Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre recently sat down with fellow angry nerd Jordan Peterson for a conversation that threatened to destroy what’s left of my sanity.
Seriously, though, over the course of the hour and forty minute interview, Poilievre exposed some genuinely worrying ideology and exposed several of the flaws in his economic logic.
It’s an immediate red flag when someone takes Peterson seriously.
It’s even worse when they sit down with him and discuss how “wokeism” is the real cause of hate crimes (yes, he said that) and call people concerned about climate change “environmental loons.”
I watched the entire thing. I barely made it out alive.
When you first start playing Resident Evil 6, it looks like it might almost be a joke, perhaps a stealthy parody of big-budget action videogames. It begins in the aftermath of an explosion, seen from a first-person perspective, and the entire introductory sequence is littered with quick-time events. There is a helicopter.
At first, things look bleak. Is this what Capcom’s legendary survival horror series has become? A bubbling mass of cliches, a tribute to everything vapid and faintly ridiculous about so-called “AAA” game development? Nothing but shallow Hollywood action sequences and glorified, barely interactive cutscenes? Is this Resident Evil now?
That’s merely what it looks like when you first start playing.
The full experience is something slightly less appealing than that.
Resident Evil 6 is a Michael Bay movie. There’s really no more polite a way to put it. Stuffed to the gills with bombastic action segments, car chases, and relentless chaos, Capcom has abandoned any pretense of the survival horror genre and embraced a world of skin-deep Hollywood audacity. Listlessly wallowing in the depthless waters of homogeneity, Resident Evil 6 is a coward of a game, afraid to make its own individual mark in the industry and cravenly subscribing itself to every overplayed trope in the book.
This review, however, is not one big complaint about the jettison of survival horror, for if Resident Evil 6 was at least a refreshing and provocative action game, it might have gotten away with it. Sadly, this is not the case. If one were to remove the legacy of the Resident Evil name and release this as an original IP, it would occupy shelf space somewhere between Quantum Theory and Inversion, those built-on-a-budget “me too” shooters that follow unambitiously in the footsteps of Gears of War and (ironically) Resident Evil 4, copying the most popular games on the market in childlike hope that they may enjoy the same success. Resident Evil 6 is an incessant, monotonous slog from one room of shambling opponents to the next, providing cheap gun battles for people who truly have given up on enjoying something better.
There are four campaigns revolving around the characters of Leon, Sherry, Chris, and Ada Wong, three of which feature support characters in order to focus solely on cooperative play. What this translates to within the confines of gameplay is a series of doors blocking progress through each chapter, requiring both players to press a button in the same location before watching a canned animation of said door being kicked open. You know the type of system — it’s in every slapdash co-op game that’s can’t think of an original way to make players work together.
There are a few cursory co-op “puzzles” thrown into the mix that mostly consist of the “one person turns a handle while the other person walks through a gate” variety, but the implementation is half-hearted at best. Most cooperative sequences are simple blockades erected to create the illusion that you actually need the second character (that nobody wants to play as because they’re both new and uninteresting) when really you’re just tolerating a burden shunted guilelessly into the storyline so some marketing department has an obligatory feature for the back of the game box.
RE6‘s hackneyed co-op design is exemplified when playing through a quick-time event that only pertains to one character, such as the one with Leon and his rent-a-partner sitting in a car. Leon has to perform a whole bunch of QTEs to get the car started while the other player just sits there in a first-person view, watching. Yes, Resident Evil 6 actually decided to make a player sit and watch someone else play (if it can be called playing), because nobody could be bothered to think up something for both users to do. There are other moments like this littered throughout, where one player has something to do and the other is meant to stand there like a brass monkey.
Outside of these vacuous examples of pantomime cooperation, you’re basically running from point A to point B, stopping to shoot either zombies or J’avo depending on which campaign you’ve chosen. The difference between the two enemy types is mostly in speed, as the zombies featured in RE6 are more like slower versions of the Ganado in RE4, while the J’avo are faster, rifle-toting versions. Both enemy types can wield weapons, and both enemy types have the potential to mutate into highly annoying variants in such a way that one feels punished for daring to attack them.
The zombies may become Crimson Heads, which now leap ludicrous distances, move faster than you can target them, and take more time than is enjoyable to put down. The J’avo feature differing mutations depending on which of their limbs have been hurt, and can transform into all sorts of creatures such as grasshopper-legged leapers or claw-armed melee attackers. It’s certainly an interesting idea, though it does reduce the fun of taking out enemy limbs, since it no longer offers any tactical advantage and just makes a fight tougher.
