Dead Rising Review

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Dead Rising

Review by SteerpikeAugust 2007

Hi Mom!

I was on the phone with my mother not long ago, and though we rarely talk about games, the conversation somehow turned to that zombies-in-a-mall extravaganza Dead Rising.

For some minutes, I waxed poetic about the subtleties of the softly spattering viscera, the rewards hidden in the sharp crack of a baseball bat against a head or the swish of the hunting knife carving reanimated flesh, the tacky syrup-colored spray of gore onto gleaming tile. I spoke of the blood-drenched corridors, the severed heads in the fountains, their cobwebbed eyes staring blindly up at the Muzak-blaring speakers, the gobbets of brain, left over from a mating of sledgehammer and skull. I made mention of the industrial lawn mower, the enthusiastic nyargl-nyargl-nyargl of bones splitting under its whirling blades; the custardy arc of mulched entrails—until, of course, the mower becomes too gummy with the undead and must needs be abandoned in favor of a mannequin leg or a chainsaw or a clothes hanger or golf balls or a mop or a lead pipe or a paint bucket or a cash register or a frying pan or a 2×4 or a giant stuffed bear or etc. etc. etc.

“How do you sleep?!” she shrieked, having listened patiently, motherlike, to my recitation for what she determined to be an acceptable minimum interval.

Mom grew up in a kinder time, when the possibility of an armed struggle against the undead seemed distant, quirky. These days we have to think about things like that. We have to be prepared. And regardless of the cause—be it escaped virus, Earth passing through the tail of a comet, unnatural radiations, eldritch powers, or (in this case) angry honeybees—man, when the dead start to walk, you’d better be ready.

This is the world of Dead Rising, and though it may be a shameless ripoff of Dawn of the Dead, it achieves something the films didn’t. By making zombie apocalypse interactive, and by putting you in there with advanced graphics and gore physics and helpless people and, most crucially, the very real sense of overwhelmingly bad odds, it realizes the genre in a way that no film has.

Dead Rising is surely one of the most cruelly ambrosial games I have ever played. Something about the sound effects, the rumble in the controller, the ludicrous camp humor, not to mention the freedom to kill zombies in a whole rainbow of gruesome ways with a panoply of improvised weapons, make this game emotionally nourishing. It is that which exonerates the serious faults and failings that would otherwise trammel it in mediocrity. Dead Rising makes several important missteps in design. It’s also meanspirited and sick … in ways other than just gore. That isn’t serious if such things do not bother you, but the flaws are another matter.

The Day Colorado Stood Still

As sites for Armageddon go, sleepy Willamette, Colorado seems too blandly American, with its quiet streets, tidy play parks, and immense shopping mall. But the military has quarantined Willamette for reasons unknown, and photojournalist Frank West has chartered a helicopter to fly him there.

Seen from the chopper, it appears to be a riot, but one happening in slow motion. Only as you zoom closer do you see what’s really going on, the extent of the devastation. Through the viewfinder of Frank’s camera, you observe Willamette’s doom firsthand—and if you’re quick enough, you can snap some sexy shots sure to net you the front page of Time magazine. The use of photography to gain experience points for Frank carries throughout the game, and you must master it. In many cases, the really spectacular shots, the ones that net you tens of thousands of points, require nanosecond timing and a sense of confidence painstakingly learned through practice. The opening teaches you to be observant and even to predict what and where future photo ops might occur.

A military helicopter forces some evasive maneuvers, and Frank leaps out onto the roof of the Willamette Park View Mall. From that moment, he’s got 72 hours before his ride comes back, 72 hours to save as many lives as possible and figure out what the hell’s going on. But with thousands of zombies and more than 80 of the weirdest survivors imaginable hiding in the mall, Frank’s got his work cut out for him.

Top of the Mall, Ma! Top of the Mall!

