Surival horror games thrive on the unknown. A player is placed in a world where they have no idea what is going on. Find a weapon or evade the monsters coming after you. What happens when a monster can not be killed and will follow you the entire game. Capcom made players face this terror when it released the third chapter of the Resident Evil saga. Resident Evil 3: Nemesis put gamers face to face with an unkillable foe.
Jill Valentine survived the initial outbreak that destroyed Racoon City. Now, she must find a way to get out before the nuclear bomb levels everything. Jill has more to worry about then zombies and T-Virus mutated monsters. Something is stalking her through the street. It has one mission: to kill anyone who is a member of S.T.A.R. Huge and impossibly strong. It adds a rocket launcher later in the game. It’s name is Nemesis, a biological prototype that is the perfect killing machine.
It is hard to state how terrifying Nemesis was. You would be walking around the city, turn a corner and it would be there. It would chase you from screen to screen. If you were brave enough to fight it, you would quickly discover it took a lot of bullets to put it down. You could not kill Nemesis, only knock it down for a short while. It would dodge your attacks, giving the player the feeling that it was thinking and adapting to your moves. You would escape, only to hear it’s call much sooner then you would have liked.
Resident Evil 3 was much more action orientated then the previous two titles. It had to be, with this unrelenting thing coming after you. Bullets were plenty, but they were just not enough. The story, taking place during Resident Evil 2, gave players a look at how a city wide epidemic might play out in different parts. It also reinforced just how evil Umbrella really was. Nemesis did not escape, he was sent out to kill any witness who knew what Umbrella had been up to.
Resident Evil 3 continued to expend the universe. Nemesis even showed up in the film series, mostly unchanged from the game. When the series moved toward more action then horror, Nemesis showed that you can have both. The recent remake of RE2 introduced new players to Mr. X, who chased players. He was scary, but Nemesis was terrifying.