The biggest difference between the campaigns is the way in which they waste the player’s time. In Leon’s story, this is achieved by having zombies regularly grab the character to initiate a brainless, stick-waggling QTE. With Chris and Sherry, we have gunfire that knocks them to the ground with such laughable regularity that you’d be forgiven for thinking the drunken physics from Grand Theft Auto IV had made an unscheduled return. Naturally, recovery animations often see the character get back up just in time to eat another attack — because that worked so well in Lost Planet. Bear in mind none of this makes the game very difficult — especially with a partner, you ought to have no problem clearing campaigns — it just makes it a pain in the backside.
There are a few other different enemies, such as dogs, insect mutants, and undead that scream to attract more zombies, but we’ve seen these ideas before in all sorts of run-of-the-mill games. The played-out enemy types are indicative of Resident Evil 6‘s biggest problem — it’s ordinary to an almost extraordinary degree. Combat isn’t even as fast-paced and varied as the critically mauled Operation Raccoon City, from which this game seems to derive most of its inspiration. Not to continue talking about Michael Bay but, like his films, RE6‘s fast pace and big setpieces are merely aesthetic, with no real energy or punch behind them. It looks impressive for the first few minutes, but then the explosions just keep on exploding with nary a change in pace. Never does the game pull out something that might surprise the player, not once is anything ever shocking. It’s simply combat-by-numbers, and RE6 is happy to be this way until the credits roll.
The lack of pacing really hurts one’s enthusiasm for the campaigns. In previous games, there was always a sense of build, of things starting slow, growing to big confrontations, and then setting the dial back to build towards something even larger. From the moment the first thing blows up in Resident Evil 6, it maintains the same level of insipid action, leaving itself no room to ramp up or scale back. Compared to past games, there’s no sense of character, nothing to remember. It’s just a cavalcade of banal skirmishes and scenarios ripped liberally from other modern videogames.
You remember the war-like scenario near the end of Resident Evil 4, where the ally with the helicopter arrives to help you take out a small army of military-level Ganado? That was a fantastic moment, because it had been built to over the course of a gradually evolving game. It felt inspiring to be thrust into a warzone after such a tense ride there. Resident Evil 6 tries to start with that level of action, and stays there. Imagine if the soldier area of Resident Evil 4 had been the whole game, with nothing leading to it and nothing changing for the course of the adventure — in an industry where half a dozen competing titles were doing the same thing, no less. That is the core of the latest Resi installment.
At its base line, RE6 inspires indifference — but it gets worse. If Resident Evil 6 had stopped at simply being a mediocre shooter, that may not have been so bad. It at least would have been worth maybe a weekend’s forgettable rental. However, in spite of copying several years’ worth of third-person shooters, Capcom makes a series of embarrassing mistakes that drag the experience from mundane to beleaguering. Aside from the camera, the cover system is an absolute joke, forcing characters to snap against walls automatically whenever a firearm is drawn, regardless of the player’s desire. Firing from cover is horrendously awkward, since the camera once again is unable to provide an adequate angle or distance to ensure accurate aiming. It’s a system that, by design, causes only problems with zero strategic benefit.
As for dodging, it wasn’t enough to have a simple combat roll. Instead, one has to aim a weapon, then push on the stick while hitting the sprint button. If the weapon remains readied, the character will lie on the floor like an idiot, only getting up when buttons are released. It’s an awkward thing to get used to in the heat of battle, especially as the whole “floor combat” thing is inefficient and mostly leaves players vulnerable. All we needed was a combat roll. The kind of thing games have done perfectly well for years. It’s pitiful that Resident Evil 6 can’t even do that right.
Health recovery has also been tampered with, the classic herb system now replaced with tablets. While herbs are still collected, they’re useless until the player goes into the menu and mixes them into these tablets, which are swallowed with a quick button press. One pill restores one block of health, and in order to replenish several blocks at once, the tablet button must be pressed the corresponding number of times. Why? Why was the simple idea of using a health item dragged out into several more contrived steps? This enhances the game in no way whatsoever, it’s just convoluted for the sake of being convoluted. Of all the things to alter, I cannot fathom who in their right mind would have the hubris to try and reinvent the working method of health restoration with all the elegance of a train full of rhinos.
One thing that has been preserved from the series’ horror roots is ammunition — there’s not enough of it. Even though the game has devolved to the point where it’s a glorified shooting gallery, the decision to keep ammo restricted comes off like a cruel — albeit ironically hilarious — prank. Characters start with multiple guns, but bullets are sparse, especially when crates and enemies spew out “action points” (used to buy some paltry upgrades) and other useless items even when guns are running empty. This potentially leads to some horrible moments in rooms where a number of enemies must be killed before progressing, and there’s nothing to kill them with from a safe distance. Fortunately, the melee attacks are overpowered enough to kick the heads off two zombies with one sweep. Unfortunately, the game needs melee attacks that are so overpowered they can kick the heads off two zombies with one sweep.
