I suppose it makes sense from a game publisher’s point of view to remaster, remake, or otherwise relaunch your most profitable and highly regarded legacy titles. If people loved it the first time, giving them the chance to play it again, either totally rebuilt from the ground up or visually enhanced and tweaked for modern hardware, is about as near as you can get to a surefire hit. It’s fine. I enjoyed the Resident Evil remakes. I love the Command and Conquer Remastered Collection. I even bought the new versions of Metal Gear Solid, despite already owning them on basically every console and machine that I have. But I’d like to see a change in sensibility. Like with the recent Star Wars Bounty Hunter re-release, rather than reheating the classics, I’d like to see more game-makers try to improve upon and revive flawed diamonds. Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, which I went hands-on with before its September launch, is a good example of where a game both deserves and warrants another draft.
I’ve played the original Dead Rising so many times. Back in 2006, I’d never seen anything like it – I don’t think anyone had. Grand Theft Auto had big, explorable sandbox worlds, likewise Saints Row, and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. But Dead Rising was just so interactive. You could go into every shop, you could pick up every item, and you could really play with the systems. You could manipulate and influence the zombie game in ways you hadn’t been able to affect other videogames in the past. The opportunities for individual expression and mischief were so great that it felt like you were finding things even the developer hadn’t realized were possible.
Moreover, Dead Rising was huge, not in terms of sheer geography, but the amount of enemies on-screen. Especially when you went down into the maintenance tunnels and the whole place was just wall-to-wall with zombies, it felt like magic – it felt like something you’d see in a cutscene (in fact, it was something you’d seen in a cutscene, if you’d played Resident Evil Outbreak) but it was there and it was live and it was playable.
And that’s just Dead Rising from the technical, macro perspective. It was also funny, dramatic, and had a great energy. You’re doing something every moment; something new is always happening. I get a little frustrated with the wackiness sometimes and how it pulls you towards frivolity and absurdity, but actually, if you allow that to happen and you roll with it, Dead Rising starts to feel like a Yakuza or a Vanquish, where the occasional sincerity reacts with the silliness and the maximalism to produce an atmosphere that refreshingly doesn’t belong to any single genre.
It’s a zombie and sandbox game, but it can also be a survival game, an extreme sports sim, and a comedy-drama with slapstick humor and tragic deaths. It should be inconsistent. It should be a mess. But perhaps the biggest asset in Dead Rising is Frank West, who’s simultaneously larger than life and the sympathetic everyman.
It feels right, somehow, that when you go and rescue these screaming, crying survivors from certain death, you also stop off on the way back to throw pies in zombies’ faces and hit them with a bowling ball. Frank, similarly, can be discussing a political conspiracy with Brad and Jessie in one scene, then throwing zombies over his head in heart-patterned boxer shorts in the next, and you somehow still buy him.
So why do we need Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster? It’s because the original, despite all of these wonderful qualities, also has tremendous flaws that make it hard to enjoy. There was always an imaginative, vivid open-world game here, but too often, Dead Rising would wrongfoot and defeat itself. The weapon system, the map, saving, and the dreaded – dreaded – pathfinding AI for the survivors all got in the way of what should and could have been the ultimate experience in videogame fluidity.
All of this is fixed in the remaster. For every weapon there is now a health bar showing you how close it is to breaking. The map is now much more detailed and interactive, and you can set custom waypoints and easily navigate between sections of the mall and different floors. As well as manual saving in the bathrooms, Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster now autosaves every time you enter a new area, something I’m especially grateful for when it’s time, once again, to kill the escaped convicts in the Leisure Park.
And survivors’ pathfinding behavior is now faultless; it works; it’s good. Blue Castle and Capcom remedied this with Dead Rising 2 and it’s the central reason that that game, despite its much less compelling setting, was better than the original. The chance to play the first Dead Rising with those improvements is worth the cost of the Deluxe Remaster alone.
This is the kind of relaunch that I find it hard to object to, where an imperfect game is improved and retooled just enough that it allows for some of its suffocated affectations to breathe, exist, and be appreciated more freely. Take a middling game, or maybe one that’s been forgotten due to the passing of time or successive sequels, and give it enough attention and recalibration so that it can both find a new audience and reignite the interests of past players. Put more simply, the original Dead Rising was good but with some enormous caveats. From what I’ve played of the Deluxe Remaster, it’s Dead Rising without the big asterisks.
Alongside Dead Rising, check out some of the best horror games available on PC, and also the best upcoming PC games making their way to you this year and beyond.