What's wrong with Dead Rising?

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Author: Matthew Keast
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One site presents Dead Rising as the solution to what's wrong with games, but this blogger heartily and respectfully disagrees

There's more frustrating save moments than zombies on the screen.

I often find myself not seeing eye-to-eye with the majority opinion on a lot of the most touted games. Usually it's not that I think said games suck, but rather they are marred by serious flaws. Usually I don't think these flaws break the games, but rather knock these crowned titles off their pedestals (in my mind). I thought God of War was merely very good, not great, as I found the combat to be fairly repetitive and tiresome after a while. I loved most of Shadow of the Colossus, but also hated its unreasonable punishments for making a mistake. I never gave Halo 1 or 2 a fair shake because nothing I saw impressed me, although the Halo 3 beta footage makes me want to finally go where everyone has gone before.

Don't get me wrongall of those games are very good games. I acknowledge that Halo 1 and 2 must be pretty good if so many freaked out so much about them. I will get around to GoW 2, and I would play a Shadow sequel in a heartbeat. But these days, not being a kid with unlimited free time and patience, when a game wastes my time, it gets old really, really fast.

And so we come to Dead Rising. In the GameSetwatch post, they provide a few quotes from the Game Career Guide article. When I read that Dead Rising is portrayed as a "solution" to game problems, my ears perked up (and my blood began to heatnot at the writers of the post and article, but at Dead Rising itself). I found a quote in the original article that brings up what I was thinking about:

...it's a game that's meant to be replayed - over and over. Like a ghost from the arcade, or at least a time before memory cards, the player is meant to want to try again, to play from the beginning whenever the whim strikes, rather than beat the thing once and place it back on the shelf to gather dust. Make the game digestible enough, and the player can easily get the point. Make it visceral enough, and the player will want to try again. Make it nuanced enough, and the player will find a new variation on the point every time he plays. In other words, the game will always be uniquely rewarding to play. If videogames are to survive, Inafune is saying, the relationship must pay off over time rather than in a short, one-way spurt.

The experience I had playing Dead Rising amounted to a whole lot of joy ripped from my brain by this "replay from the beginning" system. I was playing a copy from GameFly that did not come with a manual. No game should ever depend on a manual. Everything that's in the manual should be provided as info somewhere in the game. Well, I had no idea that this game was meant to be "replayed." I started the game, didn't save at first (didn't know where to save), died, and was confused when I started from the beginning again. No big deal. I actually thought it was a bug because when I did save later and died, I started from my save point.

I made it probably halfway through the game and wanted to quit for the day. I went into a bathroom and chose "Save and Quit." In every other game known to human beings, this means you will start again where you saved it. I was astonished when I loaded the game the next day and it started at the beginning. I was furious. The game did not sufficiently warn me what would happen when I saved. What a horribly, horribly broken "system."

If you're going to make a system like this, you need to inform the player, very clearly, what they are getting into and how it works. And you should not force the player to needlessly do the same crap over and over again. Especially when many won't find the gameplay nearly as compelling as the above quote wants it to be. I wanted to do exactly what is supposedly "wrong" with games todayI wanted to play it for six hours and set it aside. To me it wasn't worth playing more than that, and I wanted to unlock the story.

Dead Rising represents to me the worst of what is wrong with games today: wasting the player's time. I loved much of the gameI loved the atmosphere, the feeling of overwhelming masses of zombies, and I enjoyed much of the gameplay. But the overall system was outright broken, and it ruined the experience for me. Dead Rising should be taught in game design classes as an example of not only How to Make a Game Compelling, but also What Not To Do With Your Save System.

Hey, thanks: GameSetwatch.

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