Dead Rising

Moby ID: 23514
Xbox 360 Specs
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Description official descriptions

You play as Frank West, a freelance photo-journalist, and you're on a hunt for the scoop of a lifetime. Following a lead to the town of Willamette, he finds that the town has been practically taken over by zombies. Trying to get away, Frank makes his way to the Willamette shopping mall hoping he can find help there.

Gameplay takes place in a set seventy-two-hour period where one hour of real time equals twelve hours in game. Frank can freely move about the entire mall, though some areas are not accessible in the beginning. Most of it is infested with zombies, but he has a safe base in a security room. Players can follow the main plot, where they must be in the right place at the right time and successfully complete missions in order to advance, or do side missions, wander around killing zombies and dressing up in clothes from the mall stores, or just stay on the roof and wait for the helicopter to come back to pick him up. The helicopter comes at the end of the three days and the game is over regardless of whether Frank is on the roof to get rescued.

Frank gains experience by taking pictures, rescuing survivors and killing zombies. As he gains experience, he levels up, which gives him new moves, a larger inventory and more health.

Pictures are scored based on the number of survivors or zombies, their proximity to the camera and on emotional content, like horror, humor or sexiness.

Survivors are located throughout the mall and Frank must show up at the right time to rescue them. If you show up too early, they may not be at their location yet and if you show up too late, they will be dead. Frank can lead survivors back to the safety of the security room so they can be rescued. To do this, he can equip them with weapons and order them to follow him or wait at a specific location.

Rescuing survivors is complicated by the huge crowds of zombies roaming around the mall. There can be up to one thousand on screen at a time. Frank must avoid getting bitten and make sure the survivor continue to survive as he leads them. In addition to the zombies, Frank must face off against psychopaths, who are human who snapped when they saw the zombies and have become crazed killers.

Almost anything in the mall can be picked up and used. Food items restore health. Also everything else can be used as a weapon. Obvious, it's far more effective to kill zombies with a sub-machine gun or a chainsaw than by throwing CDs at them or hitting them with a mannequin, but you do have options and you may have to resort to killing zombies with a bowling ball or with you bare hands because all weapons have limited ammunition or durability and will eventually run out. You can pick up books from bookstores. These give you bonuses, like increased durability for a class of weapons, while in your inventory. There are also several vehicles you can use.

In keeping with the real-time theme, you are only allowed one save slot. Frank can save in bathrooms and in the security room, but this will overwrite and previous saves. If you make a mistake, you have to either restart the game, though you keep your current levels, or live with it and move on. This means your decisions do have consequences.

Once you complete the main plotline, you go into overtime mode, where Frank, rather than getting on the helicopter, gets another twenty-four hours to resolve the plot. If you beat overtime mode, you get infinite mode, where the helicopter isn't coming back, Frank loses health over time and all the survivors are trying to kill him. The object here is to stay alive as long as possible.

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Credits (Xbox 360 version)

336 People (314 developers, 22 thanks) · View all

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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 84% (based on 79 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 72 ratings with 4 reviews)

A masterpiece of laughs and horror

The Good
The variety of stuff to do. You can solve the cases that surround the mysteries of how the mall became swarming with zombies (or not), you can go on a zombie genocide spree, you can rescue survivors and get them to safety, you can use anything even mildly pointy or heavy as a weapon (from cactus plants to chainsaws to garbage cans) and you can even shop the mall, picking up golf clubs, bowling balls and even milk and bread (which can all be used as weapons or health items)

The variety of attacks and characters is astounding and you can play through this game twenty times and still see or do something new every time.

There is no slowdown at any point during the game and the fun factor never ceases. The story for this game is also suprisingly excellent and averts the possible boredom that could insue from smashing zombies for hours on end. The achievement system is also top notch and is entertaining as well as rewarding (there is even a mode of play you can unlock where you have to survive in the mall for up to 7 game days, with a wonderous reward waiting for you on the other end)

The Bad
While the graphics are not on level with other Xbox360 games like "Condemned" and "Quake 4", the lack of detailed shoe textures is more than adequately made up for by the literally hundreds to thousands of zombies that fill your screen at any one time with no slowdown. The game is a powerhouse at rendering all those zombies with their own activities and personalities.

The save system is flawed however. There is only one save slot and minimal save stations around the zombie infested mall. It can be a real pain hoofing it across the entire map to get to a save point.

Also, the melee attacks availible to Frank vary from easy to use to downright awkward to pull off. Good thing they're all listed in your menu and told how to pull each off easily.

The Bottom Line
Top notch! Worth every penny of the $60 price tag with massive replay value, both hilarious and frightening characters and a suprisingly deep political story that will keep you intrigued until the final second of the 72 hour survival mode.

For some bizarre reason, you'll probably wish that the 72 hours would never end, this game is that good.

Xbox 360 · by M C (6) · 2006

The best zombie game franchise (trilogy)

The Good
Dead Rising is one of my favorite video game franchises. I played it years ago on Xbox, and I got it on PC, and it still holds up as an absolute classic. There's much to love about this game, let me just go over it all piece by piece.

The gameplay of Dead Rising is very unique. Rather than using only guns and your basic melee weapons, you have a whole arsenal of weapons, because everything is a weapon. You can use benches, potted plants, large wooden boards, lawn mowers, cooked frying pans, so on and so forth. You also have a camera, which you can use to take pictures to earn experience. The more you level up, you can even learn all of the pro-wrestler kind of moves like a suplex and a double lariat.

The side missions are pretty weak, except for the psychopaths. There is great selection of main mission and side bosses called psychopaths. They are exactly what they sound like. They are unique, crazy-ass characters that have had their minds corrupted by the zombie outbreak. They have great cutscenes, they're all unique, and you can even get some powerful weapons from them that will always respawn when you reload the area coughAdam's chainsawscoughcough.

