By "tall" I mean over ten feet tall, in what looks like one of Dead Rising: Chop Til You Drop's many side quests. Other such quests include taking on three chainsaw wielding killer clowns at once, killing an unspecified amount of zombies with nothing but soccer-balls, and getting through a section of the zombie-infested Willamette Mall with nothing but a bicycle. More about these quests can be seen on Japanese scans found here.
It's stuff like these side quests that continue my optimisism that Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop will be worth its $40 price tag. Often times though, I feel like I'm the only game blogger on the planet who feels this way. The game has been a magnet for non-stop negative attention pretty much since it was announced last year, with the latest piece of pessimism coming from up and coming gaming site That Videogame Blog.
As the defacto leader of the "Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop Defense Force" I feel it is my solemn duty to address this article, and "The five questions for Capcom about Dead Rising: Chopt Till You drop" it contains. Hit the jump for the most fanboyish, pro-down port rant you'll read all day.
The first question that That Videogame Blog's Ashutosh Chhibbar asks Capcom is, "Why does the game look so much worse than Resident Evil 4?" I can't be sure, but my guess is it's for same reason that Dead Rising on the 360 looks so much worse than Resident Evil 5 on the 360 -- money. Out of all of the games in Capcom's Spring line up, Chop Til You Drop is the title expect to sell the least, so it stands to reason that it would look cheaper that the company's flagship titles. Conveniently, that point brings us to question number two ...
"Why is the budget for the game so small when the game is projected to sell 500,000 copies?" That's a strange question to ask, especially seeing as we have no idea how much Chop Til You Drop cost to make. It's also strange a strange question because it effectively answers the writer's first question; Chop Til You Drop looks worse (and presumably cost less to produce) than RE4 because it's not expected to sell as well as RE4.
While I'd be the first to say that the game looks cheap, I'm also aware that it costs some money to create the game's many new enemies, new quest modes, gameplay elements, weapons, costumes, etc. Chop Til You Drop may not be a high-budgeted game, but to imply that Capcom has been lazy with its work on the title is a little off-base.
If Capcom wanted to make a thoughtless port of Dead Rising, they would have just thrown the original game, pixel for pixel, onto the PS3. Now that would have been lazy. Instead, Capcom is putting the effort in to actually addresses some of the things that they apparently didn't like about the original game, which brings me to question number three ...
"Why can Frank West, a photojournalist, no longer take photos?" People keep assuming that the reason this feature (as well as other dumped features the ability to jump and the ability to carry multiple melee weapons at once) were removed because they would be too hard to port. I think that assumption is wrong. From what I know of game developer, there is nothing expensive or difficult about porting those kinds of features.
So if it wasn't to save time or money, there is only one reason why those features were cut -- because Capcom thought the game would be better without them.
One of the most annoying parts of the original Dead Rising was the section towards the beginning where you have to take pictures of a rival photographer while he effortlessly jumps around and beats up zombies, all while taunting Frank for sucking at his job. Not only is this part of the game not fun, but it really rubs it in your face that, unlike the zombies of Resident Evil, Dead Rising's zombies are almost completely harmless. Speaking of zombies, lets look at question number four ...
"In an attempt to make up for the lack of zombies, why weren't shambling zombies made faster and more aggressive?" Valid question, but I believe the answer that Capcom would give you might be, "What the hell are you talking about? The zombies of Chop Til You Drop were made faster and more aggressive!"
We've seen the fast moving zombie poodles and parrots. We've seen new, Paul Blart-looking zombies run at Frank West, taze him (bro) and actually shoot at him with guns. We've even seen regular zombies run at Frank with Dawn of the Dead remake speeds. None of these things were present in the original game, and all can bee seen in the Chop Til You Drop trailer below.
So yeah, question four is valid, but only if you haven't seen the above trailer, which I assume Ashutosh must have missed.
Now for the final question, which happens to be my personal favorite: "Why Dead Rising and not Lost Planet?" The answer to that is simple -- Capcom thought that Dead Rising needed to be remade, but Lost Planet didn't.
