Shop Till You Drop
Dead RisingCapcom, Xbox 360
Nothing spices up a shopping excursion like fighting off crazed armies of the living dead. In Dead Rising, the usual army of consumer zombies drooling over tacky store displays are replaced by actual zombies, drooling over your food-court-fattened flesh.
Forget a bullet in the head — most of the walking dead in this game will be dispatched with an inventive arsenal of common department store goods, from baseball bats to bowling balls to chainsaws (hint: spend more time in sporting goods than cosmetics). And since no (un)natural disaster is complete without the paparazzi snapping pics, it’s a good thing the main character is a crusading photojournalist named Frank West who bashes zombie heads with one hand and earns crucial points shooting gory snapshots with the other. ’Cause what’s the point of fighting off rotting corpses if you can’t keep score or, better yet, glossy mementos suitable for framing?
This may sound like a videogame version of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead, but Dead Rising owes as much to nonstop, fast-paced action games like Rockstar’s State of Emergency as to ’70s splatter flicks. Though our shutterbug hero’s stilted movements don’t carry the realism found in other Xbox 360 games, it’s still tough to resist battering up to several hundred zombies at once in a frenetic battle to get through the mall, rescue innocent civilians and somehow get home for supper — without being served up as the main course.
