With that in mind, let's get cracking with my little stall. When the 360 first came out, I wasn't all that psyched about it because I was still having plenty of fun with my Xbox and the only games announced that interested me even in the slightest were Halo 3 and Fable 2. Seeing as Halo 3 was worryingly mediocre in relation to Call of Duty 4 but at least managed to bring back some of the spark lost in Halo 2; and Fable 2 being announced as being "definitely" out this year but we're in May and still no hint at when exactly that will be - getting back to my point, basically I didn't have any reason to buy a 360.
Well luckily, Capcom came up with the little gem that is Dead Rising which neatly caught my interest like a barbed hook shaped like a pair of breasts. I mean come on, this is a game where you're surrounded by zombies and you're free to kill them using anything that isn't nailed down. I didn't even care if it had a story, I could spend hours just walking around killing zombies with shopping trolleys and bass guitars etc. etc. But, I suppose as this is a review, I can't just keep talking about my obsession with killing zombies just because I was free to do so, rather than hide in a corner and soil myself.
And like a pair of car thieves stealing your shiny and pretentious BMW without checking the fuel gage before setting off on an uncharted joyride, I move onto the rest of the game mechanics to see how it holds up.
To say it was more or less "take one" in the wave of 360 games, you have to admit from any angle, it's remarkably handsome, especially considering your screen leases most of it's space to an impressive number of crumbly, pale simpletons. Somehow, it's an RPG from a very Japanese company but cleverly disguised as a western action game. Which is for the best, as my Lost Odyssey review mentioned, I'm no fan of JRPGs. That nicely leads me to the first bone I have to pick with Dead Rising though.
It's all well and good utilising "levelling up" in games, and when it does it on it's own without pestering you to drop what you're doing and spend a good few days working out which skill to spend your new experience on - aside from being time consuming, it's inevitably futile because when you finally come back to the frigging game you're reminded that you weren't in an exactly favourable situation - but that said I don't think it's exactly fair having you play as the world's burliest journalist who happens to have all the physical prowess of a newborn calf. Then deciding said burly bloke is going to turn into Rocky (circa Rocky IV) over the space of 72 hours if you intend to advance at all only adds to weirdness and that lovely difficulty cur- no, wall.
Now, this is, was and forever will be the first thing anyone ever says/said/in going to say to me after they played Dead Rising for the first time. I can see where they're coming from, but the next thing they complain about only demonstrates their intelligence of lack therefore of. It's the save system. Somehow when I started out on it, I ran into a glitch and I thought that was what everyone else was talking about. What I thought happened was if you save, it only works as a save for you to carry on with after you finish a session by your own accord, not by being killed. I thought this because when I played it first, I saved, got eaten by a large crowd, then got kicked to the title screen with all my progress lost aside from my level. So, I started the game again at level 5 and decided to beat this glitch by resetting my 360 every time the dying animation started.
I also accidentally figured out the easiest way in the world to get the "Unbreakable" achievement, much to the disgust of all my friends who'd been trying for months on end to get it and didn't even consider my method.
Back to the save system, people basically complain because they don't understand the point of saving your character stats and allowing you start a new story mode with it. Or something along those lines. What those fools didn't know was they could turn the difficulty wall into a small mound of upturned soil by playing the game trying to rescue people until they fail the story, then start again having learned some special moves and developed an immune system strong enough to cope with more than a slight winter breeze.Look, I'm as disappointed I'm not writing a GTA IV review right now as you are, but I want to do it properly, and I've got a multiplayer game waiting for my next week, so I can give it a proper full run down.
You'd have to be completely blind not to realise that Dead Rising is a blatant rip off of Dawn of the Dead, but that's only a bad thing if your one of Capcom's lawyers. Since I first saw it, all I thought was "it'd be so cool if someone made a game like this where you could just kill zombies". Sadly, the result is that the story is one long excuse to drag you out of your comfort zone wherein you're dressing zombies up as Lego characters then skewering them with showerheads, and you're frequently sent off to hobble your fat ass to the other side of the shopping mall, for an inevitable boss fight. And for some reason, your standard katana is not only readily available in Texan shopping malls, but also quite capable of providing 007 with more "split personality jokes" than one can sensibly fathom, yet pretty much useless in a fight against a healthy human being. For some reason katanas only seem to do about as much damage as peanut butter to people, but even that's a damn sight better than pretty much everything else.
Using no logic whatsoever, this takes me to a spoiler warning. I think that's adequate.
In standard mode, things go tits up after the 72 hour count down, unless you fuck things up beforehand, in which case you can get out fine and dandy. However, do things right and the
end of the game goes off on an impressive tangent. From being barricaded in a shopping mall for your own protection, to a helicopter crashing into a clock revealing some really old sewers and finally a fist fight with Action Man: Mental Condition atop a remote control tank; you probably wouldn't have seen it coming. It's almost as if they got bored of pissing off George A. Romero, and decided to push their suicidal lawyers over the edge while they went on mashing up 80's action movies with Indiana Jones. As a matter of fact, I'm now certain that Capcom's HQ is an overly tall building with one side covered in the blood of lawyers. And zombies.Even when you master Dead Rising, it still finds ways to be infuriatingly difficult. For a start, there's an achievement for rescuing 50 survivors. 50 shitting survivors! Can Frank Burly West move fast enough to reach 50 survivors? There's another one for saving 8 woman at once. Aside from the obvious mental stress of having to save 8 hysterical woman when surrounded by zombies, it's frigging difficult to have even 4 followers before they start "accidentally" knifing each other and then getting trapped in the jaws of every single zombie between you and where you want to be.
The final, perfectly executed kick in the bollocks comes from the reward of unlocking infinity mode. I must explain that this is the kind of kick in the bollocks you'd usually receive if you volunteered to help someone practise their kick boxing by holding up a plank of wood. It's and idea that will look really cool, but when you miss the mark, someone's going to be upset about it. As the name suggests, the clock doesn't count down 72 hours so you can wait to be picked up, but counts how long you can survive. Fine. If only they hadn't decided your health drains, forcing you to eat every 20 seconds. You could get away with that if only all the other survivors weren't trying to kill you.
I'd like to express my final irritation about Otis and his walkie talkie fetish, but I'm sure that you stumbled across at least 3 references to it on your way here.
1 comment:
I have no idea what happened to the font colour, but I tried fixing it and it decided to ignore me. Sorry.
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