Dear God above, has there been a more frustrating game in the past five years than Dead Rising? I mean besides Mega Mans 9 & 10. Those were intentionally meant to brutalize you. Although I guess Dead Rising was too. And they are both from Capcom. Hmm...
Oh right, I was talking about being frustrated by Dead Rising. I didn't own a 360 back when it first came out, so I missed it back when it was a big deal. When all the talk about the sequel started, I thought I should go try the original. I knew there were some quirks involving the save system, but I figured I could put up with it if the game was good. So I bought a Greatest Hits copy last year and gave it a go. I played it for about an hour, up till the first boss fight with Carlito. I got murdered. I went back to try it again. Got murdered again. And this wasn't a quick death, either. I worked on that boss fight for like twenty minutes, struggling with the crappy gun controls in an attempt to hit the guy before I went down in a heap again. I didn't play the game again for six months (rough estimate).
Now before you send me your strategies for getting past Carlito, you should know that I've now conquered that little problem. I tried the game again last weekend, and somehow I utterly owned that jerk. I just got up on the platform and emptied bullets into his face until he ran away (he looked remarkably unscathed, too. I would think he'd look more like Officer Murphy before they turned him into Robocop). And what do you know? Things get harder. Now while the zombies are an issue due to their ridiculous numbers, I'm willing to put up with that. I expect that. Having to cut a path through an overwhelming number of zombies is what this game is all about. What I didn't expect was to keep getting gunned down by some stupid convicts with a jeep mounted machine gun. These guys are the worst. The literal worst. They make it nearly impossible to rescue survivors, especially if you have to carry or support them.
And that's another thing! If there are multiple survivors that I'm leading around, shouldn't one of them be able to carry the lame one? I mean, I'm the guy with the broadsword that can chop the zombies into piles of goo. I'm the one they all shriek at for help when they try to fistfight the zombie horde. Some of them will actually have the brains to pick up a weapon, but my God are they inept even when they do that. I had to fight off a psychotic, fire breathing clown who was dual wielding chainsaws. Couldn't I have just played along with his psychosis in order to get him to help me thin out the horde? No, I have to kill him so I can get two whiny and useless Japanese tourists through the food court. I doesn't matter if I get them past the food court, though. The jerks in the jeep will kill them no matter what. God, I hate those guys.
Look, I know I'm late to the party. I'm sure these complaints have been thrown around numerous times over the last three or four years. But I'm just now encountering this nonsense, and it's really ticking me off. And here's the worst part: I still want to play the game. A reasonable human being would just turn off the console and say, "Nah, son. I don't need that kind of grief." But apparently I have some inner masochist in me (my desire to try Demons' Souls should have alerted me to that), because I still want to jump back in at some point. But not for a while. I need to cool off for a couple weeks. Maybe I'll have some revelatory breakthrough like last time that let me blaze through Carlito. I can only hope so, for my sanity's sake.
No comments:
Post a Comment