The Great Geek Manual

This Friday, Resident Evil 4 for the PC finally hits the shelves in the EU. Those of us in the good ol’ United States will be forced to wait more than a month for the April 2nd release – likely with our EU buddies rubbing our nose in it the entire time. It was released for the Playstation more than a year ago, and the wait has been excruciating. Unfortunately, however, JemyM of the Warp2Search forums may not have been worth the wait. What’s more, you don’t need to take JemyM’s word for it, a French website has posted screenshots.

Here are the principal complaints:

Darkness is removed. Where the console version covers the game in eirie darkness, night is almost as bright as daytime in the PC version removing most of the feel.

Here is the PC screenshot.
Here is the GameCube screenshot.

Daylight is removed. Where the console version is lit up by yellowish daylight, the PC version is just grey dull textures.

Here is the PC screenshot.
Here is the GameCube screenshot.

But that seems to have just been the tip of the iceburg. Here is the rest of his list of complaints:

• Aiming is corrupted. Analog controllers work as digital ones. You have some kind of threshold that must be passed before the aim start to move and when it does it moves too fast. This makes it almost impossible to hit smaller targets even when they are perfectly still.
• Buttons in-game will be refered to 1-10 rather than “USE”, “MENU”, “SHOOT” etc. When you look at the in-game players manual it will describe how to do things by using the Playstation 2 controls with the Playstation 2 setup (which might not be the same as how you set up the joypad). You are pretty much forced to guess the buttons on your way through.
• Despite the lack of effects/shaders the PC version still requires a graphiccard with Pixel Shaders 2.0 to play.
• Haze/Fog is removed. You can see at any distance and when opponents run into the supposed fog (that cannot be seen) they just vanish in thin air.
• Many keys on the keyboard, such as F1-F12, TAB, DEL, Insert etc cannot be bound at all.
• They did not bother about a real “quit game” function, you quit the game with ALT+F4.
• There is no mouse support. You are going to need a joypad with two sticks to play it.
• There is no support for Anisotropic Filthering or Antialiasing.
• There is no support for EAX, modern soundcards or surround sound.
• The PC version uses low quality models from the PS2 version rather than the higher quality GC models, meaning that everything like tree’s etc uses alot fewer polygons than the GC version.

Check out the official Resident Evil site.
Check out the original forum posts.