Dead Rising (Xbox 360)

I've held off on this one for a while. I don't know why. I'm going to say this right up front though. I didn't like this game. I played it long enough to get the Zombie Genocider bonus, and with it the Real Megabuster. Why? I don't know. Maybe so I could say that I accomplished something in it, and if I ever play it again I'll have a nice shiny weapon to screw with.

What's wrong? A technical look.

In my mind there are several glaring technical flaws with the game that a company like Capcom reasonably should have never let slip through.

First off, the font size. Yes, everyone and their brother has gone over this in great detail how the text in the game is all but unreadable on an SD television. Capcom apparently also said that because of the volume of text in the game it would be impossible to write a patch to fix. This is either an outright lie, or an admission that their programmers are stupid. The lazy way of programming is to make all calls direct. This would mean that a call to draw text would be directly to the graphics system with all the values hard coded in. This is bad, and requires lots of work to change. The better way is to have handler functions that take in more abstract data, and then handle all the specifics. So for text you'd hand it things like the string to print, the general size, and the color. That's it. You let the text handler figure out how big to make the text and pass that onto the graphics handler itself. This is smart, and clearly what Capcom didn't do if they can't make a simple change of "Make text bigger."

Secondly, custom music. As most people are aware, you can play your own music in any game on the Xbox 360. This is very good because Dead Rising doesn't have any music. Well, none to speak of. All I can remember is one terrible song randomly placed while you're running away from the convicts. So you play your own music and everything is fine. Until you get to a storyline point where the characters actually speak. It seems the good folks at Capcom were cutting corners here too. They decided to (or mistakenly) defined the character voices as music. This means that your music actually causes the characters to be unable to speak, and you just get the text. I know for a fact that there is a command a game can issue to temporaraly override your custom music. Rock Band does this to make sure that you are able to hear the song that you're supposed to be playing. At least a few other games do it when they go to cut scenes. Not Dead Rising though.

Broken gameplay?

Ok, not all the gameplay is broken. But certain elements are broken, or just stupid.

Firstly, the health bar. On the surface it appears to be just fine. It's a series of blocks. Fair enough. But under that, each block is secretly divided up into smaller segments. Why is this a problem? Well, just try and figure out how much damage you can take. Did you know that a zombie bumping into you as they fall over deals damage? Neither did I. It wasn't until I was killed by a zombie just bumping into me that I realized this. Sometimes getting shot will do no damage, or at least appear to do no damage. The health bar they provide is just not granular enough for this game. When you have blocks an attack should always do full blocks of damage.

Next, the inventory. By the time I stopped playing I could carry nine items. Sounds reasonable. Except that half the time there's no logic between what I can and cannot put into my inventory. I could put nine double edged battle axes in my pocket, but not one chainsaw. Why? What is so different between a chainsaw, and a battle axe that I can put one in my pocket, but not the other? Guns are just as screwed up. There are no extra clips, just guns. The inventory management, just annoys me to no end.

Continuing with problems regarding items, the item break rate. I don't know if the programmers have ever handled some of these items, but a lot of them don't exactly break. Like an axe. An axe is designed for cutting down trees, and will in fact have no issues cutting through zombies. You'll wear your hands raw before you even come close to breaking some of these items. I'm not saying that the items should never break, just that they break way too damn fast.

What about Frank himself? He may have covered wars, but can't run worth squat. Plus he looks so stupid while he tries to run around. Even when he's unarmed and running through a clearing he can't go all that fast. I'm no athlete myself, but I could run faster than him.

Logic nothing, this just doesn't make sense

I can hear you now. "This is a video game! It's not supposed to be real, or logical!" While I agree with that, there are limits.

The convicts. Ok, so in the panic of a zombie invasion this trio managed to get out of the local prison. Fair enough. Then they got their hands on a Hummer with mounted machinegun. Um, alright, I guess they could have taken it from a couple of dead army folks after they got taken down by zombies... And then they drove straight to the mall, and the middle of zombie central. Now you've just gone too far. This isn't even a reasonable line of events. Plus, there's no way for them to have gotten into the mall in the first place! I found the tunnles. They don't go anywhere. The only way they could have gotten in would to be airlifted in, and I don't see that happening.

Unlimited zombies. Ok, so they are zombies which means that they technically aren't alive anyway. But I just cut that one in half. I cut that guy's head off. I exploded that one. It doesn't matter. Most zombies will give up the ghost (no pun intended) if you dish out enough, or the right kind of punishment. Quake had zombies that would only die if exploded. Dead Rising zombies never die. EVER. Oh sure if you clear out an area they'll look like they're dead, but they're just waiting. Waiting until you turn your back at which point they'll just get up, dust themselves off and get ready for you to come back. And there are so many of them that there's no point in killing them anyway.

Instant zombie arrival. Apparently these zombies move at supersonic speeds because the moment the front doors are breached the entire mall is absolutely flooded with the bastards. How the hell do 54000+ zombies fill a mall that fast? It just doesn't make sense.

Epilogue

I'm going to cut my losses now. You get the idea. I didn't like the game. It's not creative in any way except that just about everything can be used as a (usually ineffective) weapon. Aside from that it's a pretty forgettable zombie killing game. I don't know what's supposed to be so good about it, but whatever it was, I missed it.