That is, of course, if the camera isn’t positioned in such a way that the player doesn’t end up just kicking at the air next to the zombie instead of the zombie itself. If you haven’t gathered by now, the camera is deplorable — along with so many other things. What else could I talk about? The fact the game doesn’t pause if your controller disconnects? The sprinting sections that play like a “runner” style mobile game, but less interesting? Reliance on the whole “character talks into earpiece and is unable to walk properly or pick up the items next to them for no good reason” schtick? Blatantly placed, predictable corpses that you know are zombies but can’t touch until the game arbitrarily decides to wake them up? None of it’s needed, none of it adds anything of value. It only ever gets on one’s nerves.
The RE6 experience is one of constant struggle, and not in the inspiring, challenging way. I feel like the game itself is constantly trying to stop its players from having fun. Between the ammo restrictions, the broken camera, the awful cover system, and the grinding incessancy of the soporific shooting, it’s a chore to stay invested in the thing. It’s actively repulsive, doing its level best to turn the player away, and ultimately offering nothing to reward anybody for sticking around. There are no good boss fights, so dull they are that I can barely remember them, and it’s not like the cheesy “villain wants to destroy the world because of reasons” story is interesting enough to encourage conclusion. The upgrades players can attain are hardly noticeable in the game — especially the “find more ammo” ability which seemed to have no reliable impact on the amount of ammo I actually found. Every new hill climbed in Resident Evil 6 offers a radial view across little more than a sea of deeper disappointment.
If I had to say something positive, I’d say the ever-present Mercenaries mode still manages to squeeze some enjoyment out of an increasingly dry concept. The combat is at least more engaging when there’s additional ammo on offer and all pretense of plot or importance has been stripped away. I also love the idea of Agent Hunt, a feature in which players can invade other games online as enemy creatures. I just wish this feature were in a better game, and by that I mean it is — you can just play Dark Souls if you want to see this option married to a far superior product.
I’d really struggle to say anything nice about the presentation. Character models are simplistic while the animation is archaic and lifeless in comparison to most modern games of comparable budget. Save for a few early parts of Leon’s campaign, the environments are sparse and boring, while the menus are the only visually remarkable element. Remarkable, but totally style-over-utility (especially since using menus won’t pause the game, even in solo play). The art direction lacks any sense of vibrancy, with most monsters filling stereotypical roles –monster with tentacle, monster with claw arm, fat zombie, fast zombie etc. — and a dull color scheme that makes things look more drab than eerie.
When Resident Evil 4 first crashed into the market, it shook up the action genre and inspired years of pretenders that helped evolve the industry. It’s saddening to see a sequel to that game among the lower rung of hopeless followers, content no longer to lead but to follow like a starving dog after a trail of meat scraps. Resident Evil now lingers far behind, set back by the kind of rookie mistakes reserved for brand new games rather than the sixth installment of a series that should know better. It tows the line in terms of combat, structure, and pacing, only attempting “innovation” in areas that didn’t need innovating, and managing to make a pig’s ear of every single attempt. Its cover system has no place in a game made by professionals. The inadequate ability for players to defend themselves from attacks is maddening, and the unhelpful camera (that the enemies exploit for cheap hits) can only be described as disgusting. Budget games have done better than this.
It’s bad enough that the game — at its very best — is so pedestrian, but to screw up in areas that even third-rate shooters manage to get right is something Capcom should find degrading. It’s not enough to say that Resident Evil 6 is poor as a Resident Evil game. That alone implies there could be a quality experience if fans can get past their preconceptions and feelings of betrayal. No, Resident Evil 6 is poor by the standards of any game, not just the high ones set by its own legacy. This is unexceptional tripe that becomes insulting once the woeful missteps come into play. Resident Evil 6 is not just a step back for the series, it’s a step back for commonplace, unassuming action-shooters.
If any consistently good thing can be said of Resident Evil 6, it’s that it has made Paul W.S. Anderson’s film adaptations look like fine works of art in comparison.
Tasnim’s dad met her mum when she was aged just 13. At 16 months old, Tasnim Lowe lost her mum, auntie, nan and dog in a house fire – started by her dad. He was given four life sentences.
