Dead Rising - Fixing What's Wrong With Games!
Once again, GSW sister site Game Career Guide has been brave and let Eric-Jon Waugh out of his fenced-off area to analyze, from a game design point of view, a recent and interesting video game.
This time, he takes the lawnmower to Capcom's Xbox 360 exclusive Dead Rising, and within which he calls the game "...the self-appointed answer to everything wrong with videogames as they are now."
He sets the scene rather beautifully, too: "Somewhere between note-sharing exercises like the Game Developers Conference and the growing impact of games like Grand Theft Auto and Gears of War on the Japanese charts, goaded on by the phenomenon known as "gamer drift", in which existing players stop playing and no new players can be found, Western games have slowly begun to resume their aborted influence on Japanese design - just as Japanese design has influenced the West since Nishikado's Breakout-tile Invaders first began to boop down from orbit."
He then neatly files Dead Rising in an interesting place: "At its core what Grand Theft Auto wants is to recapture the glory of Asteroids and Centipede - the old American school, from before Atari fell off a cliff and the PC scene got weird... Dead Rising is that same idea, plus structure. It completes the picture by dragging GTA back into Ed Logg territory, and turning it into the modern equivalent of an Atari Games battle of attrition. Namely, sort of, Gauntlet." Waugh thing, I think I love you.
Comments
So, a game that has a handful of glaring flaws in design and execution is the new face of Japanese gaming? Well, that just super, I wish Capon all the luck in the world with that sort of design philosophy.
At some point folks merely selling well should not be enough to place a game on a pedestal for admiration. Holding Dead Rising or Loast Planet up as good games is like calling Chef Boyardee the "new face" if Italian cuisine because they sell a billion cans each day.
Posted by: Linc | May 22, 2007 4:35 PM
God damn Orson Welles for cutting back and forth like that. What the hell is the movie even supposed to be about? And what kind of an ending is that? Why are we supposed to care about a sled?!
Posted by: Eric-Jon Rossel Waugh | May 22, 2007 5:24 PM
Linc, translated: "It's not designed like all the other games we see these days, so something must be wrong with it!"
(Yeah, I'm feelin' antsy tonight.)
Posted by: John H. | May 22, 2007 6:14 PM
Interesting write-up over Game Career Guide. Only shows that I definitely don't read enough if I'm still depending on GSW to find these for me!
Bring more of this sort of article on... I say let Mr. Waugh out of his fenced area more often if this is what comes out of doing so.
Posted by: arne | May 23, 2007 12:52 AM
Coincedence or not. I started playing DR again this week after half a year. I didn't totally get it the first time. But now I'm totally hooked. It's just a playground for experimentation and finding new stuff. I saw stuff the second time through I totally missed the first time (the vietnam vet, the snipers) and the achievements actually make you experiment with the game itself rather than tack them on for the sake of it.
The only real flaws are the forced time structure (waiting is never fun) and the unreadable text. But for a fisrt time vision it's quite refershing.
Posted by: Lex | May 23, 2007 1:59 AM
The walkie-talkie annoyance isn't the only barrier to playing a game of simple survival. If you miss out on a big scoop, sure you can continue to play, but the "game over?" screen you get is a disheartening barrier. And who's going to want to do the big scoop missions when they include such terrible "boss" encounters that often only reward you with a death that feels cheated.
I could probably even be convinced that the all-too-dark nighttime (absolutely unplayable on a DLP TV with sunlight coming through the windows, and extremely difficult otherwise) enhances the mood, but the rest of the problems are just too annoying for many of us to play this otherwise great game, and no sarcastic cries of "philistine!" will convince us otherwise.
Posted by: dmauro | May 23, 2007 9:10 AM
Wait, I just realized.
The general design of Dead Rising HAS been seen before. It was done in The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, right down to the three day structure!
It is true that it isn't a Grand Theft Auto kind of world, and the idea isn't to survive three days but do what you can during that time then reset the clock, but other than that, it's pretty close.
Amazed I didn't think of it sooner.
Posted by: John H. | May 23, 2007 1:01 PM