Dead Rising: 7.5/10

My relationship with this game is definitely a love/hate one. It's like that girl friend that you know is no good for you but you can't help thinking about her. On the one hand I love the open game play and the simple concept - survive 72 hours in a zombie invested mall. The clock is always ticking in the game (5 minutes of real time is 1 hour of game time) and what you do during that time is up to you. You can rescue other survivors, investigate the origins of the zombie outbreak, practice your photography, or simply run amok. The thing is, with time always pressing, there is no way to do it all. You have to decide how you play the game. Capcom also made the great decision to provide a huge variety of weapons laying around. Almost everything that can be picked up can be used as a weapon, from machine guns to two-by-fours, from chainsaws to mannequins. That element of the game is a blast.

But then there's the bad. The AI of the other survivors is atrocious, often hysterically so, as it's not unusual to find them stuck in a running animation against a wall or each other with the only way of dislodging them is to rough them up a bit. The voice overs during gameplay are equally bad. Only two voice are used for every, non story, character - one male, one female - and they cycle through the same half dozen or so phrases. My kids and I have a running joke of yelling "Fraaank!", or "this can't be happening" because of this game. The unbelievably bad voice-overs are in stark contrast to the largely solid voice work and animations in the cut scenes. It almost seems like the two were made by different companies. The bosses are similarly more annoying than challenging, as are the final legs of the game. The game also has a crazy difficulty curve as you struggle to learn that many of the weapons are largely useless with no logical reason why (hitting someone with a mannequin does more damage then shooting them). Then, once you've found the right weapons (baseball bats and mini-chainsaws) they rest of the game is insanely easy.

Curiously, these deficiencies somehow add up to something fun, like a b-grade horror movie that has no right to be as entertaining as it is. If I believed that this was intentional on the part of Capcom, then I would have high hopes for Dead Rising 2, but I suspect the strange convergence was more a fortunate accident. After all, the best b-movies are the once where the director thought he was making art.

Story: 3
Interface: 2
Game Play: 4
Challenge: 4
Fun: 5

Overall: 7.5/10