Freaking.Space.Lasers

Welcome to Willamette, Colorado! On entering this lovely town your first thought will be “hey, what a lovely town” followed closely by “where can I get some stylish consumer products?” Not to worry, just head on over to the Willamette Mall for all your shopping needs. You’ll meet new people and have loads of fun, but always remember: braaaaaaains…

Dead Rising (Capcom - Xbox 360) casts you as Frank West, a man of incomparable physical and mental density. Frank is a photojournalist who receives an anonymous tip suggesting something is going down—old school—in the town of Willamette. When he arrives he is greeted by proverbial hordes of undead, a mall filled with survivors (for the moment) and a deepening mystery. You’re tasked with finding out the truth behind the outbreak, saving the remaining humans, and—above and beyond everything else—surviving the mayhem.

How you do that, surprisingly, is largely up to you. There is a 72 hour time limit (in-game time) which will have you running around like a crazy person the first time around, until you realise that it’s actually pretty generous. The main plot of the game plays out at scheduled times during the three day horror, and Frank is given a reasonable amount of time to hobble to the right location. Between these compulsory events there is often time to kill (wit) which you can fill any number of ways, from saving survivors to wiping out the living dead en masse.

Which is what you’re really here for, right?

Pretences about story aside, Dead Rising offers you a huge map filled to the brim with rotting corpses and copious potential weapons. The sheer amount of zombies on screen at once would make George A Romero mess his pants with excitement. There can be hundreds of bodies shuffling on screen at once, all of them well modelled and with enough variety to really sell the idea that a whole town has gone to hell. As the game progresses so do the numbers of zombies, until by the end you are getting very friendly with a lot of new (dead) people. This overflowing zombie party is the reason this game moves from ‘good’ to ‘tha mofokin shizzy’—there’s just nowhere else you can get the real feeling of being plonked in the middle of a zombie invasion.

Luckily, Frank has two hands and no brain, so you are able to utilise everything the mall has to offer as a weapon—and everything, for once, is almost true. Recently described by a friend as “the game that lets you pick up the junk other games don’t”, most everyday objects you would find in a mall are available for killing corpses. Sure, there are the usual suspects: a baseball bat, iron pipe, the odd handgun. But there are also paint cans, mannequin torsos, teddy bears, sledgehammers, park benches, soda cans, frying pans, coat hangers, lawnmowers, tasers, water guns, buckets, aluminium shelving, cardboard boxes, handbags, bowling balls, severed hands, HD-TVs, shopping trolleys, cash registers, handfuls of diamonds, gumball machines, soccer balls, breadsticks, chainsaws, air-conditioner vents and my personal favourite, the post-hole digger. These objects (and more!) can be picked up and used to inflict various forms and levels of pain on unsuspecting bodies. The baseball bat, for example, is a standard swing-and-hit weapon, the shopping trolley can be pushed through a crowd of zombies to knock them all down (while shouting ‘wheeee’) and the bowling ball can be lined up and tossed to scatter a group, or swung at speed to crush some heads. Each weapon has its own level of damage and speed, and they are generally found where you would expect—toys in a toy shop, guns in a gun shop, you get the idea.

It’s not all weaponry in the mall, though. If and when you get ravaged by zombie teeth and arms, you need to eat food of some kind to heal up. There is quite a selection too, and all these also have varying degrees of effectiveness. Being set in a mall, there are also clothes. Frank loves clothes, although he tries to hide it with his macho-man exterior. All the clothing and accessory stores in the game give Frank some option to change his appearance, including hair colour, sunglasses and footwear. Yes, cross-dressing happens, because I know you were asking. You can make our hero look as mentally unstable or painfully ridiculous as you want.

In the midst of all the blood and intestinal fluids, the other thing which will endear you to Dead Rising is the characters. They come in many forms—from the heroes, villains and ambiguous of the plot, to the pathetic and often hilarious survivors you are tasked with rescuing (if you choose). And of course, Frank West. Our boy is worth mentioning for his complete disregard of heroic convention. Basically, he’s an ugly, ex-jock who isn’t particularly bright or even likeable. Oddly, this is a nice change from the usual athletic and clean cut models which strut haughtily through many games. Plus, he’s covered wars, you know.

The other standout performers are the Psychopaths. These are people from the mall and the town driven mad by the whole zombie deal—and mad is an understatement. They’re fucking bonkers. Each one also works as a game boss of sorts, confronting Frank in various places and forcing a deadly battle. One of my favourites is the supermarket manager, so obsessed with his store that he remakes a trolley into a Mad Max style death cart and tries to run you down in the produce aisle.

Zombie fiction is never about the zombies. In the end it should be an excuse for psychological drama, and Dead Rising seems to know this. Even though the acting and dialogue are warm cheese, they never go far enough that you are disconnected from the tales of the people (and cheese is delicious). The undead are best when just used as an obstacle to a goal and a reason for people to lose their nut.

But all mindless blood sports have downsides, and Dead Rising has flaws. First there’s the difficulty: it’s DIFFICULT. First time players will get used to the angry red fail screen, as Frank starts out as a ridiculously weak Nancy-boy. For most it will be impossible to move on without levelling up first—which can thankfully be done by restarting the game at any time while retaining your current level. Things get a bit easier once you can come to grips with the controls and learn a few new moves.

There is only one save slot, meaning you can only have one game in progress (per profile) at a time. The in-game text is very small, which is no problem for those who have a sugar daddy willing to spring for that widescreen plasma, or bionic eyeballs, but the rest of us have to squint until our sockets bleed.

Luckily, the only thing you will miss reading is the incessant bother-calls from your radio. Your control room contact is Otis, one of the maintenance guys, and he will call you to let you know about missions and side-quests. He’ll also call to tell you about the benefits of eating, where to find cool clothes, and how fucking important it is to practice good oral hygiene when meeting foreign diplomats. These calls can be ignored, except that he will keep on ringing and ringing until you pick up, and if you hang up on him (accidentally or otherwise) he’ll call you right back, berate you for being an anti-social dick, and then go right back into the same conversation. Nothing more fun than being neck deep in zombie death when Otis dials in to let you know there are great shops in the Plaza to update your look.

The only other important niggle is in the survivor escort missions. The people following you to safety are afflicted with terminal idiocy, and will often run screaming into a sea of zombies so they can promptly die. The only thing stopping you from shooting them your damn self is the yummy experience points they give you in exchange for a safe trip.

These are small issues, though, when the whole experience is so super fun. The game picks up the zombie concept and runs with it in all the right directions—great characters, enigmatic plot, bucket loads of undead and approximately one billion ways to deal with them. Adding to this with the countless stupid outfits and a quite-fun survival mode, Dead Rising feels like a regular game with all the cool shit already unlocked. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go wear a horse’s head and spit on some corpses.