Dead Rising

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.