One of the games I really wanted to try at the show was the Wii port of the Capcom Xbox 360 game, Dead Rising. The English version has the very cool subtitle “Chop Till you Drop” so I was hoping for something like a 3rd person House of the Dead type of game.

First a confession. I never played the original Dead Rising for the 360. I always meant to, but I just never got around to it. So I cannot talk about how the Wii version compares directly to that. But if the 360 version IS like the Wii version, I’m not missing much. From the 10 minutes I played the game (which to be fair is not enough time to fully evaluate it) Dead Rising Wii is slow, kind of boring, and ugly looking.

It wasn’t completely awful. There were definitely fun parts. I liked that you could pick up and use almost anything as a weapon. Benches, bowling balls, shopping carts, etc. And the controls were responsive and fairly intuitive. The cut scene at the beginning also looked well done (but from what I hear it is just a capture of the 360 cut-scenes).

It just wasn’t what I expected. I had read that the number of zombies was scaled down for the Wii version and I am ok with that but if you have fewer zombies you should at least make them more interesting. They all moved very slowly, as zombies should, but the ways to dispatch them (guns or blunt objects) was also very slow. You had to hit or shoot a zombie so many times to take them down. Maybe this was to make up for having fewer zombies on screen.

It should be said that I have lowered expectations when it comes to Wii graphics. I long ago gave up on hoping to see the graphic output of a machine twice as powerful as a GameCube. These days I am happy when a developer puts in enough effort to make it look as good as a regular GameCube game (most don’t). But this is Capcom. They made resident Evil 4, which was probably the best looking game last generation. If they could only match that, no need to surpass it, I would be happy.

I wasn’t happy. Everything looked drab, washed out and grainy. From a technical level it looked like a mid-generation PS2 game, which I can live with, if the art style wasn’t so boring. True the level I played was inside a shopping mall so are we are going to see a lot of the same colors and shapes repeated but I just wasn’t feeling the atmosphere.

The zombies themselves got ugly up close. Zombies are supposed to be ugly (they are the walking dead after all) but they should be ugly for hanging flesh and disjointed limbs not low poly counts and bad textures. I wouldn’t feel so betrayed if I didn’t know that a Wii game could look a hell of a lot better. RE4 and RE: Umbrella chronicles (which Capcom made) both looked much nicer. It just screamed, “lazy port”. I was not allowed to take pictures or video of the screens in the booth and I understand it was probably smart of Capcom to not want those to get out.

I wandered around this in-game mall for about 10 minutes killing things. Sometime it was kind of fun, but it got old really quickly. There is no way I should be bored in the first 10 minutes of playing a game. True the game might get a lot better as it goes on and I will withhold final judgment until I play the full version, but as it stands now I am not impressed with this title.

The booth itself, on the other hand was very good. There was s a life sized replica of the main character and the walls were decorated with pictures of zombies taken obviously from the 360 version of the game since they looked so much better. And after I played the game the staff gave me a free Dead Rising poster. If only the same amount of effort put into the booth was put into the porting of this game things could have been very different.