Dear Dead Rising...

As I stood in the EB Games trying to decide what game to buy for my new Xbox 360, Dead Rising, you sang to me your little siren song, “Buy me, cause I have zombies like Resident Evil and you like Resident Evil games, don’t you?” Sure, I wanted to buy other games like Tomb Raider and Oblivion, but you claimed to be the better game with your long hours of game play and innovativeness. Tomb Raider was nice, but not long enough for a first game buy and Oblivion, though I loved your last game, you tend to make me sick after too many hours of play.

So Dead Rising I bought you, and little did I know I would live to regret it. I popped you in and you brought me such wonderful graphics and promised me so much with your great storyline. Your camera part was right up my alley; reminding me of Pokemon Snap and Beyond Good and Evil. I loved how you allowed me to kill endless hordes of zombies with lawn mowers, chainsaws, and my favorite, the electric guitar. Your main character was so cool and I loved playing as Frank.

But there was where your amusement ended for me, because you had destroyed what could have been a great relationship between you and me. You ignored so many rules of what a great game should be and by doing that; you have ruined a good thing. Dead Rising, you have readable text on the screen, when the characters can be heard talking and yet you provide unreadable text on the screen when no sound is given. Sure, you’re text may look good on HDTVs, but did you ever stop to think about the thousands of gamers that haven’t upgrading their old TVs? No, you didn’t, did you? How can I be with you if you don’t even think about my needs? You needed to adapt to me, but you refused and we just can’t live together like that.

I wanted so badly to love you, but you just had to give me a bad save system and we know how much I love bad save systems. I spend hours running around trying to find a place to save, and when I finally did, you give me a locked door. You sat back and watched me die over and over again, losing sometimes an hour of game play, because you couldn’t give me more save points. It must have been so funny listening to my screams over and over again, “Where’s the damn bathroom on this level?” Oh yeah, real funny.

Finally you throw me a curve ball with the fact that I need to spend several days leveling up before I can truly enjoy you and your storyline. Sure, I could try to play some of the missions through, but with such low level stats, there was no way I could finish the main missions and try and save the survivors at the same time. It would just be a waste of my time, right? Well, screw you, Dead Rising! I’m not playing your game any more. See the one thing I hate more than anything else in the world has to be leveling up before I can move on in the story. Oh, yeah! Some games have driven me to cheat for such annoying leveling up and they didn’t even demand as much time as you have. Just ask Dragon Quest 8 and Final Fantasy X-2 about their leveling up issues with me, and they’ll hand you the copy of the PS2 Game Shark I own. Those games learned the price of screwing with me.

Sorry Dead Rising, but you promise me a world of new experiences and then handed me a crappy ticket to Boringville. You’re going back to EB Games and I’m getting a copy of Final Fantasy XII; sure he may have gave me trouble in the past, but at least I got to play three quarters of his last single player game before he tried to screw me on the leveling up issue. You started your bull from the get go. Farewell Dead Rising; too bad, we could have been something magical.