Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop
Critical malling?
Chop Till You Drop has even found time within the transition for a few little improvements: the tiny text of the original is now fixed (obviously), and the unexpectedly hardcore single-slot save system, which some people liked, but many more hated, has been replaced with multiple slots and regular post-mission saving, meaning you no longer have to factor in lengthy trips to the toilet as you head out on brain-smashing business. The new enemy types are a mixed blessing, however: while there's a lasting pleasure in offing a poodle or a parrot, they're purposefully awkward to melee, breaking up Dead Rising's charmingly democratic pummelling by asking you to fight in two conflicting styles at once.
For every new addition, in fact, Chop Till You Drop has a habit of taking something away. For starters, you're now a photojournalist who can no longer take photos - a cut presumably imposed by system limitations, but which nevertheless removes one of the most creative risk/reward time-wasters of the 360 offering. More importantly, Dead Rising's central selling point - the bizarre range of weapons available - has been quietly scaled down, too, forcing a new emphasis on gunplay: a strange decision, as it was never shooting at zombies that made the original game so much fun. Add to that a skittish directional arrow which, like a bad case of glue ear, you'll eventually find you can live with even if you know you'll never actually enjoy it, and an increased incidence of loading screens, and the damage done in squeezing the game into its new home starts to become obvious.
And while nobody expected a Wii game to graphically compete with its 360 sibling, there's a lingering sense of the rush-job to Chop Till You Drop's visuals: the plot may tell you it's September 2006, but the graphics are waving to you from the dreamy realms of 2001, with blurry textures, nasty FMV cut-scenes, and enemies who clip through scenery a little too regularly.
And yet, despite such irritations, much like Domino's Pizza and the repossession industry, the passage of time has made Dead Rising an unlikely beneficiary of the looming worldwide depression, as Capcom's Big Gulp-sized satire on capitalism-turned-rancid is given an unnervingly sharp aftertaste. Even if unwitting social commentary seems like a stretch too far for a game which features a deranged clown who juggles twin chainsaws, you're still left with an experience that's primarily concerned with finding the right kind of shiny lawnmower with which to chop up a generous parade of slack-jawed morons, and that can hardly be a bad thing.
That lingering strength of the premise is why, as with so many Wii ports, Dead Rising almost deserves two verdicts. As a standalone experience, it's shambling but lovable: two parts quirkiness to one part tedium. Compare it to the original, however, and it's hard to escape the fact that a once-brilliant game has been put through a mangler. Somewhere along the way, Capcom's zombie apocalypse has been bludgeoned into a zombie compromise, and, unless you really like poodles, the Wii offering can't really be said to add anything that the 360 version was lacking. For a game about shopping then, it's a strange, thematically-appropriate kind of punch-line to discover that Chop Till You Drop simply doesn't have that many persuasive reasons for most people to go out and buy it.