Dead Rising

Dead rising for the X-Box 360 is an innovative game which you can beat by just standing still for several hours if you want to, but where’s the fun in that? You play as Frank West, a photojournalist who gets a hot tip and flies into a town cordoned off by the military. You end up at a mall with a group of survivors and a whole lot of zombies that want to eat you. But to be honest, dead rising is the only game that ever made me feel bad for zombies because the game allows you to do so many things to them that are just…wrong.

Just about anything that isn’t nailed down can be used as a weapon against the swarms of undead, from the classic baseball bat, to guns, to a lawn mower. There are so many weapons in this game with various and clever uses, that you will spend hours experimenting to see which you like the most. I like the metal pipe myself. You can jam a shower head into a zombie’s skull and watch the blood spray out. You can take toy animal masks to cover the zombie’s faces. You can even blind them with paint and throw jewelry at them.

You can get into cars to run zombies over outside the mall where the game takes place, but you can’t leave in them. There are even a few secret weapons which you can unlock including a mega man buster cannon. The only downside to the weapons is that they “break” after a certain number of uses. I could understand this with some weapons like a 2×4, but I have trouble believing that metal pipe would break no matter now many zombie heads you smash in with it. It’s also annoying that guns seem to explode after you use up their ammo, rather than being able to simply reload them. To be fair this gaming mechanic is meant to encourage the player to experiment with the weapons, and there are times when you have used up your arsenal and find yourself surrounded by countless zombies without anything to beat them off with which can truly make you feel a sense of dread.

The characters in the game seem a little off, and the villains are over the top to the point of being laughable. I particularly liked the store manager who is screaming about you vandalizing his store, so he tries to kill you. Perhaps it says something about society, but in this game the people are more dangerous than the flesh-eating zombies. Especially the three convicts who drive around outside, trying to run you over, smash your head in with a baseball bat, or gun you down with a 50. Caliber machine gun. I hated these guys so much that I devoted an entire play through to killing them, and boy did it feel good when I did. Of course I later learned, with open-mouthed horror, that they respawn.