I'm not saying that Lost Planet Wii would be bad. The pointer controls could work really well, maybe well enough for some to ignore how much worse the game would look on the Wii. Beyond those changes though, I can't imagine what Capcom would want to do with Lost Planet Wii that would make it different from the original.
Anyway, Capcom seems happy with how Lost Planet turned out, enough that they brought it to the PS3 and the PC. They don't seem as happy with Dead Rising.
Other than the uglier graphics, all the changes Capcom has made with Chop Til You Drop are willful design choices done to try to improve the quality of the game. These are not changes that appear to have been done because they were necessary to make the game run on the Wii. I fully believe that from a hardware standpoint, Dead Rising could have been brought to the Wii with the same style of gameplay and almost as many zombies as there were on the 360 version, (as this video of Chop Til You Drop vs Hitman: Blood Money proves). I also believe that it would have been cheaper and easier for Capcom to go that route, but they didn't. Instead, they took this opportunity to try and fix Dead Rising. It makes sense that people who thought the game wasn't broken in the first place wouldn't be interested in these "fixes", which leads me to my own question...
"Why are so many fans of Dead Rising on the 360 even paying attention to Chop Til You Drop?". When Dead Rising fans say that Chop Til You Drop is going to suck, it really makes me scratch my head, like if a bunch of hip hop fans got online and started complaining that the new Coldplay album needs more phat beats.
It's been clear from the start that Chop Til You Drop is not for fans of the original game, and really, why should it be? It wouldn't make sense for Capcom to attempt cater to those fans, because those fans already own the original game. No matter what, there is very little chance that those who already own Dead Rising would buy a port of the game on the graphically weaker Wii, and Capcom knows this.
No, DChop Til You Drop is for people who either didn't like or never played the original Dead Rising, an audience that Capcom must be guessing is a fairly significant part of the Wii-owning populace. Personally, I can attest to being one of those Wii owners. Though I loved the idea of Dead Rising, after a few hours, I completely lost interest in the game. The farther into it you get, the less it feels like a horror beat 'em up, and the more it feels like a series of monotonous (although delightfully violent) chores. Coming from a huge Animal Crossing fan, that's saying a lot.
This is the exact opposite of how I feel about RE4:Wii, which never stops being fun -- a trait I attribute mostly to the way the game controls. That's not to say that I'm sure that Chop Til You Drop will be even close to being that fun, but just knowing it will try and play like RE4: Wii is enough to get me excited.
Like I said in a recent Cblog, if Chop Til You Drop sucks, I'll be the first one to tear it apart. But no matter how the game turns out, I'll respect Capcom for attempting this remake. They are trying to fix a game that they not only feel was unappreciated the first time, but that they themselves didn't like as much as they wanted to. That takes a lot of guts, and it's a shame that more people don't get that.
The only thing that I'm sure Capcom screwed up on with Chop Til You Drop is the decision to make it a retelling of the original's story. If the game were about another survivor of the Willemette zombie disaster, people wouldn't have been so quick to use the original game as the standard to compare Chop Til You Drop by, and that alone would have saved Capcom from a lot of negative press.
I hope you're reading this, developers of Dead Space Wii.
Contest:
12:00 PM on 02.16.2009
| 
Nothing wrong with it IMO. I'm certainly not losing any sleep over the prospect of Wii owners playing a game that was originally on the 360. Who cares? This guy who wrote these questions needs to find something better to write about.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrKhUJE4ymw
http://www.amazon.com/Dead-Rising-Xbox-360/dp/B000F3AADE/
Also... your comparison of CTYD/RE4 on the Wii with Dead Rising/RE5 on the 360 is flawed. The main difference is that Dead Rising was a first-gen title for the 360 and thus didnt utilize the full potential of the system, where RE5 is very current with being able to utilize the 360 in an overall much better way. So its logical that RE5 should look better than the original Dead Rising. HOWEVER, RE4's port on the Wii almost 2 years old and it still looks better than CTYD (which looks like an aborition of the original game that would be considered mediocre for the PS2).
Then don't read his articles about this game and you won't get annoyed. Don't want it? Don't buy it. Don't want to get annoyed? Don't read about it.
Boy, that was a difficult solution.
Sheesh.
And those giant zombies look AWFUL, they look like RE2 zombies.
But keep on with the good fight Holmes.
How hard is that to understand?
I'm a nerd like that.
Also, if this if DR:CTYD is just a cheap cash in, why did they add so much new stuff to the game, like new enemies, modes, weapons, outfits, etc?
Kyo- Thanks for the encouragement, and I agree about the giant zombies looking like they're from Resident Evil 2. Thing is, I still love Resident Evil 2, in all its low-tech glory.
If Capcom came out with a $40 remake of Dead Rising that controlled like RE4, was packed with new features, and threw it on PS1, I'd also be excited about that.
No this is not a remake. Let me tell you what is a remake.
Let's take Final Fantasy (the original) for example. It recently came out on the PSP for the 20th anniversary and the remake included: UPGRADED graphics, UPGRADED localisation, UPGRADED soundtrack, new extra content (Music player/Beastiary) and also 5 NEW dungeons.
Let's look at DR Wii now. Graphics were DOWNGRADED, soundtrack was probably DOWNGRADED, gameplay was REMOVED, polygons on screen were DOWNGRADED. You know what? That's all NORMAL, because this is a port on a system INFERIOR to the 360. When we do PORTS here to the PS2 from a Wii game we must DOWNGRADE it to keep the framerate up, same thing with DR Wii.
There, i hope this explains it PLAINLY for everyone.
Capcom has a long history of remaking their games, for the better, on less powerful systems. I'm hoping they pull it off again here.
Never said they were not good, just saying that you should use the proper term in your articles from now on.
Porting - Definition: Programmers will sometimes port their applications between different Operating Systems or hardware. Perhaps from Apple to Windows or Windows to Linux.
Thing is I think they could probably pull off the look and feel of DR on the Wii if they put alot more development time into the game. The Wii is definitely capable of more, y'see I'm not bashing the Wii, I just think this is a lazy port.
1) Anything created from the outside source material that...
2) Intentionally alters that source material in the process of it's creation.
A port is when something is "transported" from one console to another, while attempting to leave as much of the original material intact. A remake, on the other hand, doesn't even try to do that. A remake is something that from the outset is made with the intention of not being true to the source material.
In the world of film, Gus Van Sant's Psycho was sort of a "port", in that it kept all the original dialog, camera angles, and edits of the original film completely intact. That's different from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre film remake, which ditched just about everything from the original other than the Texas, the chainsaw, and the massacre.
@ Scroll - I don't think you're Wii bashing. I just think that you might be missing the fact that Capcom might be trying to improve Dead Rising with this remake, and not just compensating.
And where did you hear that a lot of the story missions were cut from the game? I read that they were all in there, but now they are all individually timed, instead of having the 72 hour time limit.
Didn't stop me from laughing at the video. "Three zombies standing still in the middle of the aisle! GAH! Smash 'em with a shopping cart before it's too late!" Ha ha!
I completely agree with everything Lightthrower said, although you do make some good points, Holmes.
Also, Gus Van Sant's Psycho was awful. Like this game "looks" like it will be. Also, how did you like Bionic Commando for the NES when it had less options, and no extra training missions?
That make better sense now?
And trust me, if you and Lightthrower are right, if this game turns out to be crap, I'll be the first one to let you know. After playing the frightfully uninspired Soul Calibur Legends and the less than stellar Castlevania Judgment, I'm as tired as anyone of 3rd parties releasing watered down versions fo their hit games on the Wii.
That's how I felt about DR once I found out that you can't get the "real ending" or some of the cooler stuff in the game unless you make it to overtime mode, which means never losing a mission or missing an appointment.
The Wii version, on the other hand, allows you to make it to overtime mode no matter what, and lets you choose what "missions" you want to do at any time. So in that way, you have more freedom to do what you want.
You can still fail the missions, and they are all still individually timed, so you still have to try, but the need to follow the in-game schedule isn't as punishing as it was in the original.
For me, that's a good thing.
*Analitic never played the original DR*
But this is probably one of the best things I have ever read. It was entertaining to read, your tone was absolutely great, the article changed my perception about it and I'm not going to knock it until I see the reviews.
@ Analitic and Cadtalfryn- Wow! Thank you both so much! When you go out on a limb and admit that you're hopeful for a game that tons of people love to hate, you expect everyone to just point and laugh.
Thanks for not pointing and laughing. :)
The thing with RE4 is that it is a linear game, that never has more than 32-35 enemies in a given area, and only a couple areas actually have that many.RE5 might have more, but isn't it also a linear game?
Dead Rising on the 360 is a sandbox game, with hundreds of enemies in on area. This is a large scale game being ported to a significantly less powerful system (remember, just one CPU core this time) versus a moderate scale game being ported to a stronger system (small scale would be a fighting game). RE4 is not, and has never been, a fair comparison. It doesn't matter how many think it's valid, it's not going to make it so.
Dead Rising Wii could likely have better graphics, but as good as RE4? Not unless the areas were smaller and there were even fewer zombies (but not as few as those early screens indicated.
First off, the aesthetic of the game and the market to which the game was aimed were completely in opposition of each other. It was way too difficult for little kids; and its aesthetic was simply unappealing to the people with the threshold for such tough adventure games.
Also, the game was a point-and-click puzzle game. Released in 2007. This is one of the most niche markets out there, so there was no way it'd achieve breakthrough success via word of mouth. Only marketing would help out--and the game had none whatsoever.
I contend that it was a big investment for Capcom because it simply wasn't. Its advertising budget was about a tenth of what Lost Planet had, and all of Z&W's marketing was spent in Japan.
Also, come on--look at the game. There's no way anyone (including Capcom) could deny it was probably the lowest-budgeted project that year.
Basically, Capcom's blowing smoke up the Wii's proverbial ass. They're releasing half-assed ports and/or extremely low-budget games with no marketing; and when said games fail to be blockbusters they throw a hissy fit, scream that Nintendo's strangling their market, and take their ball and go home.
I would never point a finger and laugh at a bald guy, that shit is just wrong :P
Seriously love your features and vid, keep it up old man, but would just like to add that i think the second reviewer for the game should be someone who has not played the original DR on 360...is there anyone at the Dtoid HQ that fits that criteria?
Trust me on this one - we need a clean slate
As for your second point, from what I know DR:CRTYD does have slightly smaller, claustrophobia inducing areas, and is much more linear. It's not really a Sandbox game anymore.
@ Novikaine- All I'm going by is Capcom's own statements about how much money they lost on Zack and Wiki. I agree that they were crazy for thinking a game of that genre, no matter how great it is, could succeed in 2007, but it is what it is.
@ Analitic- Out of all the staff has any interest in DR:CTYD, I've probably played the least of the original game. I never got to "overtime" mode, but have otherwise played a fair amount of the game (5-8 hours). With that little amount of playtime under my belt, I'll be taking the stance of the "never played or didn't like Dead Rising" side.
Nick Chester, on the other hand, played the hell out of the original, so he'll be taking the "I love Dead Rising" side.
That's probably as close to covering all our bases as we can get.
Maybe I'm wrong, maybe I'm not. Only time will tell.
You buy Nintendo consoles for Nintendo games. As I look at my shelf or a release list, the main good games for the Wii are made by Nintendo. I am waiting for some third party to do something that shocks and amazes me with the Wii and it's potential - but it just isn't happening, and the way DR:Chop looks I won't see it from capcom. But it's okay, and I'm not even mad at Cacpocm, because they've had the foresight to release Street Fighter IV, complete with ONLINE, to the PC. And this is happening with the other games for the Xbox/PS3. Ninty's the only console with a solid in-house studio these days - both a strength and a weakness.