Leonardo was the ‘universal Man who personified the flowering of human achievement known as the Renaissance’, (Bramly, 1994). He painted the most famous painting in the world, Mona Lisa. He had problems with attention and concentration, often did not finish things. He was easily distracted. He had difficulty completing tasks. He was often moving from one activity to another. He moved a lot from place to place and was somewhat hyperactive. He showed a lack of motivation to complete tasks. He tended to move on a lot between art and science. He did move abruptly from one task to another, because this movement from one thing to another was what helped him to bring things together. White (2000) ‘the many confused strands of human knowledge and lent a logic and cohesion to what he understood of the world’. The ADHD was critical for him becoming a polymath. Indeed, he would be seen as primarily a scientist and secondly as a painter. Leonardo ‘got bored and distracted very easily, especially when a project became routine rather than creative’, (Isaacson, 2020). White (2000) sees Leonardo as an ‘untamable eccentric, a risk-taker, a man who strayed very close to the edge of heresy and necromancy, a man gifted in so many ways, it was almost impossible for him to settle upon anything that fascinated him or one skill above others’. Catani and Mazzarello (2019) discussed the issue of grey matter in Leonardi da Vinci: a genius driven to distraction. They pointed out that he had problems with ‘procrastination’, ‘time management’, was ‘constantly on the go’, ‘jumped from task to task’.
Writing:
Bramly (1994) stated that Leonardo ‘wrote backwards from right to left with inverted characters, so his manuscripts have to be read with a mirror … a trait commonly found in left handed people’. Schott (1979) proposed that ‘Leonardo’s language skills were lateralized to the more unusual right hemisphere’.
Parents:
His father had a child, Leonardo, outside of wedlock by a neighbour. His mother, aged 16, Catriona, later married a local farmer and moved to live locally. His father was a notary. His mother moved away from his grandparents when Leonardo was three years old. She was in the neighbourhood, nevertheless. His mother lived nearby after her marriage. Leonardo was somewhat a loner in following his own company. He was brought before a Court for sodomy – the case was dismissed. He might have been set up. He had identity diffusion. He was an anti-sexuality person. He was poor and showed poor financial management, as people with ADHD often do. His uncle, Francesco also helped with his early education (White, 2000). He did not have a formal university education which would have filled his head with scholastic nonsense. He was lucky to have avoided this. He was a highly successful apprentice painter. He was a fashionable dresser. He was a very independent student and independent person in later life.
Childhood:
Being born out of wedlock had serious implications for life chances, including education and work. Leonardo was brought up by his grandparents and had a ‘solitary childhood’ (White, 2000). Sigmund Freud wrote a very poor paper on Leonardo mentioning a vulture rather than a kite and giving a convoluted and bizarre explanation of Leonardo’s homosexuality and creativity. This did serious damage to psychoanalysis and still does today. His uncle, Francesco, who was ’16 years Leonardo’s senior, who lived for many years in the family home and was very close to Leonardo’ (White, 2000). Francesco made Leonardo very interested in landscape, which stayed with him throughout his life. Leonardo possibly got a basic education at a local school, but this is disputed. He was apprenticed to Verrocchio, a painter, around puberty.
Science work:
His method was to ‘consult experience first and then with reasoning, show why such experience is bound to operate in such a way’, (Isaacson, 2020). White (2000) sees him as ‘the first scientist’. He had antedated much later scientists, for example, Newton. He was an experimenter and engineer and always very autodidactic. He showed the characteristics of pure genius in his scientific work including engineering projects and mechanical projects. He was very interested in the overlap between disciplines in anatomy, architecture and mathematics. He was not interested in a ‘singular discourse like an autistic artist’. He was brilliant in every discipline he took an interest in. He could hyperfocus on work for a very long period, like Newton (Fitzgerald & O’Brien, 2007). He would even forget to eat. He did dissection of corpses and anatomical work.
Mona Lisa:
This is the most famous painting in the world. The lady with the enigmatic smile. Certainly, Leonardo himself was enigmatic. There is a question about whether Mona Lisa’s face reflects his enigmatic personality. Mona Lisa only became famous after it was stolen from the Louvre in Paris. Alan Yentob (Brooks, 2003), claims Mona Lisa was probably ‘pregnant’.
