Author: News Polite

The Resident Evil franchise is being adapted into live-action once again. But whereas the previous theatrical films were very loose adaptations of the source material, Netflix’s new series seeks to build on the established Resident Evil game continuity. And this time, the series’ most fascinating yet convoluted villain – Albert Wesker – is the star of the show.

How exactly does Wesker fit into this new series, and how does it all tie back to his confusing history of deaths and resurrections? Let’s break down what we know so far.

Albert Wesker: S.T.A.R.S. Captain or Umbrella Agent?

Like series mainstays Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine, Albert Wesker made his debut way back in the original Resident Evil in 1996. The game introduces Wesker as the captain of the Special Tactics and Rescue Squad (or S.T.A.R.S.), a special ops force called upon to investigate a series of mysterious killings on the outskirts of Raccoon City. But while Wesker initially comes across as a helpful ally as the player explores the zombie-infested halls of Spencer Mansion, he’s eventually revealed to have a sinister agenda all his own.

Wesker betrays his own team in the game’s climax, revealing himself to be a double agent working for the Umbrella Corporation. The zombie outbreak was caused by exposure to Umbrella’s experimental T-virus bioweapon, and Wesker’s job is to observe the zombies and report back on their military effectiveness. Wesker is seemingly killed in a lab deep beneath the mansion, but not before he frees Umbrella’s deadliest creation – the Tyrant.

Wesker manages to survive his brush with death, however. That would become something of a running theme with the character.

The Many Deaths of Albert Wesker

Wesker went on to play a major role in several Resident Evil sequels and spinoffs, most notably 2000’s Resident Evil Code: Veronica, 2002’s Resident Evil Zero, 2005’s Resident Evil 4 and 2009’s Resident Evil 5.

Over the course of these games, players learn the full, complicated backstory of Albert Wesker. He began his career as a promising virologist who rose up the ranks of Umbrella Corp and colluded with fellow researcher William Birkin. By the time of the original game, Wesker is planning to betray his employer and sell the secrets of the T-virus to a rival corporation. And despite being impaled by the Tyrant, Wesker survives after injecting himself with an experimental version of the T-virus. And not just survives, but gains enhanced strength, speed and glowing red eyes, to boot.

Wesker achieved peak performance in Resident Evil 5.

Wesker returns several times over the course of the series, sometimes directly battling heroes like Chris and Claire Redfield and other times quietly pulling everyone’s strings from behind the scenes. But the common thread throughout the games – apart from Wesker constantly faking his death – is that he’s obsessed with stealing Umbrella’s research and unleashing it upon the world. He believes humanity has reached an evolutionary dead end, and only by unlocking the full potential of the T-virus can the species reach its true potential.

All of this comes to a head in Resident Evil 5, as Wesker resurfaces yet again and conspires with the Tricell Corporation to release the Uroboros virus across the globe. Though Wesker is more powerful than ever by this point, Chris and his allies learn their old nemesis is dependent on a constant supply of a special serum to stay alive. If he takes too much or too little, Wesker could die.

Ultimately, Wesker’s luck runs out when he’s overdosed with the serum and crashlands into an active volcano. After one final battle with his old nemesis Chris, Wesker finally dies a fiery death. Or did he?

Albert Wesker in Netflix’s Resident Evil

Netflix’s early teasers for Resident Evil have revealed a surprising detail about the series. While it may not be set in the exact same universe as the Capcom games, the new series exists in a world where some version of those stories has happened. That includes Wesker’s death in 2009.

The Netflix series takes place in two separate time periods – one in 2022 and the other in a zombie-ravaged 2036. Wesker (played by The Wire’s Lance Reddick) is a major character in the 2022 storyline. The trailers hint that Wesker is once again working as a virologist for a resurgent Umbrella Corp., which has rebuilt Raccoon City on the ashes of the original city. Even more surprisingly, Wesker now has two daughters whose story forms the backbone of both timelines. There’s no word yet on whether Wesker’s son Jake Muller, who plays a big part in Resident Evil 6, will appear in the Netflix series.

