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Review

The Longest Day (of the Dead) (except it’s Dawn) (etc)

by J Nash (December 24th, 2010 at 9:37 pm) UPDATED

Game: Dead Rising. Publisher: Capcom. Authors: Capcom (original game), Digital Media Lab (iThing version). Supports Gamecentre. Price: £1.19/€1,59/$1.99 (sale; usually £2.39/€2,99/$3.99). Buy the game.

Dead Rising is the shoddiest item I’ve seen on the iThing that doesn’t include the credit, “Written by Apple.” It’s buggy, it slows down outside, the camera likes to hide what you’re hitting, every door heralds around eight seconds of loading and the save structure hates you so much that I’ll have to explain it in a separate section with pictures. And that’s even before you reach the design, with dozens of novelty weapons and maybe three that are any good, missions that repeat so often that you’re embarrassed and

OH FOR GOODNESS’ SAKE J NASH JUST GET ON WITH THE REVIEW AND THE INEVITABLE SURPRISE TWIST DOUBLE-BLUFF REVERSE ENDING (OR IS IT).

I’ve never played Dead Rising and this isn’t it. In a sitcom reference to the earliest circling of the iThing by big names, Capcom have clearly said, “Pish-tush, Bensonishi — our game would never fit on this machine; it is physically too small for the pixels” (despite, for example, games like this) and the horribly officially titled Dead Rising Mobile has been chopped back and back until the porters ran out of interest and/or died.

Out goes everything to do with survivors, for example; you’re alone in the shops forever, except that tiny facial icons keep sending you on ludicrously inconsequential missions. The map itself is crudely lopped, with bits you can never reach. Zomb numbers are scaled back (confusingly, by design, because many mishes steeply inflate the mobs). You don’t drive anything, which I distinctly recall everyone hating in the original game, so phew.

In short, Tiny Dead Rising is distilled to (a) hitting zombs, while (b) fetching stupid prizes for off-screen idiots, but (c) isn’t as much fun as that sounds.

Having now finished the game (which took about a week FOR YOU), my icy judgment is that the designers concentrated on all the wrong things. For example, here’s a giant building with shops and nooks and a big park, and you’re penalised for exploring.

It must have sounded fine on the blackboard: the longer you go without eating in the game, the hungrier you become until eventually you die. (If your tum’s empty, your health depletes by the second.) The trouble is twofold: the save structure is terrible AS WE SHALL SEE; and food is finite. You can force guns to reappear by nipping out of a door then back in so the area reloads, but food only rolls over at 4am. There are chunks of the map without any food at all, and it might be rubbish food anyway (eg, a bruised cabbage isn’t as nutritious as milk), and obviously you’re losing energy from pesky zomb attacks.

(And, berkishly, from bonus skills. As you level up, you gain “books” which provide contextual power-ups, eg wrestlingly picking up a stunned zomb and whirling them round by their ankles to crackerjack a tightening mob. Except using a skill increases your hunger, so you stick to the guns again.)

This means that you can never take off the training wheels and just gallumph around to see what you can turn up for the nosy fun of rummaging; you’re always painfully conscious that a wrong turn can be fatal. And, in fact, that’s exactly what happened to me. As the game progresses you unlock a couple of shortcut doors, but the only new section you find is the DIY Shop. Immediately I explored the DIY Shop. The DIY Shop has no food. I became trapped in the DIY Shop and died.

Anticipating your question, yes, you can carry food with you. This takes up valuable inventory space needed for guns and thing-hitting things, because all the guns and thing-hitting things run out of ammo or break.

(Anticipating your particularly crafty question, yes, you can carry food to another place, making a central bank next to, say, a save point. Except the game doesn’t track dropped objects at all: the moment you leave the “live” area, or pass a door, or save, your stockpiled tuck vanishes. Better yet it’s gone from the original location too, until the next 4am rollover. In an exciting bit? Quick, wait until morning.)

It’s a litany of hindrances bafflingly ill-suited to a game about running over zombs with a lawnmower; and the worst bit is that you can’t prevail. You do indeed level up (more health, an ungrumbly tum, etc) but, in a final stroke of idiot inspiration, so do the zombs. Proportionally, you’re never better off; you may gain an extra slot so can carry an apple or something, but now zombs are shrugging off your sword swings and getting up three times in a row from crowd-bursting gunblasts, so you still can’t afford to demilitarise your pockets.

(As an aside, I understand Dead Rising 2 fixes quite a lot of this, including the save structure WE SHALL EXAMINE LATER. Tiny Dead Rising obviously post-dates the original game and sequel design and, as we know, is not a photocopy. I therefore have no idea why the errors Capcom themselves have acknowledged remain in the iThing version, except that it’s because Capcom hate you as much as Apple do.)