Leonardo wanted to ‘know everything’ and was massively observant. He suffered anxiety and depression. He was anti-authority. He had identity diffusion and was probably a practicing homosexual. He was fascinated by music, both composition and performance. He does not appear to have related well to the Medici, the rulers of Florence. This inhibited his career. He was somewhat arrogant and narcissistic and didn’t follow contracts he made, correctly. This led to conflicts including legal conflicts. Leonardo was ‘misanthropic’, had a ‘suppressed hatred for humanity’, (White, 2000). He saw humans as ‘latrine fillers’, (White, 2000). Paradoxically, he was detail focused in his own terms. He was hyperkinetic and ‘a ceaseless wanderer among the avenues and byways of knowledge’, (White, 2000). White (2000) points out that Leonardo was ‘paranoid, constantly afraid his ideas would be stolen, and his work plagiarized’ and employed ‘codes and ciphers’ in his notebooks. He saw the world and people as rather dangerous. He was a suspicious character. He felt safer and not threatened by a 10 year old boy, Sali, who he took on and kept with him for the rest of his life. Sali was early on, a conduct disordered boy but this interested Leonardo. He was more interested in understanding problems than continuing to sort them out to their conclusion. Leonardo was a kind of ‘magpie’, (White, 2000). Leonardo was a compulsive note-taker and list-maker. He had obsessive compulsive traits. He had no problem in working with tyrants and doing engineering work for them. Leonardo said, ‘I would prefer death to inactivity’, (White, 2000). Michelangelo (Arshad & Fitzgerald, 2004) was envious of Leonardo, (White, 2000). Michelangelo shouted an insult at Leonardo on one occasion. Leonardo developed a reputation for ‘unreliability’, (White, 2000).
Conclusion:
Leonardo da Vinci painted the most famous painting in the world, Mona Lisa. Michael White sees him as the First Scientist. Indeed, he seemed more interested in science then art. He was one of the greatest men of the Renaissance. He had neurodevelopmental disorders, (Fitzgerald, 2004) which are very common in great creators, including ADHD.
Michael Fitzgerald, Former Professor of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
In general, I’ll be reserving this site for full blown novels, as you may have guessed given the title of the blog (I think it’s pretty self-explanatory). However, from time to time I will be exploring some collections, novellas and even short stories, as is the case with this particular installment. Don’t expect to see too many shorts reviewed, as I’ll only be touching down on those works that I feel are truly spectacular. Such is the case with John W. Campbell Jr.’s sci-fi/horror hybrid, Who Goes There?, which most are probably familiar with, whether they realize it or not. See, this eerie little tale serves as the source material for Christian Nyby’s thrilling motion picture, The Thing from Another World (1951) as well as John Carpenter’s far more faithful rendition, The Thing (1982).
While Nyby’s film strays quite far from John’s original story, Carpenter’s take on this one is extremely accurate, so you’ve got a great idea of what this story is about, assuming you don’t live under a rock and have seen The Thing. A group of researchers, stuck in the hazardous climate of Antarctica discover an alien space craft, and one of its inhabitants, frozen deep beneath the surface. A wealth of curiosity and a little thermite leaves the ship a lost commodity, but the alien being is unearthed, salvaged and ultimately taken to this group’s camp for a thorough examination. Scientific inquisitiveness leads to all out chaos when this creature is thawed, and proves to be a shape-shifting menace willing to travel great lengths to ensure survival.
The intensity of this story really resides in the suspense and paranoia that Campbell Jr. creates. There’s nowhere to run for this group, and the capabilities of the creature are far beyond that of mankind, which leaves a stranded band of men thoroughly outclassed, on both a physical and mental level. The impending doom that McReady, Garry, Blair, Clark, Copper and company, face manifests itself quickly, as complete distrust sweeps through the camp faster than a case of the flu. The men learn rather early that the creature is able to mimic the physical and emotional traits of just about any living entity, and that drives everyone in camp to call into question the true identity of the man beside him. Claustrophobic settings only intensify the edge of the story, as it becomes obvious that at the very least, one man has already been absorbed and mimicked by the alien, and he’s got virtually nowhere to go. But, who is The Thing, when will it strike, and has it somehow managed to spread further throughout camp than perceived? Not a soul knows, and that drives the reader about as loony as those who breathe within the pages. And believe me, a handful of these guys really plunge off the deep end.
The pace with which the story unravels is as fluid as one could request, and the mystery reaches a climax at the perfect point. McReady, though second in command, reads as the true hero of the story, while Blair plays the perfect counter: an over the top fanatic completely convinced that everyone in camp must be slaughtered in order to ensure the beast has no means of reaching civilization. In a sense, it forces readers to make a far more in depth examination of the characters within this tale: McReady seems to be the level headed one here, but Blair’s logic holds weight and his intent, though expressed in maniacal fashion, is actually pure and rather selfless. So who is the hero, and who isn’t? Who is the The Thing, and who isn’t? Can anyone escape this terrifying ordeal, or is this base camp destined to freeze to death? John W. Campbell Jr. delivers the answers, and a shitload of taut drama and visceral terror to boot.
If you’re a fan of either cinematic transfer (or even Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s “prequel”), and you’ve yet to read this story, I highly recommend it. There’s a suffocating quality (now that sounds like an oxymoron to me) to this tale that commands full attention, and leaves the reader (at least this one) on the cusp of constant panic, considering a seemingly unending level of anxiety. After getting to know the characters portrayed on film, it’s really rather rewarding to meet their original predecessors, as they more than live up to what fans of each feature have grown familiar with.
