Capcom’s remake of Resident Evil came along at the right time for the GameCube, but more importantly, at the right time for me. The survival horror genre had aroused my interest before, but I often found that graphical shortcomings led to storytelling and atmospheric concessions that undermined the experience for me. Such was not the case with Resident Evil. It was the first game that really made me afraid.

To start, I had the benefit of having been too young to play the original when it was released for the PlayStation in 1996, so I was unspoiled by the specifics of the storyline and was unfamiliar with the environments. From the gorgeous pre-rendered opening cinematic, which sets up the simple rescue-mission-gone-awry and protagonists Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine of Raccoon City’s Special Tactics and Rescue Squad (STARS), Resident Evil oozed ambience, and I was enthralled.

The majority of the hard gameplay takes place in the Spencer Mansion, which is crawling with shambling corpses, zombified Dobermans and worse. From the outset of the game, players can choose to play as either Chris or Jill, each of whom has distinct strategic advantages. For example, Chris equips grenades as a defense weapon (which results in spectacular decapitations), and Jill has a larger item inventory.

And those advantages come distinctly into play, because Resident Evil is not an easy game. Or at least, it’s not the type of game in which blowing through every enemy is ever an option. There’s a huge micromanagement aspect to allocating bullets and choosing pathways that dictates to a large extent how one experiences Resident Evil. This can lead to some occasionally tedious backtracking between the game’s many interconnected storage chests, but fastidious players should enjoy the age-old conundrum of ammo clip versus healing herb.

The controls for Resident Evil — and most of the older titles in the series — seem to be a sticking point for some, who argue that the “tank-like” movement is unintuitive to the point of souring the whole experience. I’ll admit that my first impression of controlling my avatar was that I had spent $50 on an unplayable game, (my Chris ran clumsily into walls and took off in the opposite direction I expected him to), but after a few short hours of trial and error, I mastered the controls, and so can you! There’s undeniably a learning curve, but anyone who says “I couldn’t get past the controls” didn’t have their heart in it.

Honestly, I understand the complaint, but the issue is that there’s really no other way for the game to work. Because Resident Evil features static camera angles with pre-rendered backdrops, traditional 3-D character control interface would be equally disorienting.

Not to mention that gamers who can’t get past the controls are ultimately missing out on what I consider to be one of the all-time seminal horror games. The backgrounds in Resident Evil may not be 3-D, but they breathe with dynamic animation that makes them feel alive and photorealistic. Moths flutter by open flames, floorboards kick up dust and lightning flashes realistically across the environments, accompanied by terrific rolling thunder.

The sound work in Resident Evil is absolutely incredible. The voice-acting, which is notoriously poor in the PlayStation original, is some of the most nuanced and convincing I’ve heard from a game, and the fantastic, eerie score — punctuated by the moan of some unseen enemy — is genuinely disquieting.

What I really respect about Resident Evil, however, is that unlike most horror games, it achieves both a creepy gothic atmosphere and fast-paced, edge-of-your-seat scares. Scrambling past an enemy with no ammunition or dealing with any of the sprinting “Crimson Head” zombies later in the game will make you beyond thankful for those mandatory doorway animations between rooms.

I can’t tell you have many times I’ve played through and revisited Resident Evil for the GameCube. I beat it in speed runs and with invisible enemies and still return to it every so often for another round. Its infinite replayability is, I think, thanks to the convergence of its palpable atmosphere, surprisingly addictive strategic gameplay mechanic and excellent writing — a facet conspicuously absent in the series’ more recent installments.

I have a thousand little memories that make Resident Evil one of my favorite games of all time, and it’s an easy recommendation even today for anyone with a Wii and a GameCube controller lying around. This is a reimaging of the highest caliber that I’ll wager will be one of the most frightening games you’ll ever play — that is, if the controls don’t scare you off first.