i don't know what he originally said, i just saw the list posted here and presumed 'stupid' to mean 'dense' not 'poorly conceived'. if he was criticising their designs, then yeah, i don't agree with that.
Resident Evil is a PSX game. SH2 is not. SH1 had a more interesting cast of regular enemies.
the good stuff about SH2 outweighs things like the terrible combat in SH2 to the point where some people get overly snippy whenever it gets mentioned, but if we're just talking GAMEPLAY i don't think it's really controversial to say SH1 = SH3 > SH2. again, i stress the word GAMEPLAY.
He said something like "they're not threatening at all after the first WTF moment", which i think is bullshit, if you play at a decent difficulty.. playing SH1 on hard for example with very limited ammo and dying in few hits, was extremely tense for me.
Of course when you know the game backwards and front, that tension will dissipate, but that's just how it works.
That said, i think the gameplay and controls (especially in 2, 3 was alright) aged badly, but i don't think the monsters are particularly bad to face/interact with, they change if you have the light and radio off and weird shapes and animations made them kind of impredictable.
Not that i think they're amazing as far as AI goes, but i also can't think of many games of the genre with much better monsters, not until RE4 changed the game.
Of course, combat was never a big focus on SH games, so not a big problem there.
Again, i never thought SH2 (or any SH) was a perfect game, even though it's my favorite one, but i think the problem in its gameplay it's not much in the monsters, as much as it is in the very base of its gameplay that relies too much on the old survival horror tropes.
