Getting deep on Dead Rising

GameCareerGuide.com gives Dead Rising a New Yorker Magazine-style treatment and goes all highbrow in reminiscing about the title. Dead Rising occupies a very strange place in gaming. It was obviously a hit and talks of a sequel were already in the works a week after the game premiered. But, putting aside the tiny-text and the punishing save system, those horrors were eclipsed by Otis and that walkie-talkie.

There's plenty of "drinks at the Palm" moments in the piece. Like you'll have to read all three pages to understand what this quote actually means, "Dead Rising has, as you might put it, a profoundly 'old-school' sensibility -- a pre-Miyamoto one, even. Its goal is to recapture what once made video games entertaining, by getting rid of many of the institutionalized assumptions that have made them boring, or frustrating, or arbitrary."

Highbrow analysis aside, Dead Rising certainly was a game where the concept was in the right place, along with the writing, the heart, the brains -- mmmm, brains. It was the structure of the game that hurt, especially the menacing way you failed for missing one of those picky, picky case files. The GCG piece actually explains that one should think of Dead Rising as a classic game where you should expect to play it through on one life. Fail? Well, then you should start over. Yeah, the piece gets weird, but that's because you have "institutionalized assumptions" about what to expect from a game. Read the piece and then come back to let us know what you think -- we know you will.