It was serious but it was also well done serious. It didn't have goofy enemies, villains or crazy action set pieces with exploding trains and stuff. They set the mood up right for that one. RE2 and Code Veronica where probably the closest in terms of setting and tone that comes close to REmake but those still had their B-Movie roots in full swing with cheesy dialog.

I has been about 5 years since I played Zero but it is the setting, the enemies and everything about it that smells of lazy. Oh boy...another mansion. I didn't get enough of that in RE1 or Code Veronica(twice here yo!). Random Animals = Zombie Animals...and that is it by and large. Nothing creative going on here.

REmake also succeeded not only because of the ton set by the game overall (new areas super well done) but because of new gameplay elements. Zombies don't disappear and will resurrect later to become even deadlier nightmares. Quick out items like the hand knife. Well made puzzles and traps. If anything, the game as a whole lives outside the rest of the series as nothing else is like it.

Every RE game after RE3 made the game into some sort of weird epic journey. While I love Code Veronica and 4, the stories are now about saving the world from utter annihilation. Both of those are ultimatly about that but they felt smaller. Leon goes to save the Presidents daughter and even with the stakes getting higher, this focus is never lost and things never really escalate outside the compound....even though the compound is like the size of a small country.

They want to continually raise the stakes because everything needs to be bigger and better. How about we leave umbrella as dead, don't expand on that back story (looking at you Zero) and just have a new bio-genetics company spring up and cause some serious damage through small simple experiments instead of some insane turn into a mutant and be the queen whatever and rule a civilization of whatevers.

UGH! Now I am just bitching about how the series has gone to poop :P It would be one thing if the gameplay still held up but it really doesn't.

I guess the moral of the story is that the devil is always in the small details. Is too much stuff popping up that you find to be lame? Are they trying to hard about everything? Are you questioning why the characters(Rebecca) seem to instantly forget and never mention any of this in the sequel (the original game). The game overall isn't terrible but you can't separate it from the known universe that it is attempting to expand upon and not question all of the odd choices being made.