dead man's party

I'm the guy for whom the zombie craze continues to exist. Whenever some would-be wag in a forum thread says "Who's still buying these things?" he's talking about me. As long as it's not a god damn found-footage movie, you mention zombies and/or an apocalypse and you at least have my attention.

I cordoned off this weekend to play Dead Rising 3 on Steam, since it finally became available, and it reminds me of my chief criticism of DR2 as compared to the original, which is mostly a matter of tone.

The original Dead Rising was an in-house project at Capcom by Keiji Inafune, before he left the company to make Mighty No. 9, and the next two were made by the former Blue Castle Games, which is now Capcom Vancouver. Both are reasonably worthy sequels, although the engine is and will apparently remain surprisingly janky for what's ostensibly a triple-A game; a lot of sacrifices have clearly been made in order to serve the task of keeping a few hundred zombies onscreen at once.

The odd genius of the original Dead Rising, in retrospect, was that it played itself completely straight from start to finish. Frank West was a meme generator from the word go and you could easily torpedo even the most dramatic scene in the game by showing up to it in a frilly sundress and Servbot mask, but the characters all acted as if they were serious people in a serious situation. One or two of the survivors were idiots (Ronald comes to mind here, or Burt), but almost all of them were stock characters for the genre at worst. The psychopaths you fought--a shellshocked Vietnam veteran in the middle of the world's worst flashback, a drunk hoarder with a shotgun, a survivalist family out to save themselves at the expense of everyone else--were memorable because most of them were believably ordinary people who were pushed too far by the associated stresses of a zombie outbreak. There were certainly exceptions, like Adam the clown, but they could be taken in stride.

DR2 carried that theme forward in its main plot, but the world outside of Chuck's personal storyline was unapologetically ridiculous. Survivors required cash bribes or irrelevant sidequests before they'd join you, several had to be saved from their own stupidity, a few somehow hadn't noticed the zombie outbreak around them, and one required you to strip down to your underwear before she'd allow you to take her to safety. The psychopaths were more random than anything else, such as a postal worker, a dude in a giant mascot costume, and a furry with a chainsaw. It abandons the just-vaguely-plausible atmosphere of the first game in favor of sheer forced wackiness, and it weakens the product as a whole.

Dead Rising 3 has a few improvements overall, but it's a lot easier than the two previous games. Guns are actually effective, much moreso than even the best melee weapons, and survivors can easily be made to inflict so much damage that any fight you can bring them to is over almost as soon as they arrive. Nightmare Mode likely fixes these problems, which I've yet to play, but the main mode feels underwhelming compared to the heavy emphasis the first two games placed on racing the clock.

More to the point, DR3 once again emphasizes the wacky. Los Perdidos apparently had the world's largest high school football team and they were all zombified at once while wearing full uniforms and protective gear, so now you have to deal with football zombies all over the place. The bosses include a cringing Chinese stereotype, a binge-eater who attacks you with her own puke and a sharpened fork, a depraved bisexual wearing chaps and a crotch-mounted flamethrower, and a professional female bodybuilder who's willing to kill Nick because he initially mistakes her for a man. It's just random nonsense masquerading as character design or, I suspect, attempts at cultural satire.

There are a few characters I like, such as an old woman with terminal cancer who asks you to take her to a few places in the city before she dies, but all in all, DR3's narrative design is a hot mess. I can't hate the game--I can't hate any game that encourages me to load Roman candles into a hunting crossbow and use them against zombies--but it's structurally weaker than the first two.