I’m pretty embarassed about a mistake I made in the Resident Evil 5 first impressions I posted. I said there was no split-screen co-op play.

Well, there is, as it turns out. It’s just sort of hidden.

When you’re setting up your Resident Evil 5 game, you get two options for cooperative play: System Link and Xbox Live. These are the only two options for the recent Saints Row 2, so we assumed that’s all RE5 had to offer as well.

But it turns out that if someone presses the start button on a second controller, it pops you out of the game, prompts the second person to log in, and kicks you back to the inventory management screen.

It’s kind of clunky. Since it boots you out of the level anyway, why not just let you start a new game split screen from the beginning?

Still, we were slapping our foreheads when we found out the trick to it, especially since it was a feature of previews. There’s no in-game clues that this is possible. It’s in the manual, of course, but who reads the manual anymore?

This is going to delay my final verdict on Resident Evil 5. We’ve only done the first level co-op, but it’s a considerably different experience than the single player game, and it’s raised the game in my esteem already.

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