The Pacific National Exhibition (PNE) is a nonprofit organization that operates an annual 15-day summer fair, a seasonal amusement park, and indoor arenas in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. The PNE fair is held at Hastings Park, beginning in mid-to-late August and ending in early September, usually Labour Day.
The organization was established in 1907 as the Vancouver Exhibition Association, and organized its first fair at Hastings Park in 1910. The organization was renamed to the Pacific National Exhibition in 1946. During the mid-20th century, a number of facilities were built on the PNE grounds, including Pacific Coliseum and the PNE Agrodome. In 1993, the amusement park adjacent to the PNE, Playland, became a division of the PNE.
The Vancouver Exhibition Association (VEA), the predecessor to the Pacific National Exhibition organization was first formed in 1907; although the association was not incorporated until 18 June 1908. The VEA had petitioned Vancouver City Council to host a fair at Hastings Park; although faced early opposition from the city council and the local jockey club that used the park for horse races. However, the city council eventually conceded to the VEA’s request and granted the association a 5-year lease to host a fair at Hastings Park in 1909.
The VEA held its first fair at Hastings Park in August 1910. It was opened by then Canadian Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier as the Vancouver Exhibition. The biggest attractions of the two-week fair are its numerous shops, stalls, performances, a nightly fireworks show, and the exhibition’s Prize Home. From its beginnings, the exhibition was used as a showcase for the region’s agriculture and economy.
In the initial years of the Second World War, the fairgrounds saw an increased military presence. However, the exhibition itself was not cancelled until 1942, after the Canadian declaration of war against Japan was issued. From 1942 to 1946 the exhibition and fair was closed, and like the Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto, served as a military training facility for the duration of World War II. During this time, the exhibition barns that were used to house livestock, were used as processing centres for interned Japanese Canadians from all over British Columbia. The interned Japanese Canadians were later shipped away to other internment camps throughout British Columbia, and Alberta. The Momiji (Japanese word for Maple) Gardens on the PNE’s grounds serves as a memorial for the event. The barns used for the internment of Japanese Canadians are still used to house livestock during the annual fair, and serve as storage area to house some of the PNE’s property the rest of the year.
On 7 February 1946, the Vancouver Exhibition Association changed its name to its current moniker, the Pacific National Exhibition; and later reopened the fair to the public under that name in 1947. The organization was formally reincorporated as the Pacific National Exhibition in 1955.
The highest attendance at the fair was recorded in 1986, with 1.1 million guests visiting the PNE, most likely due to Expo 86 that was occurring at the time. In 1993, the amusement park adjacent to the PNE, Playland, became a division of the PNE organization.
During 1997-1998, the PNE grounds was transformed with the demolition of a number of buildings including the Food Building, Showmart and the Poultry Building. This gave way to the Sanctuary, a parkland setting with a pond. The pond restored part of a stream that once flowed in the park out to the Burrard Inlet. The city restored a large portion of the park. Many old fair buildings have been demolished and replaced by a more natural character. Although land was purchased in Surrey that was to become the fair’s new home, the PNE has since transferred ownership from the province to the City of Vancouver and will remain at Hastings Park. The PNE is a registered charity.
Two attractions at the PNE were named as heritage sites by the City of Vancouver in August 2013. The Pacific Coliseum and the Wooden Roller Coaster were added to the list.
In 2020, the fair went on hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, alongside other agricultural and county fairs across Canada, including the Calgary Stampede, the Canadian National Exhibition, and K-Days.
In the early hours of February 20, 2022, a major fire broke out on PNE grounds, where multiple vehicles, tools and equipment, and buildings were destroyed as a result.
The PNE grounds contains several buildings and exhibition halls. The PNE Forum is a 4,200 square metres (45,000 sq ft) exhibition facility that is used for large displays and trade shows. Rollerland is a 1,840 square metres (19,800 sq ft) exhibition, banquet hall and venue for the Terminal City Roller Derby.
Two buildings on the PNE grounds are indoor arenas. The Pacific Coliseum is multi-purpose arena that holds 15,713 permanent seats, with provisions for 2,000 temporary seats for concerts and certain sports. The PNE Agrodome is a smaller indoor arena with 3,000 permanent seats, with provisions to expand up to 5,000 seats. Entertainment facilities includes the Garden Auditorium, a building that features a built-in stage and dance hall. The PNE grounds also feature amphitheatre with bench-style seating for 4,500 visitors.
Other buildings on the PNE grounds includes the Livestock Barns, a large multi-use facility, and the organization’s administrative offices.
Resident Evil 6 may be the most lavishly produced bad game in history.