There's a wonderful catalogue of clothing spread throughout the mall. You can pick up a suit and tie with a trilby hat, OR you can wear small children's clothes with the infamous Servbot mask. The variety is massive in this game. It's also tradition for this series to give you a full costume and weapon based on a Mega Man character. You can't beat that.

SPOILER ALERT Back when I played this game on Xbox, I never really got how deep the story was. It has a strong message of a corrupt government that wants to keep the zombie infection out of the public eye. Near the end of the game, the government issues a clean sweep of the whole city in order to hunt down and kill not only zombies, but people, since they could be witnesses, and they don't want that. Now that I'm older, I really appreciate how far the story goes. It's not some, "shoot the zambies and survive a post apocalyptic world" kind of game. It's a game where you need to expose the truth to the world and not let the corrupt government win. This story really got me thinking. If there was a zombie outbreak in a city somewhere, would our government help us, or try to cover it up like they did here? I can't say for sure.

The Bad
The AI. For the love of everything holy the AI. There's a bunch of survivors in the mall that you have to take to the safehouse. The reason this is bad is that the NPCs in this game just want to die. They will run through entire groups of zombies, they will go and fight some for no reason, or even just stand there and get eaten alive. The terrible AI in this game is insufferable, and I would've been ok with them just tweaking them a little for the rerelease.

Your camera runs out of batteries and you have to refill them at camera shops. There's no reason for this.

SPOILER ALERT The last mission in the game for the true ending is where it just stops being fun. You have to walk though a narrow tunnel full of zombies while this girl you're with holds a zombie repellent. You can hold her hand, but it's barely helpful since you can break free so easily. After this, the game slaps you in the nuts by letting you carry her on your back, making you think, "why couldn't I just do that before?" After the boring tank fight, you have to fight the final boss. Tip: spam double lariat. That's the only way to beat him without having a heart attack.

The Bottom Line
This game is a classic. If you haven't played them, they're on almost every console now. If you had an Xbox at release and haven't played this, shame on you. It was also made like 13 years ago and can run on anything. Play it on your grandma's Windows Vista PC, for God's sake.

Windows · by sinisterhippo (23) · 2019

A brutally addicting game

The Good
You have almost total freedom to do whatever you want. Great characters, graphics, and features are just some of the things this game has to offer. Capcom turned a simple idea (killing zombies) into a very unique and addicting video game.

The Bad
Occasional slowdown and lagging times,plus some disk read errors. But that's about it. Plus the escorts have extremely dumb A.I.

The Bottom Line
A very fun and addicting yet horrific title that you'll keep wanting to play. All the weapons and special moves you can ask for and plenty of unlockable content and secrets that won't lose your interest.

Xbox 360 · by Phobos-Romulus (41) · 2008

[ View all 4 player reviews ]

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Dead Rising appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

53,594

Dead Rising started something of an in-joke among developers with one of its achievements. The "Zombie Genocider" achievement asks the player to kill 53,594 zombies, the population of the town that the game is set in. Valve's Left 4 Dead one-upped this, having the "Zombie Genocidest" achievement which asks for 53,595 zombies, as well as "The Littlest Genocide" which asks for 5,359 on the Crash Course campaign. The trend continued with Activision's Prototype and Cave's DoDonPachi, which both had achievements for 53,596 kills. Neither of these games continued the joke with the achievement name, with Prototype's being called "Trail of Corpses", and DoDonPachi's called "Shooting King 53,596".

Further Dead Rising sequels continued the trend, with Dead Rising 2 having the "Z-Genocider 2: Genocide Harder" achievement for killing 53,596 zombies, then Dead Rising 3's "Master of Massacre" upping it to 53,597, and finishing with the recent Dead Rising 4 and its "Z-Genocider 4: The Return" which asks for 53,598 killed zombies.

European version

In the European version a topless lady on a picture got a white dress and another one on a t-shirt a bikini top.

Limited Edition

A Limited Edition version of the game was released in the UK in a steelbook case. The game came with the map of the mall that had been previous only been given away at E3 2006. The game itself is identical to the North American and regular UK edition however.

References

A couple of other Capcom franchises are referenced in the game. The restaurant Jill's Sandwiches is a reference to a character of the same name from the Resident Evil series, and one of Barry's humourous remarks. Mega Man's outfit and Mega Buster can be found in the game, as well as masks of the Servbots from Mega Man Legends.

Sales

According to publisher Capcom, Dead Rising has sold 1.8 million copies worldwide since its initial release (as of June 30, 2016).

Text

Some of the texts in the game are impossible to read on a SDTV (Standard Definition Television). Capcom has openly stated that there are no plans to fix this problem so gamers will have to buy a HDTV (High Definition Television) for the game to display text correctly.

Awards

  • 4Players
    • 2006 – #2 Best Hero of the Year (for Frank West)
  • Computer Games Magazine
    • March 2007 - Console Game of the Year 2006
  • GameSpy
    • 2006 – #6 Xbox 360 Game of the Year
    • 2006 – Best Game Featuring Zombie Genocide as an Achievement of the Year (Xbox 360)

Information also contributed by Byron Law, CaptainCanuck, jotaro.raido and PCGamer77.

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Corn Popper.

Windows added by Barbarian_bros. Xbox One, PlayStation 4 added by richardsu.

Additional contributors: John Chaser, Sciere, fourzerotwo, Lance Boyle, CalaisianMindthief, Patrick Bregger, Starbuck the Third, FatherJack.

Game added August 11, 2006. Last modified January 20, 2024.