like 10 ribbons left when I finished the game.
By the way, even if you were deathly ill as Jill before you became Carlos (as I was), you are all fresh and healed when you are back to playing her. Good thing, because you immediately encounter mutated Nemesis. You can dodge him, but he does follow you. With the infinite rocket launcher, I just blasted his ass, and he dropped one of those 3-pack health sprays. Holy shit, I forgot all about them. Three health sprays taking up only one inventory slot. Crucial here, because the enemies are brutal in this final section. I also noticed that the rocket launcher, even infinite, has two disadvantages. First, it takes time to lift the heavy fucker every time you shoot, so if fast enemies are right on you, you get caught in a loop of them hitting you while you’re lifting the launcher, at which point you start the movement all over again and get hit again until eventually you die without having shot one rocket. Second, you can’t aim up or down with the rocket launcher, so if anything is crawling on the floor or ceiling, you shoot right past the enemy. I decided to also carry my infinite assault rifle for this last part for shooting speed and flexibility for the crawling enemies.
We even meet some new enemies, including snakes that drop from above in a park section, as well as the return of the giant worm, which you do get to fight this time. You also go through a graveyard where fricking zombies come up from the ground. Awesome from a horror perspective, but in reality, Resident Evil has always been about infection, not the rising of the dead, right?
The park area is dark, spooky, and loaded with enemies, at least in hard mode. Decades ago, when I first played on easy, there was an amazing moment where I entered this really tranquil boardwalk path over the water and through the forest, and there was just one lone zombie standing at a turn in the boardwalk, swaying back and forth, not even looking at me. It was terrifying. This time, hunters kept jumping out of the water left and right and beating the shit out of me. Fuckers.
Most of this section is about finding keys just to open paths to get to other keys. You also have a few very short runs through the sewer (hate the sewer), and some of the puzzles are damn annoying, even with a walkthrough. Plus, there are quite a few choices to make to choose your own adventure and change the ending of the game.
There are plenty of save rooms, which are the perfect complement to all the ink ribbons you find. There’s also lots of health around, so I would advise grabbing it all and running back to the save rooms to store it for use during the final boss battle.
Before the final boss, you have a run-in with mutant Nemesis. You are required to kill him to get the last necessary key card, so health and ammo are crucial to have on hand. This battle is also followed by a timer, and I was panicking, because a cutscene shows the card key following the defeat of Nemesis, but as soon as I regained control of Jill, I was spinning in circles around the room trying to locate that spot. Argh.
The final battle is tricky. Nemesis has now morphed into a big slug thing with tentacles. In the tight room you’re in, which has several offshoots, the goal is to fend him off while you run around pushing three huge batteries into their designated spots. You know how slow those pushing animations can be. Argh. The smart thing to do is to go check the batteries and their locations before you press the button that triggers the battle, because they are numbered 1,2, and 3, and you have to push them in order. Also, once you get the machine running, you have to lead the monster in front of a giant laser gun thingy so he will be shot by it, and you have to get him to stay in front of it more than once.
As soon as he’s dead, it’s time to jump in a helicopter and watch a city explode below you…just like in most Resident Evil games.
Still think this is one of my favorite RE games, with Code Veronica as a close second. I will find out soon enough, because that one is next on my replay list.
