This episode is one of my favourites. I felt my energy was quite low to start but once I got into the fun stuff, I livened up. I was still very new to recording myself. Sometimes I’m happy with how I sound, sometimes I’m unavoidably low energy and re-recording stuff doesn’t seem to fix it, it just makes things worse.
This episode has some of my absolute favourite jokes in the series so far – knocking books off the shelves, trying to find a secret lever. The safe room stuff, with the bossa nova radio station – and the rocket launcher gag. The MGS3 ladder gag. I even like the escalating ridiculousness of the zombie animals.
My partner Caroline played The HIVE, she felt weird about doing it and hated hearing it back, but I thought she nailed it. She did it exactly as I pitched. I am no director so I gave very basic instructions – just read it like you’re the voice on a train announcing the next stop. The trains in the UK are my ultimate vision of the banal face of corporate evil, so that’s the exact vibe I wanted to go for. I loved her work there, and I don’t take it for granted, she did me a huge favour.
The episode is also one of my favourites in term of plotting, too. I managed to squeeze in all the Resident Evil plot beats that I wanted to cover, without it feeling like I rushed through them.
I very nearly made the episode RE2 remake vs RE3 remake. The remake for RE3 was the first big AAA game that I got to review as a writer for The Digital Fix’s (now dead) gaming section. I admit that I let the excitement of finally being entrusted with a pre-release review key from a huge publisher get the better of me and I gave the game a higher score than it deserved. I still really like RE3’s remake, but it’s not in the same league as RE2. I felt like this one needed to be a competitive episode. RE4 had recently come out and I’d played it all the way through, so I went with that instead. I wasn’t particularly worried about recency bias.
Overall this is in contention for my favourite episode.