zombie-slaying. It grounded the game
in a slightly depressing, hopeless,
Walking Dead kinda way. Also in line
with Robert Kirkman’s graphic novels,
it’s the bad humans who turn out to
be the biggest problem.
In the middle of the mall is the
Leisure Park, which should provide
the perfect shortcut from one side of
the mall to the other, only after dark
a group of convicts in a jeep torment
you with a mounted machine gun, and
they will cut down you and anyone
you’re escorting. You might manage
to kill these orange-suited menaces,
but guess what? Next time you need
to cross that open space, they’re
back. It’s utterly punishing, especially
after you’ve gone to a real effort to
get better guns in the hope you’d
end the problem permanently. In fact,
shoot the machine-gunner dead and
he’ll come back to life before you’ve
even left the park. And just don’t get
us started on the insane clown in the
Wonderland Plaza.
Die laughing
Dead Rising producer Keiji Inafune
had worked at Capcom since the ’80s,
initially as an artist on the Mega Man
series, before becoming producer of
Capcom classics such as Lost Planet
and the Onimusha series. While those
games had a distinctly Japanese
heritage and feel, Dead Rising took
aim at the west – with the all-
American Xbox the choice of exclusive
platform for its initial release.
In an interview with US magazine
Electronic Gaming Monthly, Inafune
suggested that Japanese gamers
SURVIVAL HORROR CLASSIC
RESIDENT EVIL 2
A remake of the 1998
original and the best
zombie game you can play
today. It’s more of a slow-
burner than Dead Rising.DEATH REALLY IS THE END
STATE OF DECAY 2
Permadeath stalks your
community like a big,
stalking thing. This Xbox
exclusive keeps on
giving... until you die.Feeling bitey? Terrible itch?
Uncontrollable drooling?
Don’t worry, you’re
probably turning. You
should just have time to
check these out, though.TALKING
DEAD
BIGGER, FASTER, BITIER
WORLD WAR Z
Saber absolutely
crammed this game with
the undead. There are
thousands of them, and
they move real fast.would be grossed-out by some of the
more visceral ways in which Frank
disposes of zombies, “but when
American audiences see it, they’ll be
laughing their butts off”.
Humour, albeit dark, is at the core
of Dead Rising, and one of its most
appealing and enduring qualities. It
also fitted well with the aesthetic
and evolution of zombie movies up
until that point. We’d just had Edgar
Wright’s ‘rom-zom-com’ Shaun Of
The Dead two years earlier, a film that
referenced George Romero’s classic
zombie movies. The first inspiration
for Shaun actually came from zombievideogames. In an episode of Wright,
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s ’90s TV
comedy Spaced, Pegg, having played
too much Resident Evil 2, dreams he’s
besieged by zombies.
In truth, the biggest stylistic
influence on Dead Rising was the
1978 Romero classic Dawn Of The
Dead, freshly remade in 2004 by Zack
Snyder. In Dawn Of The Dead, survivors
of a zombie apocalypse barricade
themselves in a mall... the copyright
holders of the Dawn Of The Dead films
did attempt legal action due to the
game’s similar themes and settings,
but a lawsuit was finally dismissed by
the US courts in 2008 on the grounds
that ‘zombies-plus-mall’ was an
unprotectable copyright.Die another day
In purely gaming terms, several
interesting mechanics gave Dead
Rising plenty of originality. Frank could
take photos, sometimes important to
his investigation, but you could take
photos of anything: zombies, NPCs,
corpses, trees, you name it. The game
would even rate your snaps for you
and file them under a genre. The day/
night cycle is particularly interesting,
not only because it marked the time
until Frank’s extraction, but because
post-7pm the zombies become more
aggressive. The real-time nature of
the game (you have 72 hours before
the chopper returns) is also brilliant.
You can complete each day’s ‘Case
Files’ pretty easily, but the next of
those story missions wouldn’t be“Humour, albeit dark, is at the core of Dead
Rising, and one of its most appealing and
enduring qualities”
ABOVE Frank
should heat that
pan up, much
more effective
and sizzling.extra
102 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE