The first Dead Rising was one of Capcom's initial truly next-gen HD offerings, and, not to make you feel too old or anything, but that was 18 years ago.
Dead Rising sounds surprisingly modern, definitely a game that would have benefited from coming out after roguelites got big. Not into zombie games but I like the design ethos at play here.
It at least feels so different than other zombie games, even Capcom's other ones, because instead of ramping up to tougher and tougher variants a la Resident Evil and mutating into bioweapons and such it's just like. Hey this place is just crawling with zombies. Any zombie can kill you if you aren't careful, so, work around that.
There's one other thing that made Dead Rising such a big deal at the time, IMO, and that's the timing. It landed in the quiet summer months inside the Xbox 360's first year. There weren't a lot of proper next-gen games; there were a few, for sure, like Oblivion (and, my god, Fight Night Round 3 was so pretty) but the generation was still finding its feet. And if I recall correctly, there wasn't a huge amount of hype around Dead Rising until relatively late on: it took until final preview copies came out for the word to get out that this was more than a mindless zombie beat-em-up.
Dead Rising is a special game for all the reasons you mentioned. But I'll always remember it because of the reasons I mentioned: it felt like it came out of nowhere, at a quiet time of the year, to be one of the first games to really sell me on what the Xbox 360 generation was all about.
That's a great point! I didn't get a 360 until early 2008, so I was already kind of in the middle of it by then, but still made a point of grabbing this game because everything about it still stood out as so different.
Dead Rising sounds surprisingly modern, definitely a game that would have benefited from coming out after roguelites got big. Not into zombie games but I like the design ethos at play here.
It at least feels so different than other zombie games, even Capcom's other ones, because instead of ramping up to tougher and tougher variants a la Resident Evil and mutating into bioweapons and such it's just like. Hey this place is just crawling with zombies. Any zombie can kill you if you aren't careful, so, work around that.
Fantastic write-up!
There's one other thing that made Dead Rising such a big deal at the time, IMO, and that's the timing. It landed in the quiet summer months inside the Xbox 360's first year. There weren't a lot of proper next-gen games; there were a few, for sure, like Oblivion (and, my god, Fight Night Round 3 was so pretty) but the generation was still finding its feet. And if I recall correctly, there wasn't a huge amount of hype around Dead Rising until relatively late on: it took until final preview copies came out for the word to get out that this was more than a mindless zombie beat-em-up.
Dead Rising is a special game for all the reasons you mentioned. But I'll always remember it because of the reasons I mentioned: it felt like it came out of nowhere, at a quiet time of the year, to be one of the first games to really sell me on what the Xbox 360 generation was all about.
That's a great point! I didn't get a 360 until early 2008, so I was already kind of in the middle of it by then, but still made a point of grabbing this game because everything about it still stood out as so different.