Capcom received some negative press earlier this month after showing off Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop, their port of the Xbox 360 game Dead Rising. After complaints that the game had bad controls and only showed six zombies onscreen at once, Capcom said what had been shown was a tech demo that would not reflect the real experience of the game.
The other day I got to play with a more advanced version of Dead Rising. I never saw the tech demo so I can’t compare, but there are at least enough zombies to kill you if you wade into them. There were, however, far less than in the Xbox 360 version. On the 360, zombies filled that mall like shoppers the day before Christmas. In the Wii demo I saw the zombies clustered in small groups that made the mall feel like one of those dying shopping malls where all the good stores have moved out and everyone is just waiting for the place to be bulldozed. I felt as though I could easily have run through the mall unmolested.
(I also saw more zombies onscreen in D3’s upcoming Wii zombie slasher Onechanbara, but this may in part be because there’s not much of anything in the game besides zombies; very little scenery, just zombies.)
As with the original version of Dead Rising, you can attack zombies with everything from shotguns to shopping carts. Sometimes the improvised weapons are a little unrealistic; opening an umbrella and charging into a crowd of zombies will lead to their bloody deaths, but how hitting a zombie with the cloth part of an umbrella would make it bleed is beyond me.
The game does a good job with the Wii remote, which can be wielded as a gun or waved around to control blunt instruments. The mall obviously isn’t as finely detailed as in the 360, but it still looks pretty spacious and you can run into stores and grab weapons like light sabers or soccer balls, one of which I kicked through a plate glass window.
I didn’t actually do anything more than run around picking up weapons and killing zombies, so I didn’t get a sense of story, but it should be basically the same as that of the original. Happily, the Wii version is rid of the time limit that was the stupidest part of the 360 game, in which a timer counted down while you played and if you didn’t do things fast enough the game would end before you finished and you would have to restart from the beginning and do everything faster. The absence of that lame-brained feature alone makes up for the thinned out zombie population of the Wii version.
I am cautiously optimistic that Dead Rising will turn out decently by the time it is released in February. On the other hand, Capcom was showing Resident Evil 5 on the Xbox 360 at the same time, and that game, which comes out in March, blows Dead Rising away. Sadly Capcom’s PR guy said he thought there was virtually no chance RE5 would be ported to the Wii. So let us hope that Dead Rising and Onechanbara are enough to fill Wii owners zombie-killing needs in 2009.
