5

The Movies Don't Waste (as Much) Time

Fans of the game have complained that the movies are lowbrow, and yes, they are clinically incapable of going five minutes without doing something awesomely stupid. But at least they're doing something. The games use more padding to keep people stuck than Arkham Asylum, and the contents make less sense. Most of the games are one part zombies to 20 parts fetch quest. Resident Evil 2 has you placing a unicorn medal in the police station foyer fountain statue so it can pour you a key. The quests have less than no explanation. Legend has it that encyclopedias get one page shorter with every sequel.

Capcom

Code: Veronica has you find a player piano roll in a surgical torture dungeon to unlock the death camp's casino's slot machine to get an ant statue to activate a music box to trigger the secret bed-ladder to a carousel. You haven't gone aphasic, Capcom just randomly picked words from a dictionary instead of writing them. And we obeyed their instructions and convinced ourselves that we enjoyed it. This wasn't a game; it was a brainwashing program.

The result is trawling endless narrow corridors full of undead and picking up anything you find because those are the only paths you can follow. So basically, Pac-Man. At one point you have a square crank but need an octagon crank, so you use a metalworking machine to cut it down to size, and then you're told you need a square crank again, and have to find an octagon-to-square crank converter to proceed.

Capcom
Video games can be worlds of limitless imagination. The Resident Evil games make you reuse crank handles.

4

The Games Have a Worse Plot

The first and stupidest complaint that gamers have about the movies is that they don't follow the plot of the games. Of course they don't! The movies aren't nine hours long, and even if they were, eight hours of watching people slowly fetch pointless objects while avoiding shambling bodies isn't cinema, it's a shift at Walmart. The plot of the first Resident Evil game kicks off with the only special forces team in the entire world that doesn't know how to break down locked doors. From there, the stories only got dumber. Gordon Freeman could complete the entire series in about half an hour.

Valve
Hollywood, we're mentioning Half-Life in an article about video game movies for a reason. Take the hint AND OUR MONEY.

The plot of the first game had three secret Umbrella Corporation labs close enough to steal each other's Wi-Fi but utterly unaware of each other's existence. It depends on one character forgetting that she blew up a secret virus lab on the way to another virus lab. In fact, the plot of the original games got so stupid that even the games dumped most of it, restarting in Resident Evil 4. But not before Resident Evil 0 gave us a dead scientist empowered by singing opera to leeches.

Capcom
And apparently on loan from Final Fantasy.

3

The Movies Have a Better Primary Character

Another complaint is how the movies star a brand new character, Alice.

Constantin Film
Clearly not equipped to star in a zombie action movie.

2

No Files in the Movies

The movies are permanently better because NO FILES. Ten percent of the game plot was delivered by the worst voice actors reading the worst writing in the world, and for the other 90 percent, they couldn't afford voice actors. The intro cinematic had already ruined movies, so the game went after reading. It was trying to win by destroying everything else in the world with exposure to its evil. Which is Umbrella Corporation's actual corporate strategy.

Capcom
I could have been playing Deus Ex. I was a moron in 2000.

1

The Movies Have a Better Sequel Strategy

At last count, the games had nine different kinds of virus and parasite. It's like they got confused about whether people were playing because they liked to shoot zombies or because they were interested in virologist fan fiction. Since any one of the viruses in the game can apparently do anything, it's more pointless replication of terrible things than the Kardashian family. The movies streamlined the virus count to just two, T-virus and the antivirus, both of which created monsters ... which logically should mean that everything in the world becomes a monster. And in the only case of a video game movie using logic, that's exactly what happens.

Constantin Film

In the game, the huge, villainous Umbrella Corporation is destroyed off camera between games by the villains, ensuring that the heroes achieved nothing. Umbrella is then immediately replaced by the identical Tricell corporation, just to remind players that they're wasting their time. Bizarrely, the movies are better at rebooting between levels than the computer games. The movies approach sequels like tank combat: The old one blows up, so you make the new one bigger and even more awesome. They haven't had to retcon because anything that could have complicated the story is blatantly blown up at the start of the next movie, even if it's the entire world, the cliffhanger they'd promised in the previous movie, a hundred clones of the main character, or all three.

Constantin Film
And it's still less stupid than how Agent Smith lost.

The movies are incredibly, hilariously, defiantly stupid, but they work. Each Resident Evil movie makes more money than the one before, which is exactly the kind of exponential profit from disasters the Umbrella Corporation would have been going for all this time. The movies get terrible reviews but are a huge amount of fun. And I think that now, together, we've grown enough to admit that the games were the exact opposite.

Luke also tumbles and responds to every single tweet.

If you want to watch Luke writhe in agony, he sets his own face on fire in the Chili Pepper Experiment. He also looks at The 5 Worst Monsters in Resident Evil and learns 4 Things Star Trek Can Teach Us About Video Games.