Written by Jonathan Wojcik
REVIEWING RESIDENT EVIL: DEAD AIM MONSTERS
Resident Evil: Dead Aim was actually the fourth in Capcom's "Gun Survivor" spinoff series, designed to make use of the Light Gun controller for a more action-oriented experience. Previous Gun Survivor entries were set concurrently with previous main series titles, but Dead Aim attempted its own storyline with new locations, new characters, and a modest handful of new monsters.
THE HALBERT
There are unfortunately no clearer images of these mutated bees. There's also very little more to them than, well, mutated bees, though their heads and thoraxes are a little stylized, almost more cockroach-like than Hymenopteran.
THE GLIMMER
Encountered at Umbrella's waste disposal facility, the Glimmer is an early experiment that may have lead to the development of the first hunters, and does bear some resemblance to the froglike Hunter Gamma. The glimmer, however, sports a raspberry-like cluster of luminous red eyes, hence the name, and without any teeth or claws, its primary attack mechanism is to regurgitate its gastric juices! Really weird, really interesting little mutants, just the sort of messed-up thing I really expect from Umbrella's reject bin.
THE HUNTER ELITE
In stark contrast to the Glimmer, this creature represents the latest and greatest of Umbrella's hunter line, and I like how it ends up with a completely goofy toad-shark sort of face instead of the scary snake man we're accustomed to. Smarter as well as stronger than the average hunter, the elite possesses a left arm with nasty, sickle-like hooks and a right arm with more dextrous fingers, presumably allowing it to more carefully manipulate objects should the need arise, maybe even open doorknobs! A clever girl!
TYRANT 091
Another failure, Tyrant 091 was an attempt to combine the T and G viruses into a new strain that was believed to enhance the host's electrical properties. Instead, this Tyrant simply sprouted a vulnerable exposed heart on its back, giant tentacle-like fingers and no upper jaw. A very weird and interesting Tyrant, regardless.
PLUTO
This unique boss represents another of Umbrella's sad, tortured testing subjects, a condemned criminal they presumably purchased through some shady deal with the U.S. prison system in a sadly very realistic bout of corporate villainy. Once he was injected with the T-virus, a metal rod was apparently hammered into his brain just to calm him down, steroids were pumped into him to see how big he'd grow and his eyes were removed to test how his mutations might compensate. The result was a very, very big, very strong mutant with hyper-sensitive hearing, and easily just one of the most pitiful, awful monsters in the series. The humongous left hand somehow unsettles me the most because it's just a really humongous, thickly overgrown left hand with straight, rod-like fingers. That's just so, so unpleasant.
MORPHEUS
The villain of this one isn't all that tactful. Obsessed with attaining perfect beauty and beautifying all the world through genetic mutation, Morpheus uses a combination of surgery and Umbrella's viruses to give himself breasts, hips, and longer legs. We all know this is supposed to be "disturbing" in itself and that it really sucks how any Unconventional Gender Stuff has been played for horror in so much entertainment. Hopefully, nearly two decades later, Capcom wouldn't really do that again for a main bad guy, but who knows.
Judgmental implications aside, Morpheus is absolutely correct in thinking that this form is gorgeous. The sleek tentacle hair, ridged thighs and the bony cage surrounding those exposed guts are all incredibly stylish and look more like something out of Hellraiser than Resident Evil. The earlier Hellraiser stuff, the good stuff. Unlike Tyrant 91, the electrical mutations are also a success, allowing Morpheus to hurl lighting bolts from that oversized right claw.
THE NAUTILUS
While neither the main villain nor final boss, I thought I'd review the Nautilus last because it's actually one of my very favorite monsters in the series, if not my very topmost favorite. Only two of them are encountered in the whole game, in the sewers under that aforementioned waste facility. Possibly mutated from a sea squirt, the Nautilus is a big, veiny, womb-like polyp that constantly spawns what are known as "torpedo kids" - unsettling, tadpole-like larvae with ghoulish fetal faces that actually explode like torpedos. How positively wacky is this thing?! THIS is how you design an abandoned, unstable mutation. A flat-out surreal biological abomination that isn't even exceptionally formidable, but definitely a pain in the ass and mesmerizingly peculiar.
If only I could really, really see what this thing's model looks like...
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