Anger Rising!

"Walking into the darkened tunnel you can see nothing. But as your eyes adjust, you see figures in the darkness, squirming and writhing. Taking three steps forward you learn the truth, the entire tunnel is full of hundreds of zombies slowly limping toward you..."

This was the moment I fell in love with Dead Rising. While every other store and hallway has packs of zombies, a tunnel literally packed wall-to-wall with zombies blew me away. Because not only is this a fantastic feat of processing power, it was the 1st time I stopped and asked myself, "What the fuck am I going to do about THIS!?!" I tend to brute-force any situation I find in a game and I'll tell you, there are not enough bullets to make this particular situation work.

But you know what they did with my mouth-agapery? They wrenched it from my tight clasp and slapped me with the broad side of it! The indignity!! When 1st presented with the concept of timed events, I was excited. If you don't rescue a person in time, their survival would be in jeopardy. BUT what I experienced was not so! When a potential survivor dies it boldly states in red text, "SALLY JOHNSON HAS DIED". So would this definitive declaration be used in for the main survivors? 3 times I failed to complete a main quest in time and each and every time I was left with the same question: "Uh... did I fail?" This is because there is no indication you failed until you complete said quest and it "expires" every future quest. This is done with no explanation besides the flimsy, infered defense that you didn't beat the clock. No one dies. No one escapes. You simply cannot continue the next main quest. And how do you remedy this? How does the game retectify this poor excuse of design. IT OFFERS YOU THE OPTION TO RESTART THE GAME. I'm sorry, I cannot think of one masterpiece that has that option and for good reason.

What's that? Why didn't I just load a previous save? Oh, you silly banana, there's only 1 save slot, 8 save points, and zero quick saves. If you don't save every 10 minutes you are guaranteed to repeat missions endlessly. While I love (I mean absolutely love) drop kicking zombies, I abhor bland survivor text dialogues some of which continue for at least 3 minutes.

Pros: Zombie Ass-Kickery, Armies of Undead, Genuine Pychopaths
Cons: Save System, Timed Events, Immortal Convict Clones
Final Verdict: Awesome gameplay, terrible gameplay mechanics

Ketchup

Ok... so... off to a slow start as you can see! Well, I made the grandiose undertaking of drawing a comic. I thought this would be entertaining when coupled with my thoughts on a said game. And although I have many funny ideas for comics, it seems my talent is lacking. So a half a comic and a month later, I'm where I started. No more excuses!

I recently completed God of War II and it was a mixed bag for me. While the sweet morsels of eye candy kept me mashing buttons, the bitter plot nuggets made me question why I played this game at all. But just when I was about to give it up, I found a rare honey-coated peanut of satifaction. Because in the end, after listening to all the twisted plot holes it's the core element of kicking ass that keeps you playing.