Dead Rising Week: Dead Rising

Well folks we are back for the week and I apologize for the last week being too short due to sinus headaches. The zombie genre is so beloved by all for some reason. Morbid curiosity? Gore fans? Whatever the case may be, folks cannot seem to get enough of the undead. This time around I thought we would look at a series of games involving the shambling dead folk. This is Dead Rising.

Zombie munch party!!!

So we are speaking of the PS3 and PC games that originated from Capcom because... Resident Evil just didn't covet enough of this genre but we follow the story arc of Frank West, photographer/photojournalist (voiced by stuntman and voice actor Terence J. Rotolo of Masked Rider, Big Bad Beetleborgs, Power Rangers in Space, Power Rangers Lost Galaxy, Dead Rising, Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles and Devil May Cry 4) First off, this guy looks like he should be paparazzi getting latter age Disney girl up-skirt shots but I digress. Frank has covered world events, major wars and impressive scoops of that nature. Toodling around Colorado, he stumbles in on a town gone batshit. Military convoys blocking the roads and all forms of communications going in and out of Willamette Colorado have been jammed. The whole town seems overrun by zombies. He beelines for the local shopping mall because maybe Colorado has less gun restrictions so the possibility of boomsticks a plenty!

Zombies or Mallrats?  Only Kevin Smith knows for sure.

With a fistful of lettuce, Frank charters a helicopter to get some aerial shots of the place Frank wants more visceral close ups so he tells the pilot to drop him off on the roof of the mall and come back in three days for more scratch. Turns out the mall may have not been the wisest choice as the place is packed almost wall to wall zombie mob. Frank starts snapping pics left and right showing the utter pandemonium. Frank hooks up with some fellow survivor characters giving a story path and moving towards goals and side quests via sandbox game.

This is classified as a third person horror survival fending off zombie attacks, rescue survivors, fight with nutters and stay alive to get the full story. The funniest part of this is finding any available item as a melee or bludgeon weapon. A TV, kayak paddles with chainsaws duct taped to it, chucking soda cans, beating a zombie to death with a mannequin arm or maybe a neon sign plugged in.

72 hours to get the story, get out and not get bit. Without weapons, Frank has some decent hand-to-hand street fighting/wrassling moves from some gut punches, tossing people and using the environment. There are no combos to remember or any of that crap. You stab, clunk or shoot out your way to the next level. FYI, the friggin mall looks about the size of Mall of America.

Zombies are plentiful, the boss battles are off their nut and the story line is a bit odd but overall loads of replay ability. So if you want to hack and slash the undead without deep, profound matters of the heart, hearing people flip out or for the Resident Evil fans want to collect more than 6 or 8 items, this is your jam.

Escort missions will forever blow!!!