Resident Evil 6 is a big-budget disaster on the order of the Star Wars prequels, a sprawling production that clearly required so many individual talents to bring it into being, you can’t help but wonder how the end result could have turned out so bad. Then again, the game tries to be so many things to so many different people, the image of a many-headed hydra thrashing violently beyond the control of its developers comes readily to mind. There are a few fleeting moments of greatness in Resident Evil 6, but you’ll likely spend so much time with your head in your hands that you’ll probably just miss them all.
Whatever else could be improved upon in this game is moot, since its fundamentals as a third-person action game are just plain badly implemented. After the great last couple of installments in the core Resident Evil franchise, it’s astounding that the basic act of playing RE6 doesn’t feel at least as good as it did in those games. On the surface, RE6 is made up of the same third-person shooting, button-prompt-driven melee combat, and inventory management, though it goes further in the direction of similar Western action games that focus on moving and shooting in tandem, largely at the expense of the series’ traditionally deliberate style of gameplay. But it doesn’t go far enough to produce a satisfying game of singular intent. In trying to have it both ways, clumsily mixing that more active style of shooter with vestigial elements of the series’ survival-horror past, and peppering the entire thing with excessive Quick Time events and nearly hands-off action set pieces, RE6 takes a tremendous step backwards in terms of basic playability.
The reasons for this are too numerous for any one review, but here goes. The character movement is awkward, the aiming and shooting are stiff, and your basic interactions with enemies feel unresponsive and grossly unsatisfying. With a laser sight that swims around wildly within the targeting reticle and enemies that sometimes feel like bullets are passing right through them, the shooting makes a lousy first impression. And don’t get me started on how clumsy the camera can get when you’re trying to move around in tight spaces, or about the game’s nasty habit of cutting back from a cinematic sequence with your camera angle pointed not only in a different direction than you left it, but also away from the thing you need to focus your attention on. The trusty old 180-degree turn from previous games sometimes turns only your character while leaving the camera stationary, exposing you to unnecessary risk as you then have to manually swivel the perspective around after you’ve wasted time expecting a basic game mechanic to work like it’s supposed to. Playing RE6 is like suffering the death of a thousand cuts, as one minor annoyance and unavoidable death after another chip away at your enjoyment.
Most of Resident Evil 6 is marred by a glaring lack of that video game critic’s old standby, polish. Every time you’re killed instantly by an unavoidable scripted event, it feels like a good opportunity to turn the game off and never turn it back on. Seriously, there were multiple times in more than one level where I or someone I was playing co-op with was killed by some timed event–say, a truck hurtling into the area from offscreen–that you just couldn’t avoid if you didn’t know it was coming, and often don’t even see coming if you don’t happen to have the camera pointed randomly in the right direction. The game rarely communicates what it wants you to do, leaving you in many of the game’s long, multi-phase boss fights to blindly waste ammo as you try to figure out whether you’re effectively doing any damage to an enemy that barely reacts visibly to your attacks.
There are other basic design issues that make the game feel like a chore, like the inability to stop time even while you’re trying to change your brightness or control scheme. You’re never even alerted to the existence of a cover system or dodge mechanics outside of loading-screen tooltips that, at least on the Xbox version I played through, were typically onscreen for less than a second. But the game sure does make a point of driving home how Quick Time events work in its laughable tutorial segment. It never even attempts to explain the quirks of ducking and rolling, which require you to use the same button combo in different ways, but it goes out of its way to make sure you know to push the stick down and hold the A button every time you need to run toward the camera through a barely-interactive scripted chase scene. That’s a telling example of the poor attention to detail here where basic playability is concerned.
To be fair, the more you play RE6, the more you’ll adapt to the long list of quirks that initially conspire to make the combat in this game a miserable experience. Eventually it becomes less miserable, but it never clicks and feels satisfying and engaging the way the best action games do. Think about the brightest lights in the genre on this generation of consoles. For me, it’s games like Infamous and Dead Space that give you immediate, absolute control over your abilities and impart the information for you to make split-second decisions about how to deal with any threat. Those games just feel right. Even at its best, playing RE6 feels like fumbling around blindly in the dark by comparison. The impression is of a game that underwent little to no playtesting, to see how actual human beings would respond to the mechanics and systems that make up the gameplay, and to refine and fix them in the places where they weren’t working.
As Resident Evil goes, this game’s justification for its own existence is questionable in the first place. Resident Evil 4 went to admirable lengths to upend the series’ longstanding fiction by bringing in new antagonists and a new location, and I felt like 5 was already pushing its luck by turning right around and going back to the well with Wesker and the Umbrella Corporation yet again. But at least that game was bold enough to resolve those longstanding story threads with finality, explaining and killing off pretty much everything there was to explain and kill off. Then along comes RE6 with… Neo-Umbrella and the son of Wesker. That’s really the most inspired premise they could conceive? I’ll grant that this game is awkwardly timed at the end of a console cycle, and it’s too soon to go back to the drawing board and completely rebuild Resident Evil from the ground up, but couldn’t Capcom have just put together a more modest side story to fill the necessary spot on the release calendar until then? (Actually, I guess they already did that.)