These misguided decisions infest the game. There are dozens of ways to kill zombs, all of which you’ll use once before returning to stuffing your trousers with the easily found and unfussily effective axe, sword, golden shotgun (a prize more or less for pressing Start), riot gun and, if there’s no chainsaw around, Magnum — the vitally important thing in Tiny Dead Rising is not to kill a zomb, but to clear your path.

Here’s pretty much the obvious months of weapon dev at Capcom in a nutshell: there’s a pavement-sized power drill that spectacularly impales the nearest zomb in front of you, spins them like a windmill sail then hurls them across the room skittling aligned mobs, during which lengthy effect all the zombs not in front of you kick you to death with impunity. Even if you weren’t beaten up for exploring, why bother?

(The zombs themselves are marvellous. They shuffle, lope, lunge, fall over themselves and can bite, miss, forget you’re there and happily bobble beside you until their suspicions are once more tinkled. Unless a mission’s cheatily mobbing a goal again, you can trot around the map mostly by dodging or aiming for the thinned clumps or where everyone’s facing another way. This is the one bit Tiny Dead Rising gets exactly right and it shows up everyone else’s spot-and-beeline monsters and the zombs deserve better than the game they convincingly inhabit.)

There are also dozens of missions, which come in salt AND vinegar: either you’re retrieving an idiot object for an idiot off-screen survivor; or you’re killing X zombs in area Y. You’ll laugh the first time you have to wade through a zomb apocalypse to find cleaning supplies by individually breaking open a grid of identical cardboard boxes; then you’re told to do it again, then again.

(You’ll come to FEAR the Valley Girl surv who’s always asking for earrings or fashion mags or something, because the game’s threadbare mish ideas snap and whip like HB Halicki’s cables with this set: you’re sent to a dead end, at which point the game mobs every single junction for the way back.)

Sometimes a mish is against the clock. In a surprisingly good bit, every active mish is on the map at once, usually delineated by a green rope border, and you can freely dash through or between them — you don’t lose if you stray outside the boundary. (On zomb-killing mishes, zombs without the arena don’t count so cunningly pistoling a bunch across the room doesn’t help.) In fact, because there’s no penalty for failing a mish — and, as we’ve seen, you get the same ones over and over again, so it’s not as if you’ve missed anything — it’s often helpful to trigger a dangerous timed mission in passing, then let it run out in favour of the next, likely easier one. (There are some uncommon mishes tied to achievements, eg setting up a barbeque, but they’re largely the same old shopping except with a badge, like strange scouting.)

(Incidentally, I only discovered this at the exact moment it occurred, but the overall idea is to kill 15 “mad zombs,” ie mini-bosses, at which point you auto-win. Everything else is wasting time, mostly by levelling up through the XP won from finishing mishes. Mad zombs don’t require special guns or high levs or something, and apart from the occasional double fight the only tricky bit is reaching them through the inevitable cheaty mobs; a convenient bug means a mad zomb tends to freeze when shot repeatedly point blank. So effectively you’re treading water between bosses and can even ignore mishes if you like — mad zombs appear for roughly every 125 zombs killed.)

There’s one mish genre though that’s a Tiny Dead Rising special, and that’s Rescue Calls. At first I thought these were related to saving the off-screen survs (the map permanently has a Rescue sidebar, matching colours to time left) but it turns out this is the eXCiTIngONLiNEbIT and, after an update that fixed the eXCiTIngONLiNEbIT so it actually worked, I had a look. The idea is that when you die, you prod Rescue Call and, if another player reaches that spot on their map in time, you’re saved and they win XP. I never, ever managed to see anyone with time left (if a call fails, the player dies and becomes a “named victim,” ie if you subsequently loaf into that area there’s an appropriately labelled zomb who acts like a mad one) but this does not necessarily invalidate a neat idea.

I’m not sure if it’s a server load thing, or that there really were never more than six other people playing Tiny Dead Rising (or, to be fair, playing TD Rising and making a rescue call when they fumbled things badly enough to die), but still I’d like to see a bit where you could automatically look for chums rather than pinching and dragging and whatnot to break apart the cluster of level 1 icons who ran the wrong way in the opening car park scene, etc.

(As an aside, the iThing controls themselves are fine, with contextual attack buttons that you can’t easily hit by mistake, a simple scroll-and-poke inventory and a fixed joypad that’s as good as you can reasonably expect: now and then I’d have to reset my pretty thumb because I was running so pantingly away from a mish disaster that I’d slid over the playfield, but once or twice I did annoyingly activate the tum-emptying leaping-roll escape manoeuvre by shifting from left to right too fast or something. As previously mentioned, you don’t control the camera so can find yourself fighting “out” of the screen until you break off an attack to spin around, and are occasionally blocked by scenery; this didn’t really get in the way but I wouldn’t have minded a manual camera swing or at least a recentre gesture.)

