Resident Evil 5

"For people who are new to the series it might take 30 hours to play through the whole game, so if you look at that, and look at the amount of content in the game, it's on a bigger scale than Resident Evil 4," he says. Good news - but its size hasn't meant that it has been a struggle to fit the game onto a single DVD. "It hasn't been that much of a problem, and one of the main reasons for that is that all of the movies in the game all use the game engine, so we don't have to fit in lots of pre-rendered movies onto the disk."

But what about the dreaded hard-disk install for PS3 owners? "We're still working on those technical elements in the last couple of months, but we can tell you that if users are dissatisfied with that kind of thing, then it's certainly something we keep in mind when we develop. We'll do our best to come up with something that users will not criticise, but love..."

Takeuchi also confirms that Capcom has ditched the infamous typewriter save system, and replaced it with checkpoints. In addition, the usual multiple difficulty levels have been retained, and there will be unlockable mini-games of sorts. "We can't say exactly what there will be, but we'd like you to look forward to it." Our spies reckon the Mercenaries mode will make a return, but no confirmation is forthcoming.

A downloadable demo, however, is definitely on the cards: "We'll be making an announcement about that relatively soon," he says. And what about downloadable content? "That's one of the things we're thinking about right now. We do get that question a lot, and people seem to want it, so it's possible that it's something we would like to respond to.

Happily, he also says he would personally be up for going back and remaking some of the older Resident Evil classics, given the opportunity: "If we had the chance to go back and remake Resident Evil 2...you know, I think there is the demand for it. It's certainly something we would like to consider and think about, but, quite frankly our hands are full with Resident Evil 5 right now, and trying to get that out of the door, so we're going to have to put all of our focus on Resident Evil 5 for the moment." Get the online petition started now.

Perhaps predictably, he quickly steers the conversation back towards Resi 5, which he reckons will be amazing. "We have the biggest budget of any game in the series so far, we have the best staff working on it, and Capcom is working as one to make this the best entry we have in the series. All the staff have been looking back at all the great games that have been in the series so far, and they all feel the pressure to make something better than any of the previous games in the series.

"Personally, though, the most amazing thing is seeing how the staff are doing their best and working all hours in order to make them even better than Resident Evil 4, which was a classic." If it's better than 4, I think we'll all be happy...