Preview
If
you’ve seen anything on Dead Rising, you may have first thought it was going
to be just like Resident Evil. If you haven’t realized you’re wrong yet, or
you just haven’t heard of it at all, keep reading.
You play as Frank West, a
journalist that wants to be famous. In search of a scoop he stumbles upon a
zombie-infested town. Now he must survive the attack, but he still hasn’t
forgotten his first job – take pictures!
Where this game differs
from Resident Evil is the level of fear. In Resident Evil your character is
scared, the music is scary, and things jump out at you trying to startle you.
In Dead Rising Frank West is obviously not scared at all, there’s no scary
music, and you can usually see zombies from a mile away.
The demo here at E3 took
place within a mall featuring a wide variety of shops to explore. As I ran
around the mall I noticed I could interact with almost every object in the
mall. Frank can carry quite a few items at a time, so I stocked up on some
clothing hangers, a bucket, a cash register, and a golf club. Once I left the
store I was greeted by a large group of zombies, so I tried out my golf club
first. I hit the closest zombie with it, and then proceeded to hit golf balls
into the further ones. I could even aim in detail where to hit the golf ball.
After that I switched to my bucket and stuck it on the nearest zombies head.
As he started to blindly wander in the other direction I stuck the hanger in
his buddy’s face. As I mentioned before, this game is gruesome. The cash
register I could use to bash zombies up close, or throw it and take out
multiple targets. Each hit made a pretty solid “squelch” with a spray of gore
to follow.
This is just an example
of what I did. Dead Rising is totally open, so I was able to run around the
mall and do whatever I dreamed up. I used other weapons such as plant pots,
benches, barbells, CD’s, a katana, and my fists. There are even wrestling
moves and various hand-to-hand combos to punish the undead with, but I
couldn’t figure out how to do them with my limited time on the demo. You can
also change your clothes at various stores, which resulted in my character
wearing cutoff jean shorts and a Mega Man mask.
In Dead Rising you will
meet other survivors as well, and they’ll request certain favors of you. The
time also passes realistically from day to night and back to day, even if you
leave Frank standing in the corner. Some events are time sensitive, meaning if
you’re not careful you could miss some missions or fail time-based ones.
Dead Rising was a lot of
fun and I wish I could have had more time with it. The graphics were great for
having so many characters on-screen, and the variation on the zombies was
surprising. I don’t remember seeing the same zombie twice, but I imagine it
could start to happen after a lot of play time. Capcom didn’t tell me when
they planned on releasing Dead Rising, but it can’t be too far off. At this
time it’s only planned for Xbox 360.
