That being said, as fun as zombie smashing and killing is, sometimes it can seriously be a pain in the arse and more of a fetch quest than anything...and on a time limit. Yes dear readers, this week’s Love to Hate is on Dead Rising, a title which is oh so fun..when you’re not under pressure from a stupid time limit.
I remember playing the Dead Rising demo back when it was released, and boy was it cool. Smashing zombies in the face with a chair, sizzling their eyeballs with a hot pan, using a katana to chop some bodies, it was great fun. Completely mindless and repetitive mind you, but endlessly funny and interesting as long as your brain is creative and sadistic in twisted ways, which I have no problem doing because if you ever see my nightmares, you’d be locked away in an asylum.
So with the confidence of the short but mindlessly fun demo (and promises of using a jack hammer in the full thing), I bought Dead Rising, and my hunger for using home gardening tools on undead things was satiated for a moment. Then I realised that the game actually had some weird time limit going for it and I had to start fetching people around the mall for saving.
Initially this wasn’t too bad, but after several different rescues involving old people who move slow and incompetent characters who don’t know how to use weapons against dangerous things, it really, really grated, particularly with the time limit, which is a total of 72 hours if I recall, which is the duration of the game (in game time that is).
And see this was what actually drove me to madness and essentially never actually finishing the game. The time limit that was set upon you and the constant fetching of crappy human survivors got annoying very, very fast. Sure, there was lots of zombie killing in the midst of it and that was pretty fun, particularly when it encourages you to be creative with kills and take photos of things, but that’s all I wanted to do, not work around a time limit and save people’s arses because they’re too stupid to learn to kill a zombie.
The way I see it, Capcom attempted to create a zombie game that’s all about killing zombies in elaborate ways, but wrapped it around a silly story and mall setting (which is fine, because mall = diversity in objects = killing fun!) with a time limit and unusual twists with human characters as bosses, and made it more annoying than anything. Why couldn’t they just go the Left 4 Dead route, and make some interesting special kind of zombies that are crazy awesome to fight and unforgiving? Would’ve been way more fun than random convicts riding a jeep around a park. I think that was where I actually stopped caring about the story. I hate those guys.
But nonetheless, I can only complain to the extent of which I have played, and that’s not much of it. I only now go back to Dead Rising time to time to smash zombies and such with either bare fists, katana’s or juice bottles. Yes, bottles of juice. That stuff hurts, and it hurts well. But even then, this gets boring after so much killing. I mean, you can saw them into pieces, mow them down with a lawn mower and shove witches hats onto their heads and take photo’s like some perverted jarhead, but it still gets tedious after a while. I guess with great, mindless fun, comes a lot of repetition and eventual boredom too.
Actually I’m going to go out on a whim here. I’m feeling quirky and unusual. Developers need to make a game on zombie ducks. Yes, ducks. Think about this. It’s 1983, you’re a photo journalist who’s trapped in a mall that is littered with hundreds upon hundreds of zombie ducks that have mutated and grown to the size of the average man, and are waddling about chaotically out to nab your brains out with their deadly yellow beaks. They quack horrifically, bite hard and waddle ever so violently. You can kill them off with throwing poisoned bread pieces at them, or just using guns, confectionary, anything at all, just like Dead Rising. Difference is there’s no time limit, you have to escape the mall and it’s level based like an action game, and bosses aren’t stupid convicts in cars... it’s ducks on water... with pellet guns.
I’ll stop now. Remember kids, hate makes you powerful, unlimited power to you all! (and ducks)
Quack.
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