Resident Evil – New Images from the Netflix Series

Showrunner Andrew Dabb previously confirmed to IGN that Wesker did indeed perish in the final battle in Resident Evil 5 and didn’t simply fake his death as he so often has in the past. Somehow, Wesker is back, and he seems relatively more sane than he was in most of the games. Is it possible we’ll learn that Wesker was some sort of deranged clone, and the original has remained loyal to Umbrella all this time?

Whatever the secret to Wesker’s return, it’s clear he’s still pursuing his ultimate agenda of forcibly advancing human evolution. The post-apocalyptic 2036 storyline suggests Wesker will eventually unleash his creation on the world, leaving a dwindling population to fight for its survival against billions of zombies and the worst monsters Umbrella has to offer.

How do you think Wesker survived his death in Resident Evil 5? How will the Netflix series build on the foundation of the games? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. And for more Netflix Geeked Week coverage, brush up on everything that’s been revealed at the event so far.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on Twitter.

What do we mean when we talk about an “all time” great in any genre? It’s got to be something that’s stood the test of time, like all our picks for the best classic board games. But at the same time we need to steer away from titles that have become diminished by over familiarity and stray into new and exciting territory. We also want to include things that have been acclaimed as top of their particular tree at one time or another, to give some historical perspective.

That’s the steer we’ve bought to the list below, a mixture of games once seen as the best ever, together with some close pretenders that have earned their spot through novelty or popularity. They’re all great in one way or another, so whatever you pick you can’t go wrong.

Cosmic Encounter

Lots of games that revolve around grabbing territory tend to involve the kind of tentative alliances and festering enmities that mimic real-world diplomacy. Back in 1977, the designers of Cosmic Encounter had a brainwave: why not get rid of the territory and cut to the chase? The result is this hilarious game of shifting alliances where every player has a game-breaking alien power to leverage in the race to win colonies on five of your opponent’s planets. Crammed with variety, tactical decisions and more dramatic reversals than a prime-time soap opera, Cosmic Encounter may be the only negotiation game you need.

The current king of the board gaming pile got that way through an ingenious bit of genre-blending. If you like old-fashioned dungeon crawls with a strong narrative, well, the 95-scenario campaign of fantasy adventure has you covered. If you’re a sucker for tactical combat then its cunning, card-driven face-offs against a staggering variety of foes will thrill you. But if you want heavyweight strategy then deck-building and resource gathering over the campaign plus the in-scenario exhaustion mechanic gives you plenty of meat. Truly all things to all gamers — even fans of the best solo board games — Gloomhaven deserves its staggering level of acclaim. And if the cost is a bit much, Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion offers a smaller campaign at a much smaller price tag. And not for nothing, both of these iterations also made it on our best board games for adults list as well.

Pandemic Legacy: Season 1

If combat-based narrative campaigns aren’t your thing, how about working together to purge the world of infectious diseases? Building on the success of the original Pandemic, this introduces “legacy” concepts to the game, in which components are added or removed as you progress through the game, based on your decisions, successes and failures. After a few plays, your copy will be a unique record of your group’s play. So in addition to offering a very personal tale to engage you, Pandemic: Legacy also individualizes your strategic experience. It’s a magical combination that has spawned two further seasons, creating an epic arc of story and strategy to enjoy with a gaming group or even as one of the best family board games.

Twilight Struggle

Billed as a cold war simulation and with bullet-pointed rules, Twilight Struggle can appear daunting to the uninitiated. But there’s a reason it was widely acclaimed as the best game of all time after its 2009 release. Players have hands of event cards that replicate key moments from the conflict, keyed to either their side or their opponent. If you play an opponent’s card you can still make moves on the board but their event also occurs. This makes every hand a thrilling, tactical dance of play and counterplay as you try to move your plans forward while also nullifying enemy events. In addition to the superb strategic workout, you might even learn some history too.

