The first Dead Rising was a stand out game for many reasons. Not only was it a madcap, tongue in cheek adventure, which saw you trapped in a shopping centre, trying to survive for 72 hours with thousands upon thousands of zombies for company, but it was also, well, pretty damn hard - mainly because of its leveling system, which basically meant that when you started the game, you set out to fail from the beginning - at least initially.
Every time you died playing Dead Rising, you had to start from the beginning again - entering the shopping centre on day one, as you attempted to survive for the 24 hours. However, while the rest of the game reset when you died, your character's progression (you levelled up your abilities by defeating enemies in combat, and taking photos, as strange as it sounds).
This meant that if you wanted to play the game through in one go, it was nigh on impossible, and it was much easier to just fight through the zombies until you died, and then start again with a much stronger character, resulting in most players playing the first day repeatedly in order to level the game's hero, photo journalist-of-few-words Frank West up to a decent strength.
Yes, that's a tiger. Yes, that's dynamite strapped to Chuck's arm. We're not entirely sure how this is going to work out.
But while that initial difficulty might still be there, in a recent interview Capcom's Global Head of Production Keiji Inafune tried to explain how they've made it slightly more accessible. With multiple save slots, and a new co-op mode to boot, hopefully the new, improved learning curve will make the game even easier for newcomers to get into.
Of course, there are several other aspects being carried over from the original Dead Rising - not least of which is the "social" aspect of the game - which basically involves making getting the best ending so convoluted, you have to ask your friends to try and figure out the best way of doing it.
In the first game, one of the sub-objectives was to rescue as many people from the mall as possible. While you were often alerted to their presence by Otis (who told you where the survivors were), there were others that you were only able to find if you just so happened to be in the right place at the right time. So if you wanted to save the maximum number of people, you had to either use some kind of guide to let you know where you should be and when, or tap into your network of friends who owned the game.
This woman acts as the new Otis, she'll phone you up at inopportune moments and get angry when you don't pick up.
Inafune said that this social aspect of having to get information off the internet to help you finish the game with all the survivors (and indeed get the perfect ending, which required you to do a bit of backtracking before heading to the helipad for a pickup) was "one of the more attractive points to the game", but this time you hopefully won't need to use the internet as much, as you can just invite another player into your game to give you a hand when you get stuck.
Dead Rising 2 comes out on the 1st of October, and the inclusion of multiple save slots and a co-op mode means that it'll be even easier for newcomers to the series to get the hang of it. Check back then for our full review.
