I have only occasionally played some bits of the games I have. I'm really anticipating the Saturn releases, since the Battle Game is something I've only played once or twice.
I beat my first game tonight at around 4 hours and 30 minutes. I kept dying too. This game is quite hard, especially when Hunters corner you

. Thankfully, that play-through has pretty much all the item/enemy locations for the site, so I don't have to go to every single room multiple times anymore ;). Now its just a matter of finding all of Jill's scene variants.
One cool thing I found that I never saw is when you are on the 2nd floor East Wing. When you are at the point where you can walk down the stairs to the first floor (the Botany Book room is next door), theres a zombie thats on the 2nd floor near the one room that leads to the bedroom and the fish tank room. I left him alive this time, and ran into the room. I read the Researcher's Will, where he explained that he'll be taking his own life in an effort to stop becoming a zombie. I guess it failed, because as soon as I left the room and headed for the bedroom, he opened the door (the zombie near the stairs) and came in for me. Pretty cool thing that I never noticed.
I always thought the zombie that comes into the dining room was the only one that opened a door at you.
Another thing I noticed was Plant 42 is incredibly hard to hit with any kind of Bazooka round. You are supposed to use Flame Rounds on him, but only his tentacles can be hit by them and they move around a lot. I died 2 times on it
In one of the researcher letters, its mentioned that "a man with sunglasses" stopped him from leaving the grounds. Was it ever mentioned that Wesker was head of security for the Arklay facility? Might just be a coincidence, but it seemed to imply that Wesker was on-site during the outbreak, handling security.