Dead Rising 2: Case: West Trailer Knows Its Way Around a Zombie or Two

I love me some Dead Rising 2, so I’m looking forward to the game’s upcoming downloadable epilogue Case: West starring the man, the myth, the legend, Frank West of the original Dead Rising. While Dead Rising 2 focused on Chuck Greene’s prodigious skills with duct tape, Case: West will see the return of the photography element that was so important in the first game. The DLC will be co-op enabled, so you and a buddy can pile-drive zombies to your heart’s content. Capcom just released the gameplay trailer for this bad boy, so have a watch:

This Xbox 360 exclusive will hit sometime in December, so keep that wallet ready. Who here is going back into Dead Rising 2 for some zombie slaying action?

User Interfaces: Which Games do Them Right?

Dead Rising 2 UI
The user interface is incredibly important to a person’s gaming experience, yet it often seems that this particular facet of design is either over looked or included as a last-minute thought. Even games with amazing visuals elsewhere have generic menus and head’s up displays, marring their otherwise perfect visages.

As a group, I think that gamers have gotten used to average looking UIs and we usually block them out. However, there are some that stand head and shoulders above the rest. Fable 3 is one of those, the few and the proud. This is a game that eschews the idea of traditional menus entirely and replaces the pause screen with your Sanctuary, essentially a magical bat-cave. There’s no long, arduous trek, or even loading, just a simple press of the “start” button brings you back to your John Cleese-staffed retreat. To me, this is a masterful solution to the multitude of clothing, weapon, spell, and quest menus that cluttered up previous games of the series and similar titles in the genre. I spent a good ten to fifteen minutes looking around seeing what it offered, and I’m anticipating the options that will come along to pimp it out as the game progresses.
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Review: Dead Rising 2

dead rising 2 review

Very few “sandbox” games in this generation give you the option to wear dresses and dye your hair while mixing pie and whiskey into a drink. In fact, only one game in memory allows this, and that is Dead Rising. While Capcom’s zombie-slaughtering game’s claim to fame is both the number of walking dead on the screen and the impossible save system, I liked the game because of the freedom it afforded you. Sure, you could screw yourself pretty bad in the main campaign with the save system, but if you wanted to spend your time in the mall rescuing survivors or killing zombies or even just trying on clothes, then you could do that.

Dead Rising offered a lot of re-playability, but it was still fairly broken. Besides the save system, gamers also had to contend with the sluggish controls, terribly friendly AI and the damn guy from the safe room whose phone calls would somehow paralyze you on the spot in a mall full of zombies. As much as I loved the game, there were some problems with it. Now that we have a sequel, have these issues been addressed? With a new developer, Canada’s Blue Castle Games, jumping on board, is it even going to feel like a Dead Rising game?
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GamerSushi Asks: What Are You Playing?

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

Since I haven’t been playing very many games in the last few days, I thought I’d live vicariously through you guys. Caught up in the middle of a substantial amount of personal writing, I’ve set my gaming aside just a bit. It keeps nipping at my heels, too, but I try and resist as much as possible.

So, if I weren’t writing, here are the games I would be playing: Halo: Reach (Captain Grade 1, bitches), Lego Harry Potter (I refuse to return it until I get an achievement), Breath of Death VII, Dead Rising 2, and Minecraft, although I might cave and check that one out tonight. On my list for the next couple of weeks: Enslaved: Odyssey to the West, and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.

What about you animals? What are you playing?

The First 15 Minutes of Dead Rising 2

One of my favorite games this generation is Dead Rising, the zombie-outbreak in a mall title by Capcom. Dead Rising is famous amongst gamers for its obtuse gameplay style and outdated save system, but I loved the freedom of running around in a dress drinking milkshakes and dying my hair. Oh, and killing zombies too, I guess. Despite the fact that we’re reaching the saturation point with the walking dead, I’m still looking forward to Dead Rising 2, and to celebrate its upcoming release, some kind soul has decided to post the first fifteen minutes of the zombie-slaying sequel up on YouTube for all of us to enjoy. Kick back, relax, and enjoy the opening of Dead Rising 2:

It looks a lot like the original, which is both a good thing and a bad thing. Dead Rising, for all its faults, has a lot of notions associated with it, and it looks like the new developers, Blue Castle Games, nailed the feeling of the first. One thing that might irk me is the amount of load screens, but what are you going to do? So, any thoughts on Dead Rising 2? Are you reserving your judgment, or is this fifteen minute glimpse enough for you to go off of? The game is out next Tuesday in North America and this Friday in Europe.

GamerSushi Asks: Tired of Zombies?

Dead Rising 2

Zombies. They’re everywhere. Swarming, gnawing, gnashing, brain chomping and being generally ugly while they do it. Not only do they ravage the earth like locusts in fiction, they are rending our gaming landscape littered with their undead bodies. Seriously. No matter where you look in video games these days, there will be a zombie horde doing something unseemly, constructed out of pixels and dismembering other pixelated bodies.

