The game incorporates this into the action by letting players take pictures for experience points, with bonuses given for close-ups, action shots, and generally just capturing the insanity in glorious detail. Photojournalist Frank West dropped into a zombie outbreak not to help people but to take pictures of the carnage and win a Pulitzer prize. There's the family of gun nuts using the apocalypse as an excuse to exercise their Second Amendment rights on anything that moves, the man who trusts his neighbors so little that he would rather kill them than risk helping them, and the grocery clerk whose life is so dedicated to the job that minding the store is his priority even in the midst of an undead apocalypse.Įven the game's protagonist is an example of greed trumping compassion. And the population of this stand-in for the USA is an assortment of potential victims and profoundly disturbed killers, many of whom are caricatures taking one aspect of American culture to an extreme. Like George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, the bulk of Dead Rising takes place in a mall, the home of American capitalism. Dead Rising's social commentary had all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to a zombie's face. That disregard for non-American life spurs a survivor of the town to turn terrorist, unleashing the zombie plague within US borders and sets the stage for the game's Willamette, Colorado outbreak. When the experiment goes haywire and creates zombies instead of strip steaks, the government contains the outbreak and covers it up by wiping the South American town where they'd been doing the experiments from the map. According to the backstory, the zombies are the accidental result of a US government experiment to mass produce enough cattle to meet America's out-of-control consumption demands.
One of the most interesting aspects of the original Dead Rising is that it was developed by a Japanese team to appeal to Western gamers, but the game itself is deeply critical of American culture. (NOTE: Dead Rising 1 and 2 SPOILERS FOLLOW). So here are a few things I see as essential to the series, along with the reasons I have to be a bit worried about Dead Rising 3. I'm a bit turned off by what I've seen of Dead Rising 3 because I think the developers and I disagree on what it means to be a Dead Rising game.
And it's not just because getting any facts about the game in reality couldn't help but constrain the limitless possibility of the Dead Rising 3 in my imagination (although I admit, there's likely a bit of that at play). But now that it's been announced, I find myself more concerned than excited for it. Going into E3, I listed Dead Rising 3 as the game I most wanted to see announced.