Few things in this world excite me more that the anticipation of the impending apocalypse. And the thought that it wont come at the hands of thermonuclear war but at the hands of the undead, well that’s just electrifying. The new capcom game Dead Rising has the most accurate depiction of the undead in any video game ever. Now some might say, “What is accurate?” Well, since we never have had a chance to study the undead in their natural habitat is it difficult to say.  And we won’t get into the debate of fast zombies vs. slow zombies or D&D zombies vs. Juju zombies. For the purposes of this review we will say that accurate = popular. And by far the most popular depiction of the modern undead is the George A. Romero zombie.
 
 

Dead Rising has a disclaimer on the cover of the game “This game was not developed, approved or licensed by the owners or creators of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead.” Which means it is almost an exact copy of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Really, Dead Rising has nothing to do with Dawn of the Dead, except that you and a small group of people are trapped in a mall trying to survive a zombie attack. OK, the story has nothing to do with Dawn of the Dead. The setting has everything to do with Dawn of the Dead. Imagine Dawn of the Dead with all new people and a whole new story.

All Romeroing aside the game itself is fantastic. You play Frank West a freelance photojournalist who investigates a riot in a small town in Colorado, after seeing this is no ordinary riot in a very dramatic opening scene he goes to the center of town, which is the mall, and tells the pilot to return to pick him up in 72 hours. You now have three days to find out what happened, get the biggest scoop of your life, and not to mention stay alive. Over the course of your Zombie escapade you come across over 250 items that you can use to kill zombies including lawnmowers, baseball bats, Katanas, 2x4's, showerheads, chairs, plates, bowling balls, knives, chainsaws, hockey sticks, plastic lightsabers, safety cones, pies, TVs, HDTVs, potted plants, fully deployed beach umbrellas, a battle axe, Megaman helper bot heads, microwaveable pizzas, dumbbells, sniper rifles, uzis, step ladders, cardboard boxes, soccer balls, shopping carts, fire axes, a Hummer, nightsticks, Teddy Ruxpin heads, Frisbees, boomerangs, water guns, and of course the most powerful weapon in the game Megaman’s Mega-buster. Like I said fantastic.
 

We all heard the term playability. Well, this game has inspired a new term in videogaming reviews. Emersability or how well the game draws you in to the world that is has created. Dead Rising gets an A on emersability. Not since the fall of 2002 when I spent a week in Vice City have I been sucked in to a game like this. You start to fill trapped and annoyed at all those damn Zombies. Yeah, I might be able to get though the hoards of Zombies and save Lisa Thomson. But I also might get eaten cause Lisa’s too scared to hold a fucking gun. Maybe I should just leave Lisa? And that’s the beauty of Dead Rising; you don’t have to do anything. You can stand on the roof for three days and wait for the helicopter, or you can venture back in to the depths of hell to pull others back to the light.
 

Overall Grade: A+
- Nick M

“Come on!”  “Over here!” “This way!”