SO THERE YOU ARE, jogging around the shops for no real reason, alternating charlady missions (“Find my shoe, again”) and killing arbitrary numbers of zombs in a particular area (“We need to make that area safe for survivors”) with no bearing whatever on overall zomb numbers. (You can never empty a place, even temporarily.) Eventually you kill 15 mini-bosses after about a week, the end.

My guess as to what happened is that Capcom bottled it and ordered a cheap and fast cash-in. Even if you accept that Tiny Dead Rising must be technically hobbled for some reason, there’s no excuse for the endlessly repeated missions. (It’s just text, so why not at least make up fifty amusing collect-item paragraphs in a quiet lunchtime instead of cycling the same four or five?) At the heart of Tiny Dead Rising is the excellent idea of exploring a large shopping centre with zombs in. Every single thing the designers have added drains just a bit more fun out of that notion until you’re left with the world’s purest Japanese RPG: you grind and grind and grind and if you’re expecting to be entertained WHAT DO YOU THINK THIS IS HA HA LOOK AT THE PUBBIE EVERYONE A GAME TESTS CHARACTER AND ENDURANCE IN WATCHING A NUMBER INCREASE. I have better things to do. I mean, obviously I don’t, but I don’t have to not do them here.

What a shame.

And I bought the game at full price. Podgamer: we’re mugs so you don’t have to be. (Mugged.) (In a shop, by zombs.)

Judge this

Posted by J Nash on December 24th, 2010 at 9:37 pm

in Reviews, iPod Touch and iPhone

» 2 comments

Podgamer Postscript J Nash adds

Real Dead Rising attracted a lot of stick (to its face) for the save structure. If I recall aright, the game continuously saved (ie, you couldn’t reload to try something else) and, when you died, you restarted but retained your power-ups. In other words, you were playing Groundhog Day of the Dead (Except Dawn) (nearly clever wording, I acknowledge) (again).

Tiny Dead Rising isn’t quite the same. There’s still only one save slot and no reload other than post a perish, but you can only save in designated areas (“S Boxes,” the shopping centre’s panic room-y bits) and when you die you continue from that point but! lose your inventory and “prescribed XP.”

You might be slightly ahead of me here, but levelling up relies on XP; as you lev up, you become a bit stronger, marginally faster, and so on. Thanks to gaolbreaking I was able to test being killed a lot without imperilling my week’s progress, and have conclusively proved that losing “prescribed XP” leads to levelling down.

This is an 80s flashback degree of death terror. You lose everything you carry, and become weaker. Here’s me at level 20:

After running into a crowd of zombs 19 times in a row and waiting, here’s the resulting Level 1 me:

Mmm. To be fair, you’re probably not going to spiral quite that badly, but as we’ve seen you can become stuck in a foodless area, etc. (To be fair 2, you retain your power-up books, but can now only activate one at a time.) Being killed then reappearing without even the basic motor skills that didn’t save you and you now have to earn them again bicycles energetically past “miscalculation” and into “criminality.”

Aside. Alert readers will have noticed I’m still a long way from full bars at level 20. I wasn’t particularly more rugged at level 24 when I killed the last mad zomb and suddenly won. The thing is, in a Real Dead Rising way you can then Super Continue, ie start again with your skills intact. The zombs, who you’ll remember lev up with you, are now incredibly harder to kill, and the mish goal guide arrow has gone (which’ll make the multi-stage miles-of-zig-zagging mishes even more delightful where the next goal doesn’t appear until you’ve found the current one).

(UPDATE. No, that’s wrong, the mish goal guide arrows are still present. What happened is that only one mish was available when I checked, and I hadn’t activated it. I’d previously managed to miss this because you can’t “unset” an arrow, only point it to another job (ie, there’s always one mish on the compass) and it’s only at the beginning of the game you see quests singly rather in groups, so it’s only at the beginning of the game you can be jogging around without a guide at all. It hadn’t occurred to me this might be the case for super-continuing because the mish icons are permanently on the pause map, ie you know generally where to head. In short, I am an idiot.)

It’s possible therefore that there’s an entire new layer of game — the first couple of missions are identical to restarting (“Open this door”; “Find a save point”; “Check my car”), but conceivably you go on to open the unused sections of map, etc. But by this point you’ll have likely lost all interest in Tiny Dead Rising several days ago, and I’ve exhausted mine in mechanics-inspecting on your behalf. The funny thing is, about 70% of what enjoyment I excavated from TD Rising was from really quite closely examining how it worked — something I haven’t done since probably the J Nash vs Driver 3 epilogue. I can’t in all conscience present this an excuse to buy TD Rising unless you are top showbiz chum Z Nicholson, in which case hello Zy and don’t bother.

Also, for no reason I can even obliquely deduce, the menus are split: the map and your stats are only visible when pausing, which you can’t do in the save menu, so you have to save, leave, pause, check, re-enter the save room and activate new mishes, which you can’t do from pause. It’s… just… the… I don’t know, the clockwork of my dismay has unspooled to the end.