Dead Rising 2

They say when the long-predicted Apocalypse comes everything will change, but we’re not so sure. People have the uncanny ability to put a veil of normalcy on anything, and as long as humans survive we’re certain two things will endure: terrible TV and embarrassing game shows. Something will have to take X-Factor’s place on Saturday night, after all.

You could be a steam train. If you'd just lay down your tracks.

That certainly seems to be what Capcom believes will happen after the zombie Apocalypse in Dead Rising 2. Set in glitzy Fortune City (effectively Las Vegas) several years after the original, it introduces a world where zombies are ‘just another part of life’ and grisly fodder for TV entertainment.

Dead Rising 2 takes the originals tongue-in-cheek humour beyond the pale, throwing new protagonist Chuck Greene into Fortune City’s outrageous ‘Terror Is Reality’ TV game show, (which also forms the basis of its four-player multiplayer), where killing zombie for points is the goal. At present we can only speculate, but it seems likely the action will spill out onto the streets of this fictional city of sin – perhaps thanks to a recently revealed group of zombie rights activists. And with Dead Rising 2 now able to throw thousands of zombies on screen for you to kill in myriad ways, they’ll be plenty for them to protest about.

When we first heard that Canadian developer Blue Castle would be helming Dead Rising 2, we quailed slightly. Capcom’s recent Western collaborations haven’t gone so well, with neither Bionic Commando nor Dark Void meeting expectations or feeling very Capcom-like. And as endearing as Dead Rising was, it was a rather clunky affair, arguably saved by the sheer number of ways you could kill zombies and its bloody exuberance. You’d think Capcom would want to keep Dead Rising 2 closer to the vest.

Up shit creek?

But Blue Castle appears to have a firm handle on the original’s spirit, and thanks to deep Capcom involvement, Dead Rising 2 still feels more Japanese than Western, and promises to expand on all the ideas of the first game. Single-player narrative details are still thin on the ground, (hopefully the Dead Rising 2: Case Zero DLC prologue released before the game will better clue us in) but game show Terror Is Reality focuses on humiliation in slaughter, and Chuck Greene will do some crazy audience-pleasing things in an orgy of hilarious zombie killing.

Not only will you have zombie-killing staples like chainsaws, samurai swords, electric guitars and razored boxing gloves (?!), but combine weapons to create even better ways to dismember. Why simply use a paddle to whack zombies or even a chainsaw when you can combine them to make a ‘paddle-saw’ and wade bloodily through the mob? Chuck is a former motorcross champion, so it only makes sense to give him a bike – albeit one with chain saws on it, creating a ‘slicecycle’ to kill at speed. In fact, why even use regular ‘weapons’ at all when you can grind zombies into the ground with lawn mowers?

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