Tasks are scattered throughout this consumerist nirvana, generally revolving around helping innocents to safety or dealing with some threat. The main storyline takes precedence over everything else, and the key to successfully playing Dead Rising is learning to juggle the overall case with the experience-giving tasks meted out by the mall janitor over Frank’s spectacularly annoying two-way radio. This game occurs in accelerated real time, and if you’re not in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment, you’ll break the main story. You can keep playing if this happens, but Frank will never discover the cause of the zombie plague.

The challenge is exacerbated by the hordes of undead. As you desperately calculate the time required to do this task or that one, you must account for how long it’ll take you to reach your destination through shopping plazas so teeming with reanimated corpses that at times you can literally walk on the heads of the zombies from one end of the mall to the other. Nearly every object in every shop is a potential weapon, helpful since they break all the time. Hand-to-hand combat is the way to go, as the abhorrent firearm aiming interface makes it nearly impossible to shoot straight no matter how much you practice. The whole everything’s-a-weapon, from potted plants to soda cans, is one of the most adorable aspects of this game.

You’ll soon learn three important things: first, you cannot complete every side task and still finish the main quest. You will sacrifice many lives through inaction to pursue the mystery. Second, zombies are an obstacle to be avoided, not a foe to be engaged. If you’re on a deadline (and you almost always are), the best way to miss it is to get bogged down in pointless, protracted combat with zombies. This game absolutely captures the clumsiness of the shuffling dead. Capable of short bursts of speed at best, bursts that usually end with them toppling into a fountain or down the stairs, they hardly seem dangerous, until dozens swarm you from all directions, biting, tearing, holding you down. Getting caught in a major zombie scrum can cost precious minutes … or your life.

That highlights the game’s appalling save system, which is Dead Rising’s most serious problem. You can only save in the mall’s Security Office (getting there is a ten-minute job, or about 30 minutes of game time) or the bathrooms, which are ill-placed and often overrun. With only one save slot to work with, there’s also a chance you’ll save yourself into a position where it’s impossible to reach your next objective in time. That means starting the game over, which you’ll do accidentally at least once anyway, since if Frank dies you’re offered the choice of restoring your save or “save status and quit.” That last, innocuous though it may sound, forces you to restart from scratch.

The third thing you learn about Dead Rising’s play mechanics is that it’s not meant to be completed as a single linear experience. Every time you restart, your level and skills transfer with you. You should plan on playing through the first two hours of the game a few times, just to get Frank to a point where he’s strong enough to handle what lies ahead. That’s not as bad as it sounds—gameplay is so enjoyable that repetition is okay.

The long and short of it is that you’re hesitant to save. Sometimes you just forget to save, because you’re having so much fun … then you die and you realize that the last three hours need to be replayed, which can be rather galling despite the fact that gameplay is a blast. A competent save system would have eliminated the issue altogether. This is especially significant given the extraordinary challenge of some bosses.

The astonishing variety of gameplay is one of the chief selling points. The mall is immense, detailed, and fun to explore, full of secrets and plenty of little unnecessary but welcome treats. You can, for example, change into any of several different outfits at assorted clothing shops (a fact that so delighted a friend of mine that he is forever banned from Dead Rising; upon discovering that he could outfit Frank with a giant yellow Lego person head from the toy store, he was unable to play without giggling). You can also download new duds from Xbox Live. Touches like the costumes and weaponry are where Dead Rising really shows its charm—like the campiest slasher films, there is a core of humor that truly makes the game sing.

Subtle, Like a Hand Grenade Is Subtle

Japanese games are usually for Japanese people first and foremost, and it shows. It is only after a bad localization job do we see them on this side of the pond, and American audiences are just used to the Nipponese influence in their games. This time, Capcom tried creating a game for Americans, and whether intentionally or not, the design does make one thing very clear:

They hate us.

Now, even more than other nations, Japan’s got a pretty good reason to feel that way. But I was still taken aback by the level of angry, sneering disdain you’ll find here. According to Dead Rising, Americans are ignorant, gluttonous, indolent, uncouth, bloodthirsty, dimwitted, sexually predatory, arrogant, brutal, chauvinistic, avaricious, prejudiced, consequence-blind thugs heedless of the rest of the world. The fact that this is actually true of a huge portion of the American populace doesn’t really help our case.

