Dead Rising really went for it. A new generation of hardware was struggling for meaningful content, and Capcom—practitioner of the most popular and influential zombie games on the planet—turned down a fresh Resident Evil entry in favor of an improbable chimeran fabrication; Dynasty Warriors, photography, casual murder, and humiliating the living dead all in the same place at the same time. Dead Rising scoffed at the notion that first generation software had to be prettier versions of familiar games.
It was easy to get caught up in Dead Rising’s sense of scale. Dozens of zombies populated the mall in the fictional town of Willamette, Colorado. Hundreds more were prowling around the spacious park in the center of the mall, and thousands were roaming the subterranean parking structure. In the past, games like Drakengard and Kingdom Hearts II used some very clever illusions to populate battlefields and buildings, but Dead Rising was delivering hundreds of opponents in real time through the Xbox 360’s burgeoning horsepower. Every zombie could be touched, leapfrogged, shot, ran over, bludgeoned, mutilated, set on fire, disemboweled, DDT’d, diced, or, if you were in a rush, ignored. For many players, this was the first time power and agency had been conceived and combined on such a massive scale.
Frank West, photojournalist extraordinaire, was the opposite of a typical hero. Pudgy, disagreeable, mostly unattractive, and with patience for days, Frank felt like the diametric opposite of the sure-fire, focus-group’d-to-hell dirt bags that populated mid-aughts action games. A true everyman, Frank was compelled to listen to the benevolent caretaker Otis and perform any number of absurd tasks in order to rescue survivors in the mall. A well-rounded guy with a diverse series of interests, sometimes Frank would also have to viscously murder deranged clowns, insane butchers, and upset veterans.
While survival is the ultimate assignment, Frank’s performance is measured by following through on scoops and working on case files. Friendly NPC’s will radio Frank and tell him about trapped survivors or suspicions activity, and Frank will have to comb through the mall and an escalating series of barriers in order to resolve the situation. Most of the time this just involves finding a helpless person and coercing him or her into coming with Frank to safety. This briefly transforms Dead Rising into an escort mission, and one that is especially perilous if Frank happens to collect more than one survivor at a time.
Progression is measured through Frank’s character level and acquired through Prestige Points (PP). Taking provocative photographs, getting survivors back to the hideout, wiping out bosses, or murdering hundreds of zombies are among the way Frank can gather PP. Several stats level up automatically, but Frank also gains new abilities, inventory slots, and general combat prowess. It’s a safe and effective system, although performance seems to rely more on arbitrary stat boosts over demonstration and practice of any acquired skill.
All of Dead Rising has a narrative through-line reliant on Frank completing a series of story-based scoops. Like every scoop in the game, there is a semi-visible timer before the opportunity to complete it expires. For optional quests, either the person you’re trying to rescue dies or the psychopath becomes unavailable to battle, costing Frank both goodies and experience. Missing a clearly marked “main” scoop will cost Frank the ability to properly finish the game. If this happens, Dead Rising allows the player to fart around in the Willamette Mall until 72 hours of game-time runs out and the place is destroyed. It’s a nice concession, and one that’s seemingly aware some players will ignore any implied objective in favor of zombie destruction and messing with all the toys, clothes, and weapons available inside the mall’s stores.
Still, that pressure is the reason so many people fell in love with Dead Rising. Saving everyone demands a ruthless commitment to efficiency and the foresight, either through strictly adhering to a FAQ/wiki or by sheer repetition, to know where you need to be and how to best execute the desired objective. Keys need to be acquired, psychopaths need to be brought down, certain survivors must be rescued together, and all of this has to happen under the escalating duress of a lethal zombie plague. Dead Rising was an unabashed videogame not beholden to any tangible sense of reality to create its tension.
While Dead Rising’s commitment to raw mechanics never wavered, its ability to make them work together was mortally tested. Frank had to rescue survivors as quickly as possible, but doing so involved waiting through inane dialogue until they agreed to help you. Otis calls Frank constantly and he’ll call back and repeat everything if you enter a different part of the mall or cut him off. Most survivors, even if you’re gracious enough to arm them with a weapon, are extremely stupid and either get caught up in zombies hoards or fail to properly follow Frank back to safety. Worse, freeing a survivor from a mass of zombies typically results in simultaneously harming the survivor.
Dead Rising was also kind of a roguelike. If Frank died the player had the option of restarting from their last save point or starting a new game with Frank’s current character level, accounting for both stats and abilities, intact. Starting off with the ability to better leap over zombies or disembowel any would-be aggressors were huge time savers, not to mention the all the extra magazines (buffs) and items that could consume Frank’s expanded inventory slots. Recklessly getting to level 15 or 20 and then starting over for a legitimate march toward an endgame felt like the right way to play Dead Rising.
Ten years later, the question still persists; did Capcom make Dead Rising this way on purpose? Did they willfully create an incredible sandbox that was secretly filled with scorpions? For some, the countdown timer is an oppressive mechanic that should have been tossed after the first game. For others, a time limit is an agitating je ne sais quoi that makes Dead Rising what it is. Other than Lighting Returns: Final Fantasy XIII, I can’t think of a similarly budgeted game that allows the player to invest a significant amount of time in what might turn out to be a failing enterprise. Dead Rising, its three sequels, and Lightning Returns completely stress me out, but I simultaneously feed off that stress and strive to play the game as efficiently as possible. It’s a unique sensation, and it’s something that so few other games even attempt it’s tough to evaluate whether or not Dead Rising does it well.
Ten years later, Dead Rising on an Xbox One still felt like Dead Rising. The resolution is higher. The framerate is smoother and much more consistent. The best improvement, however, lies with Dead Rising’s most supreme object of loathing; loading times. Over the course of that game I made, I don’t know, a million trips back to the hideout with survivors in tow. Sometimes they wouldn’t even get in the damn ventilation shaft and I’d have to go back out and get them. The loading times were excruciating, and while travelling with survivors is still far from acceptable, it’s a lot easier to manage with loading times that seem to max out at five seconds.
On its way up to the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and into its second decade, should Capcom have *fixed* Dead Rising? Should it be easier to grab a survivor’s hand and tug them along? Would making a survivor invincible from your attacks break the game? Would it be such a pain to make gun combat functional? It’s hard to say, but this version of Dead Rising remains pure to the original. A $20 retail disc isn’t going to guarantee the same amount of attention a complete remake may entail, leaving Dead Rising, at the very least, as an honest representation of a bygone time in gaming’s history.
While it’s odd to feel nostalgic about a game that debuted on Xbox 360, I took in Dead Rising’s opening helicopter ride, mall massacre, and howdy-do’s with Otis in stride. The first hour was a breeze as I visited the same shops and played with the same dumb weapons I did ten years ago. Eventually it turned to night and the zombies got harder, then my band of survivors got wrecked by the assholes in the jeep patrolling the park area with machine guns. Then I died and it reset my entire game because I forgot Dead Rising keeps saves manually. Eventually I got sick of Kent’s shit on the mission where you have to photograph him in very specific poses, so I murdered him, stopped caring about survivors and just plopped around the mall until I got bored. This seemed like a good place to leave Dead Rising.
This sentiment may be emblematic of Dead Rising’s place in 2016. For the uninitiated it’s a curious dive into the raw mechanics and chaotic systems of a brave outlier. What Dead Rising accomplished in its time and place is more interesting as a historical piece than it is as a pleasurable experience. If you’re looking to actually enjoy yourself and have never played a Dead Rising game before, every sequel better services that need without losing sight of its dangerous edge.
