Saturday, February 17, 2007

Dead Rising (Xbox360)

Trading in horror's usual dank alleys and noir lighting for an infested shopping mall, Dead Rising's arsenal of ad hoc weaponry is its most valuable asset.


Between the remade movies and "survival horror" video games, zombies are by now too familiar to be scarier than expired milk. If Dead Rising is any indication, though, there's still plenty of fun to be had at their expense.

Dead Men Tell No Tales

Willamette is covertly quarantined by the military, and ambitious photojournalist Frank West gets himself air-dropped onto the huge local shopping mall to grab the scoop. From that point on, the clock is ticking: you've got 72 hours to take the best photos of your career, get to the bottom of what happened, and escape in one uninfected piece.

You're not alone in this shopping mecca: swarms of undead infest every corner, and survivors range from cowering nitwits to armed psychos. Some need your help, others consider you fair game, and any could know more than they let on. "Case Files" develop over time, dropping odd pieces of a greater whole, and a buddy in the security center occasionally alerts you to "scoop" opportunities: people barricaded in a storefront, a competing photographer, a gunfight. You can prioritize as you see fit, but most of the narrative elements feel tacked on, providing only arbitrary excuses to send you scampering from one end of the mall to the other, with dimwitted AI and some inexplicable dark spots providing the biggest challenges.

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