The Dead Rise Again
October 8, 2009 – If you hadn’t heard already, Capcom’s next installment in its (other) zombie franchise was pushed into next year, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. What that means is the game will be even better and that the hordes of hungry gamers just have to wait a little longer to get their hands on it. So until that day when we finally get to sit down with a bag of Doritos on our right and a four pack of Amps on our left (or is that just me?), here’s all you need to know to get up to date on Dead Rising 2.
To start things off, it’s a zombie game – though if you didn’t know that already, than you might be reading the wrong article. The original was what you would get if Dawn of the Dead got a virtual makeover as you play a journalist who’s been trapped in a mall infested with the hungry undead. The best thing about the game, other than the amazing visuals and literally hundreds of on-screen zombies, were all the weapons you had at your disposal. Want to club a zombie to death with a golf club? That’s boring, but you can do it. How about a lawn mower? Now you’re getting more inventive. Dead Rising had a myriad of weapons for you to use to take down your shambling, uncoordinated foes.
The upcoming sequel promises to take everything I just said and make it bigger and better. There will be a ton of new and immensely more creative weapons just waiting to be unleashed on the unsuspecting undead. These new additions include things like an explosive-strapped football, a motorbike armed with dual chainsaws, and, wait for it… a shotgun attached to a rake. I don’t know who thought up that last one, but they are officially my hero for life. Dead Rising 2 promises to take one of the original’s best features, the large arsenal of weapons, and take it to the next level. But that’s not the only thing being expanded upon…
Dead Rising had roughly 800 zombies on screen at any given time. While that’s nothing to be ashamed of, the sequel promises to have up to 6,000 zombies on-screen at once. That’s a virtual mob of decaying flesh, enough to fill a small city (try to imagine just how bad that would smell). Like any good sequel, the in-game locales will be improved as well. This game won’t take place in a boarded up mall, no, that’s way too small-scale and Dead Rising 2 is anything but small scale. Now we get to explore the virtual equivalent of Las Vegas, called Fortune City, with a completely different character as well. I’ll admit I was never a fan of the previous game’s camera-wielding protagonist, Frank West, so the chance to control someone new sounds great. This newcomer’s name is Chuck Greene, who is part-time motocross champion, full-time badass.
Horror games (horror being a term I’ll use loosely for this game) have never been known for their amazing multiplayer features. Until now the genre has been able to fend off the growing trend of social gaming by simply saying “playing with friends makes it less scary”. Well, times are a-changin’, and Capcom knows it. First they introduced coop into Resident Evil, and now we’re getting an admittedly awesome multiplayer for our Dead Rising. The multiplayer comes in the form of a faux reality TV show called “Terror is Reality” (not the most clever title, but it certainly gets the point across) where you and three others compete against each other to slay the most zombies in an arena filled with, you guessed correctly, zombies. The best part, you ask? You get to prevent other players from scoring kills by implementing various forms of yet to be unveiled “dirty tactics”. My guess is these tactics comprise of some sort of eye gouging or toe stomping.
All in all, Dead Rising 2 looks to be shaping up quite nicely, and I’m glad to see that the multiplayer feature hasn’t been tacked on so they could include it among the list of features on the back of the box like other games (I won’t name names, you know who you are). The original was a great game that had more than a couple big problems that took away from the overall experience (things that may or may not include its God-awful save system). But with a plethora of ingenious weapons and a couple thousand zombies to use said weapons on, this looks to be yet another great zombie game by the guys who know how to satiate gamers’ undying appetite for rotting flesh.
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