Pulazumaaaa!
You may recall that in October I said of Dead Rising
As it stands, I don’t feel like playing Dead Rising ever again.
Times change. People change. The moment that I finished Dead Rising I lent it to a friend. The moment he gave it back, in late January, I played it through again. Twice. The moment I finished it the first time on my repeat play (from level 1, because I figured out how to do that), I played it again on my level 50 save.
Since then I’ve played it through, what, five or six times? That may be an exaggeration, I don’t know; the impetus for my recent spate of play throughs was the introduction of an HD TV to my home. Now I can actually read the text rather than simply make it up!
It’s probably no surprise to a lot of 360 users that the achievement system is a stroke of genius for replayability, if they feel like achievements you could be bothered achieving. Dead Rising makes you feel like a king amongst zombies.
I am now thoroughly convinced that I am a king amongst zombies.
Yes, my good sirs, I have saved fifty plus survivors in one run and, thanks to My Name is Earl and picture-in-picture, I achieved zombie genocider. Now I can shoot things like a true Megaman.
I’m not sure why I came back to my old friend Dead Rising, with whom I had parted on bad terms. It’s the sort of game that you master; the sort that you just keep on playing because you’re so dang good at it. Unlike something like Oblivion, you can get harder, better, stronger, faster, but the zombies and psychopaths stay as they ever were. Unfortunately, the survivors are permanently stupid, running into walls and whatever, but if you know all of the mall’s secrets, then you can outfit them well enough to make them not suck to hard. If you’re good enough, you can save every last one of them without compromising the storyline.
This is just like the olden days of video games, when the game content was so limited that you had to keep on playing and improving on your style for the benefit of … well, who exactly I don’t know. In my personal experience, video gaming has become so broad that you can’t bring your friends around to say “hay check out what I did in this game” or tell them about it at “school” the next day. Kids still go to school, right?
I’d say that the days when you could lie about having done something in a game are done, too, thanks to the internet, but rumours and scuttlebutt are really easy to be perpetuated amongst the stupider classes, I suppose (“Hay guys Luigi is total in Super Mario 64 if you stab yourself in the eyes and jump forty seven times on Bowser’s shell.” This does not explain how the N64 accepts the knife-eye interface and I’m lucky that I was able to worm my way to the top of the transplant list).
Basically, in the last thirty years (only 21 of which I have been a party to), many video games have remained exactly the same: exercises in rote learning! The only difference is now you can kill in excess of 53,594 zombies and then tell everyone on the internet how great you are.
Because believe me, I am freaking magnificent.
Update: I have been informed that Luigi was in Super Mario 64, and unlockable by the method I described above, only I couldn’t see him on account of my eyes being stabbed. I apologise to the heroes who have managed to achieve such a feat.
