The lifeblood of Dead Rising
I bought Dead Rising on Xbox Live’s Games on Demand yesterday because I felt like I never gave it a fair shake back when I got my 360 in 2006 and borrowed a friend’s copy. Booting it back up for an hour, I was reminded just how transitional of a title it was — the previous-gen and current-gen features are very clearly delineated — but I wasn’t sure it’d have much staying power for me.
Then I walked into a children’s clothing store and I discovered just what a bizarre sense of humor the game has. I had Frank West — male, late 30s, probably 220 pounds — dress up in ill-fitting children’s clothing and athletic socks and, in the interest of going for broke, a huge bear-shaped helmet. This is my Frank West. This is the Frank West snapping erotic photos of dead zombies. This is the Frank West with the exposed stomach and shorts that stop a full six inches above his kneecaps, the man who rescues survivors trapped in the Willamette Mall. He’s the Frank West who teams up with DHS agents to tackle whatever contrived conspiracy is at the core of Dead Rising.
I guess where I’m going with this is that there’s a real intrinsic value to creating a game that boldly sets its own tone and establishes its own framework for comedy. It’s a huge part of why the ancient LucasArts adventure games hold up so well now, and it’s why games like the impossibly bad yet impossibly good Deadly Premonition have become sleeper hits. And it’s why I’m gonna keep playing Dead Rising.
