Member the games you used to play? We member. The basement at the Hardcore Gamer office has a section known as the Crust Room, with an old grey couch and a big old CRT TV. All the classic systems are down there collecting dust, so in an effort to improve the cleanliness of our work space, we dust off these old consoles every so often and put an old game through its paces, just to verify everything stays in working order. We even have a beige computer with a floppy disk drive.
The English word for zombie has only been around for a little over two centuries, but in that time there has been no shortage of media dealing with these walking corpses. The term has Haitian origins where a corpse would be reanimated through Voodoo magic, though there are a few theories that suggest the creation of zombies had more practical than magical means, and they weren’t actually the walking dead. Most examples of zombies in entertainment media involve literal walking corpses, however, and while their zombie origin stories vary, the commonality is that zombies are a case of immortality going horribly wrong. There’s no shortage of zombie games to remember either, but we’ll just go with 2006’s Dead Rising for now.
Dead Rising’s protagonist is a photojournalist by the name of Frank West. In pursuit of getting the scoop of something going on Willamette, Colorado, he travels to said town only to learn it’s under military quarantine. This would be about the time a sensible person decides to go back from whence they came, but sensible behavior would lead to a boring video game. Frank is dropped off at the Willamette Parkview Mall’s helipad where he tells the pilot to return for him after three days. This is about when Frank figures out that the military quarantine was done in response to a zombie outbreak. As luck would have it, the very mall Frank is at happens to be heavily infested by the shambling corpses. The next three days are spent by Frank exploring the mall, rescuing survivors and fighting off both zombies and more sinister-minded survivors.
Shopping malls have been used for settings for zombie outbreaks, and if someone is old enough to remember going to malls in their heyday, they might have even felt like they were in the middle of the zombie apocalypse if they went at particularly busy times. This was before the decline of malls which led to the closure of many and reduced others to desolate wastelands with numerous empty storefronts. When Dead Rising was released, horror film fans noticed that it seemed like an unlicensed Dawn of the Dead game. The copyright holders for Dawn of the Dead thought the same thing and filed a lawsuit for copyright infringement against Capcom. Capcom’s defense was essentially that the idea of zombies taking over a mall isn’t a copyrightable claim in which the judge presiding over the case agreed.
Given that Frank told his chopper pilot buddy to come back in three days to pick him up, it makes sense that the initial game mode is 72 Hour Mode. Frank progresses through his three day stay at the mall by completing case files which gradually unlock different elements of the story. Unlike most games, failing these objecting don’t end the player’s adventure. Instead the player will continue in helping Frank attempt to reach his objective, but the outcome may be less desirable and certain bits of knowledge will remain unknown. Successfully completing all the case files unlocks Overtime Mode which gives Frank an extra day in the mall to complete even more tasks. Completing that unlocks Infinity Mode, which allows Frank to roam about the mall indefinitely with no time limit.
One of the more amusing aspects of Dead Rising is how many different endings are in the game. The true and best ending is the achieved by successfully completing Overtime Mode and all the case files. There are many alternate endings and all contain varying degrees of badness. In some of these endings Frank survives; others Frank is not so lucky. Several of these lead to zombie outbreaks occurring in other parts of the country or in more extreme cases widespread outbreak in a small amount of time. The goal is to succeed at everything and get the best ending, but it is fun to explore the less-desirable outcomes.
to survive a mall swarming with zombies, Frank has to use anything he can get his hands on to fight off the horde of zombies. And we mean anything: there are an astounding 250 or so items that Frank can use for his defense. Some of these items are powerful and conventional items while others are useless and comical. Sports equipment and firearms are natural choices that any level-headed survivalist would want in this situation. Other items like sticking traffic cones on zombie heads or using children’s toys as weapons seem to be included for a comical effect. This isn’t too surprising in learning about the development history, Capcom wanted to distance Dead Rising from their other more well-known zombie biohazard franchise, so they gave Dead Rising a more humorous tone.
The sandbox style gameplay and humorous approach work together. Fighting off legions of the undead wasn’t the most original idea when Dead Rising was released, but adding absurdity to the experience helped distinguish it from countless zombie-related entertainment media. Completing the main objective isn’t too terribly long, so it does make achieving all the different endings more accessible. Plus having the freedom to roam about the mall and use just about any old item as a weapon can lead to highly-entertaining conflicts. While Dead Rising was generally regarded favorably, there was another controversy at the time of its release that’s hard to imagine today. Dead Rising was released when high definition televisions were gaining popularity but weren’t standard. The small text in the game was fine on decent-sized HD TVs, but standard definition users weren’t so lucky. Nowadays this isn’t an issue since big screen 4K TVs can be acquired at reasonable prices, but in 2006 things were a bit different.
Dead Rising was one of the more successful zombie games to come out of recent console generations. Dead Rising originally launched for Xbox 360, but has since been remastered for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. It spawned three sequels and a few spin offs. Zombie games are a dime a dozen these days and as a result many who might have been into the idea could have been burnt out from the over saturation. That being said, Dead Rising is still one of the better options for someone in the market for zombie killing.
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