Agricola

Another game that spent its time in the “best game ever” limelight is this unlikely game about farming. Stepping back from the theme, however, growing a family to work on a family farm is a dead ringer for the popular Worker Placement mechanism. As a result, Agricola conjures a real sense of growing and developing your humble plantation into a thriving stead, with plenty of interesting strategic bumps to navigate along the way. Its particular genius is its huge decks of cards, only a handful of which are used in each game, which ensures lots of strategic variety and allows you to tailor things like complexity and interaction to your group’s tastes.

The Castles of Burgundy

Coming into this game of estate-building in medieval France you could be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed by the options to grow your castle. Fortunately, it’s a dice-based game where the roll each turn limits your choices of where you can take actions. But don’t be fooled into thinking this is a random game: rather, the dice are there to keep throwing you curveballs you have to dodge around as you build a strategy. A classic case of having too much to do and too little to do it with, every action of every round feels weighted with impossible priorities, keeping you stretched right up until the points are tallied.

Lords of Waterdeep

By marrying the sensibilities of Dungeons & Dragons with the mechanics of modern board games, Lords of Waterdeep made a smash hit to last down the ages. Players take the roles of power brokers in the Forgotten Realms’ biggest city, hiring adventurers to defeat perils threatening Waterdeep while building new facilities in the town. It’s these additions that take this unusually thematic worker placement game to the next level, with the new buildings entering play ensuring that new strategies are required each time. Throw in a modicum of minor “take that” cards to spice things up and you’ve got a brilliant game with very wide appeal.

Ticket to Ride

One of the few hobby board games to cross over into full mainstream sales, Ticket to Ride is a steaming success story. It’s a combination of familiar concepts with players collecting cards, like a Rummy game, in order to try and claim matching routes on a map of the US. But beware: it’s a tight board with relatively few potential connections between the cities that you’ll need in order to complete your allotted routes. And if another player gets there first, you’ll lose potential points instead of gaining them. Easy to learn and exciting to play and with a wide variety of versions and expansion maps, Ticket to Ride is great fun for all ages. It also works well as a two-player board game, or with a group.

Concordia

While conquest games involving ancient Rome are ten a penny, Concordia instead has you manoeuvring a noble family to gain wealth and contacts during the height of empire. Play is conducted using a deck of action cards that you can expand, using wealth from your trades, as the game progresses, allowing you to tailor your strategy accordingly. But the kicker is that your final scoring is also depending on those cards, with different cards earning you points in different ways, from goods in your storehouse to colonist pieces on the board. This creates a fascinating, rich, wheels within wheels layer of strategy, while the resource management elements also let you mess up your opponent’s plans while advancing your own.

Summoner Wars 2nd Edition

Collectible games wax and wane in popularity and print status, which makes even classics like Magic: the Gathering hard to include in this kind of list. Summoner Wars, however, with its clever blend of card and board-based gameplay has an evergreen sense about it and, best of all, its collectibility comes in packages. So if you tire of facing off the six included factions against one another, you can just add more to your collection. By forcing players to use cards both as units and currency, it keeps everyone making knife-edge decisions as they maneuver round the board and roll off against opposing units in their quest to kill the enemy summoner, right up until the on-board death.

Codenames

Blasting onto the scene in 2015, Codenames changed the face of party games forever. In place of trivia quizzes or trivial tasks, it challenged players to come up with clues to interlink a series of apparently unconnected words. So you might link “Trip”, “Rome” and possibly even “Embassy” with the clue “Holiday”. The concept proved so accessible and addictive that it launched an entire new genre of synonym-based word games, each giving different spins on a similar formula. But for ease of teaching and wideness of enjoyment, the original is still the best.

Looking for more ideas not covered herer? Check out our rundown of the best board games for kids.