Dead Rising is intended to be campy and over the top—sometimes way over the top—so this ill-will is certainly dialed up … but it’s there. Take the inbred family that stakes out the mall’s entrance plaza with hunting rifles and drawls the right to bear arms as justification for killing everything they see, zombie or otherwise. Or the grossly overweight female security guard who captures a bunch of teenage girls, ties them up, and violates them with her nightstick because they are pretty. Or the psychotically fundamentalist cult that says the zombies are punishment for our varied sins. Consider the escaped convicts who terrorize the Leisure Park, ignoring the zombies completely but murderously pursuing any humans who pass through. Or the mad (and, peculiarly, Asian) butcher who, lacking shipments of cow and pig, turns to grinding up human for his imaginary customers. Or even the zombie plague itself, which, without giving away too much, is basically caused by the size of the American dinner plate. Aside from meaning that this game really deserves its “M” rating, there’s something … nasty, scornful about much of Dead Rising. It didn’t bother me too much, but it might make some players uncomfortable, so be warned.

Almost Like the Walking Dead

Dead Rising and Ninety-Nine Nights both chose to showcase the 360’s next-gen processing power by displaying thousands of complex moving objects onscreen at once. There is an indecent number of zombies in the mall, all controlled by their little zombie AI, and it looks great. The bright colors and handcrafted layout of each store is equally well-done. Even a year after release, Dead Rising is technologically impressive, though the multitude of load screens break up the action and the cinematics don’t compare to the gameplay.

Alas, that next-gen technology brings with it some new problems. The phrase “Uncanny Valley” doesn’t begin to describe the sepulchral hideousness of (living) character faces in Dead Rising’s cinematic sequences. This is the first time I found human representations genuinely creepy—disturbing, right on the brink of repellent. This is especially true for a female character who I think was supposed to be attractive. Instead the people are, as Masahiro Mori warned more than 30 years ago, so human-looking that they don’t look at all human: they look dead, or worse. Many games have already moved past the Uncanny Valley or have adopted a stylized look that allows them to skirt it, but Dead Rising is right down there in the chasm.

On the subject of AI, its dimness works for zombies because, well, they’re zombies. It’s a little less amusing when you’re trying to escort people back to the Security Room and they flat out refuse to come when you call them, or they charge into a pack of zombies despite life-threatening injuries. The escort missions can be exasperating for this reason, and some basic pathing and AI improvements would have fixed it.

Adjectives Aweigh

When I try to think of words to describe Dead Rising, “satisfying” is the one that keeps coming to the top of the list. There is something satisfying about it. Dead Rising is part of this complete breakfast of video games. And while there’s no one thing that makes it stand out—and several things that stand out as serious defects—at the end of the day, it comes back to the satisfaction quotient. It is a yummy game. My brother Marcus, who can find something wrong with every video game ever made, bought a 360 in part because of Dead Rising. It’s just fun to play, regardless of flaws.

Capcom, that oh-so Japanese company that’s given us Street Fighter, Mega Man, Resident Evil, Phoenix Wright, and Devil May Cry, is capitalizing strongly on the next generation of consoles. Between Dead Rising and Lost Planet, they have sold several dozen truckloads of 360s—not least because both of those million-plus sellers were designed explicitly for Western audiences. The fact is, the Xbox 360 isn’t doing well in Japan, and there’s little point in developing games aimed at that market to the detriment of others. They’re going where the money is. Dead Rising, Lost Planet, Crackdown, and Gears of War are the only games I’d consider required reading for the 360. The 2007 holiday release cycle is about to increase that library dramatically, but for now those four are the clinchers.

Part platformer, part pure action, part open-world adventure, there are a number of ways to enjoy Dead Rising. Indeed, if you don’t care why there are zombies in Colorado, you can easily get your money’s worth just running around the mall, doing side tasks and creating undead frappe with lawn mowers and assorted blades. Or you can follow the crisp, well-written, well-translated storyline and solve the mystery. And, best of all, once you finish—or at any time before that—you can start over again, retaining all of your skills and advancements.