While I am generally eager to play Dead Rising 2, which releases next week, I kind of wonder if I’m zombied out on video games these days. If a game is not about zombies, it will inevitably have a mode that is about zombies of some kind. Sure, fighting the horde is fun, but when are we going to move past this? Next generation?

Anyway, I thought I’d throw the question to you guys: are you zombied out? Are you excited to play Dead Rising 2? What are your favorite zombies in video games? Go!

Halo: Reach ViDoc Prepped for Combat Insertion

Microsoft’s X10 event wrapped up yesterday, and what a day it was for casual fans and X-Bots alike. Long-coming psychological thriller Alan Wake actually has a release date, and Crackdown 2 is looking very fine in my opinion. The only real disappointment to come out of X10 was the rough-looking trailer for Dead Rising 2, which tempered my excitement for the zombie-slaying sequel a bit. The best news to come out of X10, though, was the announcement of the date for the Halo: Reach beta! Slated for May 3, this beta may be a bit far away but I’m sure that Bungie has some excellent treats to keep the rabid fans sated for a while, like the following ViDoc.

This documentary, even though it’s full of Alpha footage and concept art, has me ridiculously excited for this game. Honestly, when the video gives you a comparison of the graphical changes of the Marine and assault rifle models from Halo 3 to Reach, it’s enough to warm my jaded heart. What do you guys think? Can Bungie finally pull off a more human Halo story? Who else is getting this game?

Capcom Remains Dour On Western Collaboration

bionic commando
Capcom, why do your employees have to be such downers? First Mega Man and Dead Rising series creator Keiji Inafune says that he believes that Japanese game development is on a serious decline, and now company president Haruhiro Tsujimoto has gone on record saying that Capcom has some trouble working with Western studios. The full quote goes like this:

“Our experience with Bionic Commando has demonstrated the difficulty of outsourcing the development of new title to overseas companies”, he said. “Nevertheless, we cannot develop a sufficient number of titles without using the resources of these companies. This is why we plan to continue using these alliances.”

Mr. Tsujimoto elaborates further, saying that the joint developments between his studio and Western based companies will continue for sequels while Capcom works on new titles. Part of the problem may stem from the fact that having two completely different styles of game development trying to mesh in one game may not work as well as one would hope, but what do you guys think? Is Capcom a little gun-shy after the failure of Bionic Commando, and what does this mean for up-coming titles like Dead Rising 2, which is being developed by Vancouver, Canada based Blue Castle Games?

Source: Kotaku

Capcom’s Inafune Gets Sour at TGS

With the Tokyo Game Show wrapping up, it’s a time for all the games journalists of the world to remember the awesome things they’ve seen, like Peace Walker and everything Final Fantasy. For others, it’s a time to bemoan the fall of the Japanese game industry. One such sour-puss is Capcom’s Keiji Inafune, creator of Mega Man and my personal favorite, Dead Rising.

Where others looked around the TGS show floor and saw hope for Japan’s flagging creative teams, Inafune saw only despair and darkness. Quoth the raven:

“Personally when I looked around [at] all the different games at the TGS floor, I said, ‘Man, Japan is over. We’re done. Our game industry is finished.'”

Harsh words, Mr. Inafune. While the games industry has kind of turned on its heel in the last decade or so, being predominantly a Western enterprise, I don’t really think that Japan is “finished”. Sure, they’re hitting a rough patch, but things will turn around. Right?

Of course, Inafune shouldn’t be taken at face value: he left Capcom out of the list of dismal failures of TGS ’09, and as Destructoid pointed out, avoided mentioning the irony of handing off Dead Rising 2 to a Western company (Canada-based Blue Castle Games).

The decline of the Japanese game industry has been a hot button issue for a while, but I think this is the first time that anyone from inside the the industry has come out and said that we’re looking at the end. What do you guys think? Is Mr. Inafune exaggerating, or will we see the end of Japanese-made games in our lifetime?

Source: 1up

Dead Rising 2 Confirmed!

dr2It seems that the mysterious viral Dead Rising 2 trailer from the other day was actually the real deal. As of yesterday, Capcom officially unleashed the news that the sequel to the popular zombie brawler will be dropping for the PC, PS3 and XBox 360.

The second game takes place in Fortune City, a spoof of modern day Las Vegas, and from some of the ludicrously gorgeous screenshots, it looks like you will take to killing zombies in all kinds of crazy ways, including roulette tables, slot machines, and whatever else the new protagonist can get his hands on. Apparently, it’s set around 7 years after the first game, and the zombie outbreak has recurred in several cities beyond the humble town of Willamette.

Personally, I can’t wait to get my hands on this game. I think if they fix some of the save/replay options (the first game only allowed one save file and skipped the story if you were late), then itll be a surefire winner.

Who’s excited about this? Did anyone play the first game?

Source- Kotaku