Whether RE6’s premise strains plausibility or not, the series has had good luck in the past with multiple concurrent campaigns starring different characters, and here you get a whopping four of them. Dandy-haired Leon Kennedy’s vignette feels the most like an old Resident Evil, with the highest concentration of cathedrals and rotting zombies in the game. Square-jawed Chris Redfield’s campaign then goes and does a middling Gears of War impression, with an increased emphasis on taking cover and shooting at enemies who shoot back at you. Then son-of-Wesker Jake moves through a campaign with a disjointed mix of shooting, ill-conceived stealth sequences, and an indestructible Big Bad who chases you through every area like a modern-day Nemesis. Once you finish the three storylines, you unlock a hidden fourth campaign so top-secret it’s mentioned on the back of the box, one that’s meant to give some additional context to everything you’ve seen over the last 20 hours or so.
The idea of this many criss-crossing storylines is a great one, and you do get little nuggets of info in each campaign that expand on the events in the others. It’s hard to get too excited about anything that happens in the game, though, revolving as it does around yet another iteration of the X-virus that’s always been at the center of the whole zombie mess. Nothing of major importance to the Resident Evil continuity takes place here, as every character and story thread introduced at the outset has either been blandly resolved or summarily dismissed by the end, resulting in a conclusion that, as far as Chris and Leon are concerned, might as well never have happened. More damningly, as the game wears on, it becomes more and more disappointing how much content is flat-out recycled from previous campaigns. By the time I got to Jake’s campaign and especially into that last one, I was replaying sequences and boss fights on a disturbingly regular basis that I’d already played before. Sometimes you at least get to take part from a different angle, but just as often you’re literally fighting the exact same boss fight you already did a few hours ago. It’s especially glaring that if you play the campaigns in the recommended order, the first last-boss encounter you face is identical to the very last one. That’s a pretty anti-climactic way to end such a huge production, and it’s emblematic of the many aspects of RE6 that just weren’t thought all the way through.
The game at least earns a few points for sheer audacity. Its scope is enormous; the volume of huge, detailed environmental art crammed in here could fill two or three similar games of average length. And many of those areas are framed and lit to great dramatic effect, though others look like they had less attention given to them, and the frame rate is low enough across the board to diminish the effect of actually moving around in them. Many of the monster designs are creepy as hell (a human torso attached to spider legs and wielding an assault rifle seems like something that just should not exist), and the bosses are plenty big and menacing and impressive to watch, though that effect is often lost in the frustrating trial-and-error required to fight them. The production values in the cinematics are top-shelf, and the character performances are quite well done, with Troy Baker further cementing his status as the new Nolan North in a nicely snarky turn as the wisecracking, in-it-for-the-money merc Jake. And as flat as I found the broad story, there were a couple of honestly affecting human moments that got to me a little bit. But once the moment is over, they don’t really go anywhere.
By the time I’d slogged through the two-dozen-plus hours of the four main campaigns, I couldn’t find it in myself to care much about the return of The Mercenaries, the score-based time attack mode that I used to play obsessively in past games, or Agent Hunt, which lets you match your way into another player’s game as a monster so you can give them some trouble. That’s a great idea, though most of the monsters you end up with aren’t very capable or much fun to control in practice. Mercs is the same as it ever was, which is fine, and by the time I was done with the game, I felt well enough attuned to the combat that I could have given it a pretty effective go, I just had no energy or desire left to do so. It’s worth noting you can once again play the whole game in co-op if you like, though your ever-present, indestructible AI buddy is actually pretty effective in combat, except for the rare moment where they refuse to get themselves over to a tandem door you need to open. That doesn’t happen often, but always seems to happen at the worst times.
At a glance, Resident Evil 6 is built on the basic blueprint of a good action game, swaddled in what must have been one of the most expensive productions in video game history. You could offer a lot of ifs about how to make this game better: if the fat were trimmed out in service of a shorter, tighter campaign; if the designers had drilled down more intently on one style of gameplay rather than trying to cover all of them; if the player’s core interactions with the game were simply as refined as they should have been. But in the real world, we’re left with what’s in the box. It’s hard to fathom how Resident Evil, which almost singlehandedly redefined the action genre just two installments ago, has now become such a strange, mediocre pastiche of the better games this series once inspired. What a bitter irony that is.
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