I cannot bring myself to give Dead Rising a Gold Star, because it does have very serious flaws that even a neophyte game designer should have recognized and eliminated. But that won’t stop me from recommending it to anyone … provided you have the stomach, the good nature, and the speedy thumbs necessary to enjoy all the game has to offer. The End

 

The Verdict

The Lowdown

Developer: Capcom Publisher: Capcom Release Date: August 2006

Available for: Xbox 360

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16 Responses to Screw the Internet

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    God damn, Scout, I’d never heard of this Lanier fellow, but that’s pretty profound.

    Information is not a manufacturable item… as you said, we are making less and less. This is either indicative of a larger-scale societal transformation, or a bad thing. I’m afraid I’m inclined to assumed the latter.

    Thanks!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Steerpike, that was exactly the argument Lanier was having with callers on the BBC. Lanier was all fatalistic about society’s drop in real productivity while his opponents claimed that this was a huge transformation and that he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all. If you notice, the web address of that first Lanier link is well.com. I mean, that is old! The Well?

    Lanier’s thoughts were pretty much echoed by David Simon, one of the creators of The Wire. Here he speaks with Bill Moyers about the fate of paid journalism in the face of the web.

  • Spike

    I’ve read many criticisms of Facebook et. al.  I’ve also read contradictions of those criticisms, namely, that social sites are making people more connected than ever.  I think that that connectedness is an illusion.

    For several months at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 my daughter badgered me to join FB.  I could connect with her and some of her friends that I know as well as renew old acquaintances with some of her friend’s mothers.  I finally signed up so she’d quit the badgering. I used to check in every day to see what daughter and friends were saying because if I didn’t she’d ask if I saw her post, or a friend’s post. 

    What I’ve learned is this:

    1.  “Karen Likes John’s photo (or post)” IS NOT communication.

    2.  The reason I lost contact with some of these “friends” in the first place is that we no longer had anything in common.

    3.  I am bombarded with so many ads in so many places that I can do without more.  My policy is to never click on ads on FB or on many other sites. 

    4.  While FB’s original mission was connectedness/communication, I think it has become “Let’s make as much money from these fools as we can.”  “Wanna have gobs of fun playing a free game on FB?”  That game is gonna cost ya big, folks. 

    5.  Social sites are just more places where your personal info can be stolen.  There’s enough risk out there as it is.  Additional risk is not providing any valuable payoff for me.

    6.  Why do I want to “friend” a certain handbag manufacturer?  Why do I want to take a quiz that tells me what my personality is?  FB content providers tell you up front that if you click the link to take their quiz (goes for other types of content as well) you are giving them permission to access your profile info.  That’s ok.  I’ll also give you my SSN, bank account number and the key to my front door.  Not.

    7.  Don’t even get me started on the number of people who start an account in a pet’s name, and even have the pets making friends and posting.

    “…he was just too old to grasp the coolness of it all.”

    No, it’s just that most of us get to the age when we demand a bit of wheat with our chaff.

    At 38 my daughter is older than the average demographic of social sites although I know that that demographic is skewing up.  She seems to be cooling on FB.  Some of her 221 friends are as well.  Many of them do want some wheat.  When more cooling has taken place I will unjoin.

    I wonder, though, what new fad will come along when FB, Twitter and others run their course?  MySpace, anyone?

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    My favorite line from the BBC interview was when Lanier was comparing MySpace and Facebook. He admitted that MySpace had some eye gougingly bad pages but said that he liked the “strangeness” of personalities that you get with it. With Facebook, he claimed that it was like looking at a tax form. A boring, watered down, bland presentation of people.

    I joined Facebook almost exactly a year ago. Apart from sparking up a new friendship with a very dear buddy, I’ve gotten about zero back from it. I sort of read with bemusement the activities of people I hardly know and could care less about. And when you consider how much information the devs harvest there…it’s scary. Lanier claims that the information is so far worthless to the investors and that the whole thing has become a sort useless ritual serving no purpose. He claimed that Google’s ads on the other hand will probably turn out to be the greatest advertising model ever created. He also thinks Google should stop before it’s too late but says they probably won’t. Just a glance at the side bar reveals about 4 ads for advertising agencies. Heh.

