The Wii’s first year on the market hasn’t exactly been spotless. Despite the glowing reports from mainstream media outlets who don’t know any better, and Nintendo’s own endless self-praise, there’s been a good deal of less-than-stellar material pumped out for the console. The worst of these budget games are “Wii-makes,” which is typically a euphemism for a half-baked PS2 port with motion controls unceremoniously tacked on. Ubisoft gained particular infamy for their practice of cheap-porting. Within the ocean of mediocre, a few gems do shine out, titles that had honest effort put into their Wii-ification. Trauma Center Second Opinion blazed the trail, but Capcom has arguably the best example of a successful Wii-make with their re-imagining of Resident Evil 4. In my opinion, this final version of their survival horror instant classic is the new benchmark by which all Wii ports should be measured.

It does help when you’re polishing gold in the first place; RE4 is one of the best games in recent memory, and I’m sure it lent more than a little inspiration to Gears of War. RE4 helped to revive not only its own series, but the survival horror genre, which had stagnated in recent years. You can go to any game website and hear bountiful accolades for this game, so I’ll spare you more fan gushing. Instead, I’ll try to convince you why this port is worth your money, and is the definitive version of RE4.

The main game remains unaltered, including the story. It works itself out nicely through the course of the game, but the basic gist is this. Leon S. Kennedy, hero of Resident Evil 2, has been dispatched to a secluded Spanish village where the U.S. President’s daughter has been taken captive. Leon soon discovers that there’s more to the village than a simple religious cult. The locals have been infected with a parasite on the scale of the T-virus, but they aren’t mindless zombies. They’re intelligent, cunning, fast and what’s worse, someone is pulling all the strings.

So if the game is just a port, what’s the big deal? Well, the biggest change to this version of the game is the controls. The original GameCube setup worked well enough, although it was a tad sluggish. The PS2 port handled about the same, but the PC bastardization was a nightmare—no native mouse support, which meant you were pretty much screwed unless you owned a USB controller. The Wii version’s controls are the best of all the ports, and they easily beat out even the old Cube scheme for which the game was designed.

The standard button controls are split between the remote and nunchuk, which feels less constraining. If you’ve played the older versions, it might take a minute or two to figure out where everything has been moved on the new setup, but the new controls are largely as comfortable if not more so than the old ones. The pause and map functions are a little awkward on the 1 and 2 buttons, but everything else feels just fine. It’s the aiming, however, that really makes the Wii setup rise head and shoulders above the older models.

The Wii remote really lets RE4 shine in the way it was supposed to. The laser-pointer aiming was a huge step for the series anyway, but the IR control makes it almost perfect. Instead of a flickering laser dot, a small crosshair is visible on screen at all times. When it’s not in use it is colored a light gray, but pressing the B trigger brings Leon into aiming mode and the crosshair glows neon green. When you have a target in your sights the crosshair goes red, which is accom...