accessible until 6am the next morning,
leaving you plenty of time to go rescue
survivors or follow scoops, given to
you by the janitor, Otis, via a walkie-
talkie. The levelling up system is great,
too. Completing missions and rescuing
survivors gives you Prestige Points to
level Frank up, unlock perks and buffs
to movement speed, health etc, as
well as access new melee moves.
A number of different endings are
possible, too. Fail to complete Case
Files, show up on the roof for the
extraction, or stop some jerk from
blowing everything up, and the whole
thing can end very differently. One
ending even has Frank succumb to a
zombie bite. Crucial to a good zombie
story is that the characters have to
be relatable, so that you care whether
or not they survive. The game’s
NPCs were believable and likeable,
making it all the more affecting if
or when they turn into zombies. We
still haven’t recovered from Jessie’s
heartbreaking last call to Frank before,
well, no spoilers. But let’s just say
we liked Jessie, until we saw she
had something stuck in her teeth –
someone else’s throat, in fact – and
we stopped loving her.
The new Xbox 360 was able to help
Inafune realise his vision, perhaps
more than he’d ever thought was
possible. As he told Xbox Live’s Major
Nelson back in 2006, “As a producer
I’d always imagined I’d be able to bring
more zombies to life and come up with
different weapons in order to attack
the zombies, it was just this vision I
TOP Still a
better shopping
experience than
Black Friday.
ABOVE In America
you can get
anything in a
mall, even a
submachine gun!wanted to put together. Up until now it
was very limited... [with] the Xbox 360,
it seemed like working on the platform
would enable the dev team to do
more than they originally thought they
would be able to do, so it evolved into
something [like], ‘Can we do this? Can
we do that? Can we make it even more
engaging and fun for the player?’ That
made the whole dev process actually
more fun than [something] you would
describe as work.”
It was a truly next-gen title back
in 2006; almost next-gen-but-one.For most gamers, playing the game
through a standard definition TV,
before most people had HD, and for
whom 4K was a likely millennial virus
from 2,000 years into the future, the
on-screen text was so tiny as to be
incredibly difficult to read without
leaving the sofa and putting your face
one inch from the screen. This was
because Capcom took ‘next-gen’ to
also include tellies, and developed the
game for HD TV sets. Despite a fair few
complaints, it was too late for Capcom
to change this without creating
further problems – this wasn’t
something you could simply patch.
Happily, it’s been fixed for the Xbox
One remaster, in fact the UI is
now vastly improved.
The series produced three
sequels. Inafune reprised
his role as producer for
Dead Rising 2 in 2010, with
a new protagonist, Chuck
Greene, riding bikes over
zombies’ heads, and
Frank was back for a DLC
chapter, Case West. Dead
Rising 3 was an Xbox One
launch title in 2013, Dead
Rising 4 saw Frank return
to the Willamette Mall,
at Christmas. All decent
games, for sure, and
certainly good fun, but
for us the series never
quite recaptured the
thrill of that first
zombie takedown
with a guitar. QMore Xbox news at gamesradar.com/oxm THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE 103