  • lokimotive

    Has anybody read Anti-Oedipus? I’m slogging my way through it (the third attempt I believe), and Deleuze and Gauttari’s ideas seem relevant to this in a way that I’m not sure I can articulate. This probably has something to do with a conversation I was eavesdropping on that, coincidentally, mentioned a lot of Deleuze and Gauttari’s theories. Someone was talking about another theorist (whose name I didn’t catch) who was defending “Generation Y” essentially. The argument went that Generation Y is an example of a “de-Oedipalized” cultural group (that’s Anti-Oedipus jargon, just stay with me). Apparently this meant that they made connections in a different manner than other generations, the idea of bricollage was brought up and things were generally mired in a lot of reasons why I don’t have my Masters in English. What I got from it was this Generation Y shoots out connections everywhere and attempts to make up a whole idea with them as opposed to relying on predefined pathways. In Deleuze and Guattari’s language: the schizo as opposed to Oedipus. In language that probably makes sense: Peer to Peer as opposed to client-server.

    So, of course, no one’s really right. I’m skeptical of the idea that Generation Y (full disclosure: I’m 29 so I’m part of that group) has enacted some sort of paradigm shift in how to operate in social systems, but facebook has changed how I connect with people. Then again, it’s not like I don’t value face to face communication.

    The future is somewhere in between. I’m really not cynical enough to believe that we are at the end times of civilized society because of Web 2.0. Instead society will change and stay the same because that’s what it does. Facebook is not the future; it’s probably a rung up the ladder though.

  • kaythomas

    To me, Facebook and Twitter are 0’s. They are not worth my time.  I do not care what someone I know or don’t know did a half hour ago or will do next.  I have met up with people on facebook I had lost contact with.  But, in truth, the reason I had lost contact was I was not that interested in staying in contact.

    I think for many people the Facebook/Twitter world is great.  For me it has nothing to offer. 
    kay

  • Matt "Steerpike" Sakey

    Tap has an automated device that twits… tweets… whatever whenever someone posts a new article. Just in case it draws some visitors.

    To be honest, though, I’m on Kay’s side of the fence, I don’t understand Twitter and I don’t understand why it’s so popular. I barely care what I’m doing from moment to moment, why should anyone else?

    I don’t get Facebook either, though I’m a member to keep track of all the girls who wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school.

  • Lewis B

    Tweets are great for giving me snippets of news.  If I like what I’ve read in the short paragraph tweets give, then I will visit the main page for that tweet. (Very good for following world news, favourite columnists, etc.)

    However, reading tweets from people such as “Just woke up, Madonna is giving me a massage while I shave my nuts” is not my idea of a good read.

  • Toger

    I use tweets the same way Lewis does. Of the people/things I follow, if the tweet is interesting I’ll follow the link to read the entire article. I follow fairly intelligent people, so I’m not subjected to the idiocy of “Just brushed my teeth while sitting on toilet”.

  • Gregg B

    @loki: I’m afraid I’ve not heard of them. I’m a couple of years below you so that puts me in the same Generation Y as well. I read through a few of those links Scout posted as well as a few more on Lanier’s new book “You Are Not a Gadget” and it took me a fair while to get to the crux of what he is saying and he has a lot to say, most of which I find very confusing.

    As a graphic designer the whole “everything is becoming advertising” thing has been bothering me for years. The incessant barrage of advertising is like fingernails on the chalkboard of my soul, which sort of makes me a hypocrite. After all the years of tuning my art and design skillz my creative abilities have amounted to nothing more than crafting pretty ads that sell things. Non of it speaks any truth or has any sort of ‘beauty’; it’s just stone cold mechanical capitalism. Granted there are ads out there that are beautiful, clever and visionary but the front line stuff is as dull as it gets. I’m sure this isn’t strictly what he’s getting at but it’s definitely something that irks me in relation to Scout’s last remark.

