I'll be the contrarian here and say that if you never played an RE game before RE4, don't ever play the early games.
Much to my chagrin, Capcom stuck with a shit control system long after games like Silent Hill had updated the genre to make it where the player was pissed at the game instead of the faulty mechanics.
Don't get me wrong, I loved RE back in the day but RE4 was waaaaaaayyyy overdue when it released. I tried to play Zero on the GC and returned it three days later because I don't tolerate developer laziness through a shit aiming and control system. In this age, that's not fun, that's just crap. Unfortunately, the RE series took too long to get to that point but at least they redeemed themselves with one of the greatest games of last generation, RE4 (quite possibly my favorite game of the sixth generation).
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