No review this week.

Dead Rising (Xbox 360)

This is “Dawn of the Dead: The Video Game”, so much so that they had to include a disclaimer on the front disavowing any connection to George Romero or his iconic zombie movie. In it, you play Frank, a photographer who goes to Willamette Mall (the apocalypse starts in Oregon, I guess?) to investigate the strange goings-on. And what’s going on? Zombies, of course.

So, here you are in survival horror as only the 7th generation of video game consoles can produce. Once the game starts going, you basically have to use whatever items (and there are a lot of them) you can find in the mall to slog through hordes of zombies, rescue survivors in the mall, and advance the plot. And it’s pretty darn fun… Although not at first. You see, you have to level up in order to walk faster than a geriatric candidate for hip replacement, to have more than four measly bars of health (getting grabbed by a zombie will more often than not drain at least two of them), and to have kickin’ hand-to-hand combat skills so you won’t immediately die when your only weapon breaks.

Oh yes, your weapons break. That’s kind of annoying, but I guess that’s what happens when the American manufacturing base gets shipped over to China. There also are a lot of weapons you can pick up that are pretty much useless. Unless you find the idea of killing zombies with an electric guitar amusing (which, since they squeal guitar riffs when you connect, it is, kind of), you’ll be pretty much sticking with stuff like knives, chainsaws, mannequin torsos (they’re deadly, don’t ask me why) and, in the later parts of the game, machine guns. The good news is if you die – and in the early stages of the game, you will die a lot – you can start the game over with all of your experience intact.

As with all good monster movies, you will find out that the real monster is man. From time to time, you’ll have to take down various psychopathic non-zombified humans that are up to no good. Again, early on this is annoying as hell, because you’ll probably be stuck with a peashooter of a pistol that takes maybe one pixel of health off with each shot. And the game, depending on how much of the main story tasks you complete, has a multitude of different endings to enjoy.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention – the game is 72 in-game hours long, or 6 hours of gameplay. At night, the zombies become more dangerous, and all of your main and side quests occur at certain points of said 72 hours. It’s an interesting way to present the game, but it’s kind of a shame that there isn’t a sandbox mode (not counting the infinite survival mode where your health constantly ticks down) where you can just mess around.

So there you have it. It’s survival horror with not-so-bad controls and interesting gameplay. I’m kind of annoyed that the mall is somewhat unrealistic – how many malls have a big park in the middle? And where are the department stores? But the rest of the game is good, although you have to be patient at first. Also, if you’re into that kind of thing, you can run around in a dress and Mega Man helmet.

4 out of 5

Prince of Persia (Xbox 360)

There are a few things that I generally dislike in video games. (I know, only a few?) Prince of Persia aptly summarizes three of them:

1. Trial-and-error gameplay. There are few things more frustrating to me than having to repeat sections of a game over and over because there is only one solution, which must be perfectly executed. This is the basis for Prince of Persia's gameplay, in which you have to parkour yourself around a bunch of identical ruined vaguely-Middle Eastern vistas assisted by your magical princess friend Elika. Now, in the Sands of Time trilogy, you could rewind when you made a mistake back so you could retry from where you screwed up. Not so here. Instead, Elika rescues you, but you have to start back at the last bit of solid ground, so in extended sequences, one screwup will cause you to repeat it over and over.

2. Blocking-based combat. I don't enjoy combat that involves you standing there holding the block button until the enemy combatant finishes his attack, at which point you attempt to whittle down their health by a few bars, then start over. It's long, frustrating, and generally not fun. Compounding this is the many enemies who can enter a state where they are only affected by a certain type of attack (grab or magic, depending; neither are as useful as the sword).

3. Idiotic writing. In this game, the main character is not a prince. He's just some kind of thief who cracks wise constantly like a brain-dead action movie star, and shocker of shockers, his companion is an icy high-born princess. Can they put aside their differences to save the world, and maybe even fall in love? Original plot, huh?

Well, the game's not unplayable; there are parts that are fun to play, but like Mirror's Edge that amounts to only a fraction of the total time. Most of the time will be spent swearing at the non-Prince to do what you tell him to, or at the ridiculously-cumbersome and aggravating boss battles.

2 out of 5

Mega Man 9 (Xbox Live Arcade)

You can’t go home again.

Mega Man 9 is a retro platformer with 8 bit graphics and it’s bad. It would be one thing if it were a challenging game, but this game is sadistic. It’s like the developers played a Mega Man game for about five minutes and thought, “hmm, this is okay, but it needs death spikes everywhere”. It’s ridiculous. Not helping matters is the fact that the Xbox 360 controller, while superior in many respects to the NES controller, does not have the sensitivity you need to perform the precisely-timed jumps this game constantly demands of you. I can’t count how many times I careened off a ledge into the abyss because the jump button didn’t respond at the correct time. At least, until I got fed up with the game and deleted it. Then I tried it again a week or two later, and it took me about 20 minutes to give up again.

Basically, this game is for old-school obsessives and masochists only. It looks cool in a retro 80s kind of way, but it’s just not fun. You know, the reason we liked Mega Mans 1-4 and X. I can count two examples of bringing retro gaming into the 21st century actually being a success: Pac-man Championship Edition and Bionic Commando Rearmed. Every other game has been boring, frustrating, or uninteresting after the first five minutes.

1 out of 5