Dead Men Walking Here!

Hey, I love a good zombie slaughter-fest as much as anyone else. What could be more fun than beating the crap out of some dudes who shouldn't be able to defend themselves? (Ask my grade-school bully - he knows.) And hey, a game like "Dead Rising" seems like the perfect kind of game for that. Within the first ten, fifteen minutes, I was (literally) mowing down zombies with - yeah, you guessed it - a lawnmower.

And yet, I was feeling distinctly upset about it. Why? Well, for some reason, pressing the control stick left made the mower go right, and vice versa. Plus, you know, sometimes it didn't stop when you let go. By the time I figured that out, I had gotten myself killed. And back to the last save point to try it all again. What should have been a gleefully gory moment was frustrating. And so it goes with "Dead Rising." What should have been a great game turns out to be, well, not.

It's not that the game steals its premise from old-time zombie movies. Zombies attacking humans in a mall - yeah, like I've never heard that one before, but never with a guy who's "covered wars, you know." That would be Frank West, easily one of the least engaging protagonists I can remember in any video game.

But this ain't about the hero. If games were, Halo would have sucked, right? Let's see how this plays out, I tell myself. Turns out, it played out pretty badly. This is due in large part - ah, forget it; this is the reason the game is getting three stars rather than five - to the controls. One thing that sticks out for me is the gunplay. Of course, you'd think getting a gun would be a good thing, but it's too hard to use. Using any weapon requires pressing the X button; aiming a weapon, like a gun, is done with the right trigger. Putting aside the fact that this is not how any good shooter does it, you cannot imagine how infuriating it was when I pressed down the right trigger to aim my not-so-trusty sidearm, only to have Frank the photog aim in a completely different direction than what I wanted, leaving me disoriented and open to zombie bite marks. The gun is a weapon you want to use as little as possible; when I wanted a zombie dead, I grabbed a baseball bat, lead pipe, or nightstick (I do like the nightstick) and button mashed my way to victory. Maybe I wasn't exploring the game's possibilities, but when that's how the basics play, you ask what there is that can turn it around.

Plus, there's the photo aspect, which feels like an even bigger waste of time. I mean, I get it, Frank's a photographer, but come on - am I really going to snap a pic of the oncoming horde when I should be working on running AWAY from them? Not to mention that aiming the camera is a tiresome, difficult process which takes about as much time as aiming the gun. That I could have done without.

I really wanted to love this game - I got it because I kept hearing how awesome it was. All I have to say is, "ugggggggggh uuuuuunnnnnhhhhhh?" Which is, I think, zombie for "what the hell?"