Damned Zombies!

“KATHY PETERSON IS DEAD!”

That's pretty much the moment Dead Rising truly starts. Capcom, makers of the Resident Evil series of games, once again uses zombies as a plot device in its latest Xbox 360 game. But where the zombie video game cliché is generally as lifeless and maggot-ridden as the shambling husks it holds up as adversaries, Capcom manages to bring a breath of fresh yet fetid air to the genre's bloated corpse with Dead Rising.

The player steps into the role of a (probably suicidal) photojournalist who catches word of bad happenings at a giant shopping mall in Colorado. With the mall and surrounding town quarantined by authorities, you've hired a helicopter pilot to drop you off in the heart of the chaos and come back to pick you up in three days.

As you fly in and survey scenes of civil unrest that, upon closer examination, turn out to be zombie hordes closing in on desperate survivors, you snap pics, which the Xbox 360 then grades, giving points for such things as how close to the action you got, how many subjects are in the picture, and how dramatic/brutal/horrific/comedic/erotic your picture is.

Yes, I said “erotic.”

No, I am not kidding you.

There's not much eroticism as you fly into town. Instead, you see helpless people converged upon by the undead. Cars overturned and burning. Mutilated bodies on the streets. A woman on a rooftop spots the helicopter and reaches out to you, begging for help. You take a picture; the game assesses the scene, gives you bonus points for the drama and enthusiastically proclaims your picture “Great!” Zombies close in around her, and she jumps to her death to avoid them. You can get lots of points for capturing that, too.

Before long, you arrive at your destination and jump to the roof as feds chase your pilot away. The mall is free of zombies for the moment, but they are beginning to congregate  around the exits. A handful of survivors have barricaded themselves in the entrance plaza, the usual zombie movie mish-mash of people from all races, age groups, and walks of life. Then one of them does something stupid, and all of a sudden zombies are freakin' everywhere. Maybe hundreds of the bastards.

The game turns control over to you at this point, and before you've figured out which button is jump and which button is pick-up-the-park-bench-and-brain-someone-with-it, you're alerted in giant red letters covering the screen that “KATHY PETERSON IS DEAD!” You probably didn't know Kathy. She was part of the multi-cultural mish-mash, the homely woman all bandaged up and bitching about it. If you go into the pause menu, you can see a picture of her next to her name. She was 52. It says she had been arguing with her husband Alan Peterson in the entrance plaza when the zombies came. He is 56. “ALAN PETERSON IS DEAD!” He was 56.

Right about the moment you realize how completely fucked everyone is, you're informed that Brian Reynolds (27), Chris Hines (31), Dana Simms (30), Freddie May (40), Lindsay Harris (70), Todd Mendell (28), Ryan Larosa (54), Verlene Willis (24), and Mark Quemada (25) are also dead.

Dead Rising is not your typical zombie game. The gimmick of the game is that you can run through this mall infested with zombies and make a weapon out of nearly anything you find. Use a shopping cart as a battering ram to clear a path to safety, or bring out a lawnmower to chew the same path. Hit the hardware store and walk out with chainsaws to carve your way through the decomposing opposition. Stepladders, electric guitars, trash cans, bowling balls, purses, cash registers … all weapons.

It's a fun gimmick,  and it drives a lot of the game's tongue-in-cheek humor. Throw cooking oil on the ground and watch the uncoordinated undead struggle to keep their footing. Slam a bucket on top of a zombie's head and watch him stumble around helplessly. Snag a golf club from the sporting goods store and use the food court as your own personal driving range. And of course, take some pictures of your humorous exploits along the way to get points, level up, and learn new ways to torment the walking abominations.

The picture-taking bit sounds neat at first. It's been used in games before but never ones that let the player be so … evil about it. For one, you can effectively stage your shots. Is that zombie not scary enough? Find a stray hand lying on the ground (a disgustingly easy thing to do) and then shove it into the zombie's mouth. Take a picture: instant horror points!

And then there's the whole “erotic” photo thing. There are a couple ways to get erotic photos, but they basically boil down to sneaking up-skirt shots of scantily dressed women and zombies as they lie prone. So the question is: which is worse, finding eroticism in a picture of a zombie's nether-regions or braining an innocent woman so you can get some creepy panty shots for points?

What about the woman you took a picture of as she was crying for help? In the helicopter you couldn't do anything. In the mall, you usually can. And if you're playing this game to win, you'll keep photo opportunities in mind at every turn.

“Look at that poor guy being swarmed by the fuckers. Good god, they're eating his face. *click* Hrm … the angle wasn't right. His life bar's still got some length to it. I'll let them gnaw on his nose for a second while I look for a better vantage point …”

And that's if you decide to help at all. Saving people gets you huge points in the game (more so even than exploiting their abject suffering to further your own fictitious career), but it's also much more difficult and much more time consuming. Which brings us to another sticking point in the game, assuming you can stomach the previously established violations of basic human decency and photojournalistic ethics.

The game is a bit of a tease. I guess aimlessly sprinting through the mall wildly swinging a chainsaw through anything in your path would get old after a few hours. So Capcom throws a story in your way. You'll have to be in the right place at the right time and usually slaughter the wrong people in order to advance the story. If you're a little slow of foot and you miss a plot point, you completely derail the story and will have to reload if you want to get back on track. And that brings up the game's asinine save system. There's no room to explain why it sucks, but rest assured it'll screw you over at least once.

Frustrations aside, Dead Rising is a fun game and the first zombie game that really gets what makes zombies so goddamned scary. There's a shitload of them. They're very patient. And to reach you and your sweet, sweet brains, they will crawl upon a mountain of their dead (deader?). And more often than not, zombies win. You may be destined to lose in the end, but Dead Rising provides a fun mix of horror, action, and humor along the way.

And eroticism.

But only if you're not right in the head.