Dead Rising

[John Beaulieu]

please use the spoiler tags - this game is a month off for those with PAL consoles, so lets not spoil it for them

cheers

[Concept]

To be fair, the spoiler in question is featured in a recent marketplace trailer (which some may have not seen admittedly).

Um. Yeah. Contradiction ahoy.

[John Beaulieu]

to be fair, it takes 2 seconds to use the spoiler tags before pressing the submit post button (highlight the text you want to hide and press the little blue S)

Its all about being considerate to others....

[Kotatsu Neko]

to be fair, it takes 2 seconds to use the spoiler tags before pressing the submit post button (highlight the text you want to hide and press the little blue S)

Its all about being considerate to others....

This is first play though, so should be for those playing the game now... not waiting for it's release.

That aside, the case system is really messing with my brain now. Cases must be completed in a certain order or it's automatic game over. I just had a situation where I beat a boss, only to get game over as evidently I had to do something else before beating him....

It's not very clear and does somewhat show Capcom are not terribly experienced with these free roaming type game designs.

[Kotatsu Neko]

Can't you just climb up on a stall or something to answer?

Yeah you could if there's something close by, but there often isn't.

He even calls during boss battles....! And doesn't give up when you don't answer, just keeps on calling and calling.

[Geezer]

I was thinking, maybe we should have 2 first play threads? One for the demo and one for the full game

[Kotatsu Neko]

This game sure is punishing. Just got sent back 2 hours again due to the vast gaps between save points.

I have a new favourite weapon though -

->Open Spoiler<-

the queen parasite. Crack her open and the head of every zombie close by explodes!

My death this time was really rather unfair -

->Open Spoiler<-

naked with no weapons except for a small set of steps and against 30-40 knife weidling religious nuts. Oh and with 1 bar of health and no food...!

[taurusnipple]

The time limit is fast tiresome too. In between working out the story missions your left very little time to sort out rescuing/psychos. I was left 1 hour between missions. I can't do anything with that!

Again, the save system is so flawed. It would have been so easy to just restart from your last load screen after you died.. Saves on frustration and LOTS of backtracking. Oh, you only have one save file. So say you rescue some survivors and then save at a bog, in order to continue the story you have to be back at a certain place at the right time. If you've not left enough time to get there your shafted. You'd have to restart the entire game.

Anybody mentioned the attract screen yet? Leave it to see a movie intro. I was left sickened by it.

[Bleeders]

If I'm being honest the game is a bit of a mess tbh... it's great finding new weapons and different ways of killing zombies et cetra, but as KN remarked, the game isn't entirely clear what you need to be doing next, which in turn isn't helped by the flawed save system.

I think levelling-up Franks PP ability is open to abuse in the early going as well. I got

->Open Spoiler<-

10,000 PP for the part where Jeff and Natalie were re-united,

I was killed in the mall and had to do it again, but I kept my current statistics.

Despite my negativity, it is an extremely fun game to play, mowing zombies down with a shopping trolley has never been so much fun; good game hampered by the cack-handedness of the story and save systems.

EDIT - Okay, the **** save system is really, really grating now as is the free-roaming targetting system, managed to do

->Open Spoiler<-

Carlito in the pitch black after carefully navigating the field whilst the 3 prison break blokes in the jeep were trying to mow me down

. It's getting to the point where I can't actually be bothered to play it at the moment.

[John Beaulieu]

Just had my first quick go, and suffered my first death

->Open Spoiler<-

by the convicts in the hummer with the machine gun

- tbh its a bit overwhelming with the amount of scoops that the game throws at you early on, had 4 or 5 on the go, alongside the rescue Brad bit from the demo.

Weird how the camera and the weapon have different aiming speeds - the camera is way too sensitive, whilst weapons are way too slow - going to mess around with the options and hope I find the ideal setting for both.

->Open Spoiler<-

The very start of the game (the opening movie) reminded me of Resident Evil (helicopter going over a mountain rather than forest but you get the gist) and the bit before you get to the Mall puts the copter rides in GRAW to shame - the town looks massive, would be good if we could visit it all rather than just the surrounding area of the mall but I expect that will come in Dead Rising 2 (similar to how Resi Evil moved from the mansion/complex to Raccoon City in RE2 and onwards).

Early impressions are good - though I already knew that from my brief time with the demo.

[Jebus]

I noticed people said that if you fail a mission it's pretty much game over?

So, if you fail a mission can you just carry on roaming and slaughtering? But you'd get NO missions so it'd pretty much be game over unless you're happy just slaughtering forever?

That seems poor if it's the case.

I'm really gutted about what I'm hearing, the demo was supreme...surely they can't have ****ed it up that much?

[John Beaulieu]

You have Cases and you have Scoops - fail a Case and i think its story over, fail a Scoop and you can carry on. If you want to just go for the story then just cover all the Cases, whereas if you want to find everything you will need to do the Scoops as well.

[Jebus]

So (and sorry if I'm being slow but this all seems so convuluted for no reason) if you fail a case, what happens? Game over and start over from last save? If so, how hard are the cases?

It seems they took the most free roaming game they could find and added a **** load of restrictions, game overs and very few save points which will really take away from the quality of the title?

[John Beaulieu]

save points are all over the place - save slots are limited to 1 per game, but that just comes across as a gameplay incentive, continue the game from where you are with a bare bones Frank or start from the beginning with souped up Frank.

if you fail a case then you can't progress the story mode - how this is different from any other action adventure title in which you fail to complete a story based objective is beyond me - Scoops are side-missions, you complete them if you want to, failure to do so will not result in game over (or at least i don't think it will). For example,

->Open Spoiler<-

the scoops i have been given upto now have mostly been to rescue NPC's, fail to do so and they get bitten, and join the zombie horde.

. Completing scoops will give you PP, possibly raise your Level or give you special moves etc (they can also give an insight into the story - flesh out the main storymode etc).

[Jebus]

how this is different from any other action adventure title in which you fail to complete a story based objective is beyond me

Indeed, which is why I was trying to clear it up in my own mind! The only thing that seemed annoying is that IF you fail a case file you can lose hours of play.

The save points are toilets aren't they? Surely they are everywhere, travelling to and from areas there must be a save point every time? This is what I'm not understanding about people's current complaints about the game. If you could save whenever you want it would make the game very very easy.

So you don't HAVE to start from a previous save if you fail a case/die? You can actually play on from the point you died, but with a level 1/starter frank? That's not nearly as harsh as it sounds. You can either carry on and level back up, or you can go back to your save and keep your levelled up frank?

Although yes, it definitely should have an autosave after each case I feel.