    Anyway, I remember Twitter just exploding in what seemed like the space of a week and I still can’t fathom the allure of it aside from providing a direct stream of consciousness from famous folk to their ravenous fans. I wish I’d thought of it to be honest. I can see the creators sitting around a table staring at Facebook and then saying “I know! We make a website that’s just about status updates! You can even update them with your mobile phone!”.

    With regards to Twitter news snippets, unless it’s for a phone, I don’t see the point because RSS feeds do a great job. At present too great; I simply can’t keep up with my subscriptions. There’s too much information on this super highway.

  • Jen

    Twitter is officially the dumbest thing ever.

    That said, it looks like I will have to be the official “tweeter” for my day job before too long. I can’t wait! (roll eyes)

  • xtal

    I’m with everyone else here. I’m glad to say I’ve never signed up for Facebook; I fear that if I ever had I would have long ago died from loss of brain cells due to reading moronic status updates. It’s as Kay said: ninety-five per cent of people with whom you lose contact are probably no longer in your life because you have nothing left in common. And echoing Steerpike’s comment, me eating toast and jam on a Sunday morning watching Fawlty Towers is not interesting, not to me. Why the hell would anyone else give a shit?

    Twitter I signed up for about a year ago, not really understanding what it was. I now understand it…but don’t care to use it often. I have made 58 tweets over that year. I suspect for some that is a daily or weekly average. It’s just Facebook status updates without all the drunken photographs. I admit it can be mildly useful for following, say, a news site. Usually when I hop on my twitter (once every two weeks??) it reminds me that I should read The Onion more often. That’s about it.

    Let’s see… looking at the actual humans I follow, um… Wil Wheaton is happy that the LA Kings have won 9 games in a row, my sister-in-law thought our dinner tonight was “delicious,” and Kevin Smith’s batteries are recharged … or something.

    Wow, my life is already getting better!

    p.s.  <—– Gen Y'er (can we call ourselves that?) and proud that when I Google my own name a real estate company pops up.

  • Fraser

    Twitter is exactly as useless as the person who’s writing it. If someone is telling you boring shit over Twitter, it’s the person wasting your time, not the delivery channel.

    MySpace is the same, but it seems more intrinsically garbage because for some reason almost everyone who used it was an intellectual embryo with a fetish for unreadable hyperneon text on top of garish uninteresting photos. Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.

    That’s the argument against the whole of this post: the internet isn’t evil, but the people who use it might be. It’s people who make business models successful; people who make money flow to advertisers instead of artists, by buying into the advertising.

    This has been a pretty didactic post, so let me compensate by saying VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOOO!!!

  • Gregg B

    Good point about not blaming the delivery channel Fraser. I seem to recall Lanier saying that he preferred the personality that MySpace has over Facebook despite its Craptastic Pages of Illegibility. I’m trying to think of something intelligent to follow that up with but my brain is failing me at the moment, so…

    VIDEOGAMES WOOOOOO!!!

  • Jason Venter

    Fraser, I really loved your following comment:

    “Facebook’s great trick is that it prevents you from realising that most of your friends would make a brutally hideous homepage for themselves if they could.”

    I think that may just be one of the most hilariously true comments I’ve read in a comments area on any video game web site ever.  That sounds overly dramatic, I know, but I actually mean it.  Kudos to you!

  • Mike "Scout" Gust

    Yeah but don’t you miss all the ugliness of MySpace? All those hideous pages at least had personality or what Lanier called the “strangeness of the person” to them.

    I actually don’t agree with a lot of what Lanier says esp “the hive mind must die” stuff. But I do think he is right about the spirit shriveling blandness of Facebook.

    I also suspect that Twitter is going to be around for a while. It will be more and more influential. People are simply not as willing to ingest huge amounts of information in the form of pages of text anymore. The delivery systems that succeed will be those that can communicate a lot of information in a short amount of time. Most days we want “glimpses” or “snapshots” not total immersion. Lewis, Toger and Fraser are correct in that you get out of it what you decide to follow.

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