Articles
By Q Dog Sah
Published: Mar. 11, 2007 11:49 AM
What could be cooler? Take one shopping mall, the embodiment of our current commercial obsession – a modern-day cathedral if you will. Now, fill that mall with flesh eating zombies of the idiotic, slow-moving variety we’ve all come to know and love. Not just a few zombies mind you, I mean a veritable hoard of zombies, more then you ever thought possible in a game. Finally, add in the spice of random, every day objects to use as weapons to face this hoard and you have yourselves the recipe for a fine game.
Capcom and zombies have a long and fruitful history together. Although they missed the boat in terms of inventing the survival horror genre (that honour belongs to Alone in the Dark), they certainly helped popularise it with the hugely successful Resident Evil series. Now they’re back to reinvent the wheel by injecting some much-needed fun into the genre with Dead Rising.
You take on the roll of Frank West, a freelance photojournalist who has been given possibly the biggest scoop of his life. The game opens with an action packed helicopter ride into the small American mid-western town of Willamette, recently quarantined by the army and experiencing a spate of “civil disturbances”. As you approach the centre of town, you begin to realise that not all is well as 3 army choppers begin to chase you. You are finally dropped off onto the roof of the mall, with the promise of being picked up in 72 hours, leaving you three days to get to the bottom of it all.
The majority of the game is spent in and around the mall, where you find yourself unlocking clues and unravelling the mystery surrounding the plot by completing missions and helping people. There is a fairly large cast of characters for you to meet and help along the way like government authorities, elderly couples, other photographers, crazy rednecks…the list goes on. In fact, you’ll be hard pressed to meet them all in a single play through the game.
Unfortunately, far too many of your missions involve escorting one or more of these characters through the aforementioned hoards of zombies. Suicidal AI sees people you are escorting too often try and find their own path through the zombies, rather then follow the path that you have lovingly carved for them. This can get incredibly frustrating as time is always pressing.
You see, you only have 72 hours to complete everything in Dead Rising. While this sounds like a long time, it really isn’t as time inside your TV screen progresses at a much faster rate then the time you experience in your lounge room. Check your watch and then check it again five minutes later and you’ll find that 20 minutes have passed in the game. Time is something you are continually wary of because a lot of missions and events are time critical. Quite often, you need to be in a specific place at a specific time in order to advance the main story, fail to meet this and you fail the game. This can be quite inhibitive to actual exploration in the game, as you will find yourself waiting the last hour in a specific area rather then exploring the rest of the mall so you don’t miss a critical objective.
Thankfully, even if you do miss an important event or get to the end of your 72 hours and discover you didn’t meet everyone or do everything, you still get a chance to do it all over again. Dead Rising is a game that is all about replayability. Every time you restart the game, your experience and skills are saved so you begin the game stronger and better equipped to deal with the zombies then last time. There are certain side quests you will be too weak or unskilled to complete the first time round that you will probably need to come back to on subsequent plays. Experience is built by earning Prestige Points and levelling up; something that should be familiar territory to any RPG fan. As you progress, you learn new combat moves, get more health and can carry more items. Killing zombies and taking photos earn Prestige Points, making photography not just a fun diversion but also a central part of the game. Snap a few good shots and you’ll find yourself flying up the levels in no time.
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