“Zombies, huh?” – Dead Rising

In Dead Rising, some people take refuge from a mass zombie event in a mall, only for the zombies to be let inside. It gestures to the old chestnut that people are the real monsters. And there is an unusual disclaimer on the box just in case you miss the obvious influence: “This game was not developed, approved or licensed by the owners or creators of George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead”. In a British context, the game’s comedy-heavy approach and option to toss musical albums at zombies also make me note that it came only a couple of years after Shaun of the Dead, and indeed one of the many outfits you can obtain to wear in it is a familiar-looking bloodstained shirt and red tie.

From the world of games, meanwhile, it’s not exactly a zombie game that comes to mind most, but Rockstar’s State of Emergency, another game from early in a console generation with a mall setting. Beyond the Dawn of the Dead disclaimer, one of the more prominent things on the Dead Rising box is its claim to “next generation swarm technology” and showing off the ability to display big crowds was clearly a strong motivating factor for both games. Their presentation and messages have a lot in common, too. State of Emergency’s mall was full of literal consumers and metaphorical zombies, and Dead Rising just flips that around.

The comparison is a particularly good one to demonstrate what difference four years of changing trends in games could make, plus some idiosyncrasies of Capcom’s own. It comes as no surprise that the mall that it’s set in has a place called Jill’s Sandwiches in reference to Resident Evil, their other zombie series, and there are similarities. They both exist in a bizarro movie America, both have a similarly conspiratorial bent to their platting, and both draw a lot of tension from your limited resources and opportunities to save. Dead Rising is distinctly less harsh on each, but you can still get in a lot of trouble if your last baseball bat breaks in the middle of a crowd of zombies.

The thing that breaks it away from State of Emergency and Resident Evil alike, and puts it squarely in the 2006 zeitgeist, is its committed approach to sandbox gameplay. Said zeitgeist essentially meaning splicing the approach popularised in Grand Theft Auto III and its sequels into ever more different genres. Dead Rising has a plot to follow, but it gives you a huge number of opportunities to do other things. You can spend your time rescuing human survivors, letting them follow you back to safety or carrying them as needed. You can take up photography, trying to get as many points as possible for photos judged against the five genres: brutality, drama, erotica, horror, and outtake (now there’s a telling outline of the aesthetic boundaries of mainstream video games if ever I’ve seen one). Or you can enjoy killing zombies in gory HD with as many different objects as a mall can provide. Running them through with a giant promotional lipstick, leaving pink splodges, was my favourite.

Each of those different activities provides points towards a complicated system of levelling up which grants you new skills and attributes. Adding an extra layer still is the fact that each time you die, you get a choice to either revert to your last save, or to start the game over with character progression intact. This choice proved fairly central to my enjoyment of Dead Rising, in allowing me to ditch a few early attempts where I had failed to get a hold of some of the finer points of the game or the mall’s geography, without feeling like I had wasted hours to no gain. Once I got the acceptable level of zombie risk and the rhythm of visits to savepoints down better, there was no need for any more restarts, but it was a nice offset for increasing complexity.

An even bigger advantage gained by Dead Rising from the possibilities of the Xbox 360 is that it is the best advert so far for the achievements system. Achievements are not the only way to signpost things – Grand Theft Auto III and plenty of other games managed to provide the appeal of doing lots of different things, including just messing around, without offering them. They’re certainly a very handy addition, though, especially when you have a mind that craves structure as much as mine. The big thing is how, as a meta-language that can be learned across between games, achievements done well can give a quick read on what is expected of you. Seeing an achievement for taking pics of ten survivors, or for reaching particular target scores in killing zombies or putting novelty masks on them, turns something massively open-ended into something which is still fun to experiment in but also has a set of very firmly defined goals to work towards.

Dead Rising’s mall is not exactly a pleasant place to spend time in, for reasons intended and unintended. The constant low level threat and crowd control work of zombies and the occasional bigger threat of un-undead psychopaths work well to make moments in safer areas a real relief. I can take the big gobs of gore pretty easily, even when methodically covering the ground with dumbbell-pummelled zombie head after dumbbell-pummelled zombie head. The general feel of mean-spiritedness and exploitativeness leaves a worse taste, starting with those erotic photo challenges and the fact that if you point the camera at the wrong woman it will instead come back as horror. 

Beyond that, satire on capitalism frequently takes a backseat to punching down at anyone going to malls and women in particular. One of the psychopaths is a fat woman preying on other women and every aspect of that is played for disgust. In that context, when you go to a clothes store and main character Frank puts on a dress and does an exaggerated sexy dance of feeling himself, it’s hard not to see it as transmisogyny. If looking for Dead Rising’s narrative to have something to say, it offers little at best. As an experience of playing and exploring, though, its combination of scenario and mechanics builds to a constant stream of interesting little choices, which can’t help but accumulate into something bigger on how to navigate three days in a zombie-filled video game mall. In that sense it’s something more than just a game version of its obvious influences.

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Top of the charts for week ending 9 September 2006:

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