The main character, Frank West, encapsulates the typical horror movie idiot hero - see a town swarming with the living dead, and intentionally land right in the middle. Such is the situation you find yourself in when you take control of Frank, a photojournalist crammed in with so many metaphorical zombified sardines at the local mall, with a seventy-two hour window to fill before your ride returns to pick you up. As with any good mall, there's plenty to see and do, such as trying on new threads at the clothing stores, browsing the latest CD releases, taking pictures of the local monuments, and fending off the zombie horde.

The graphics, sound, and overall presentation of the package is terrific. Occasionally we got the feeling that we were seeing detail as minute as the pores on the characters' faces, and the squelching of undead flesh being squished or skulls being crushed really hit the mark. The dialogue occasionally seems awkward, due mostly to the strangely large pauses in between the characters talking, but this seemed to help add to the B movie charm that the premise was aiming for. The game is filled with fine touches like the "breaking news"-esque spinning globe in the pause menus, or the various Capcom ties-in with Megaman and Servbots in the toy stores.

The gameplay is a seemingly straightforward third person beat 'em up in some regards: you run around and pick up a wide variety of objects, most of which can be used as weapons in some way. Quite soon into the game it becomes apparant that items don't typically last very long when confronted with repeated use against the zombie masses, and this seems to have been a design decision in order to encourage the rotation of the environmental objects as use for weapons. As a photojournalist, Frank carries his camera around with him wherever he goes (amusingly, he seems to run at an odd gait when the game is first played, due to the fact that it's not immediately obvious that he habitually holds onto the lens of his camera), and this becomes an important gameplay mechanic - at almost any time you can hold down the left trigger to go into photo mode to take pictures.

Pictures you take reward your ability to get shots of subjects close up but still in the frame, and distribute 'Prestige Points' or PP based on the shots content of horror, drama, brutality and, believe it or not, erotica. Prestige points are also gained from doing other tasks, such as brutal behaviour towards zombies, rescuing survivors found in the mall, and other such activities. PP then gets added up and effectively acts as an experience meter as in any RPG - earn enough PP and you level up, gaining more life, the capacity to hold more things, more attack power, speed, or some new unarmed combat moves.

The 72-hour clock is constantly running regardless of your interaction with the main plot, so you can't mess around forever in the mall and then expect to come back to the main characters and continue the game's story. Effectively this means that there are places you have to be at certain times. To this end, the game aids you in the sense that you can set a marker that will point you in the direction you have to go to reach the place for some story arc, but it doesn't help solve one of the blemishes on the experience: at the start of playing, managing the time in the game for running around is rather tricky, so there's decent potential that you could end up missing your deadline to be somewhere, and cut the main plot short, or turn up early and have the oh-so-annoying experience of not being able to fit any particular mundane task in between now and then, and being forced to do nothing but wait for the clock to advance on its own accord. This doesn't end up being a huge issue, since the fundamental experiences come together to provide a great amount of fun. The controls aren't possibly as intuitive as they could have been, particularly in the first person mode. It feels a lot like Resident Evil 4 in that you have to hold in the right trigger to aim, and press X to fire. While aiming, your feet lock in place and the left thumbstick is then used to alter the angle - it's not so much the fact that you can't move while aiming, but rather that you can't use the right thumbstick (the one that's been doing all the camera work up till you attempt to fire a gun with precision) to do your aiming. Granted, you've got to press the fire button with your right thumb, but it certainly feels like there could have been room for alternative solutions here.

The main stream of gameplay, aside from caving in the skulls of the undead, often involves escorting terrified tourists and patrons who have not been zombified through the rotting masses to the safety of the security room. Most grizzled video gamers would have probably grimaced at the last sentence, but the oft-maligned escort mission isn't so bad in Dead Rising as in other games, even though the AI isn't exactly on genius levels, and Moses isn't around to part the sea of zombies for you, unless you call your chainsaw Moses (which I do). Probably one of the best facets of the gameplay is that for all the things available for you to do as far as rescuing people in the mall goes, only a portion of them are critical to the main story, so aside from feeling bad and not getting rewarded if one of your charges falls victim to the zombie tide, it doesn't constitute a game stopping event, so the indiscriminate abuse of zombies continues uninterrupted.

The offset to rescuing survivors is the killing of survivors, since some people managed to fend off the horde but lost their mind in the process (or possibly had sanity of dubious value beforehand). These are more or less your standard boss battles, somebody with a little more health than you typically expect, and a range of attacks to use against you. The introduction of these individuals is well handled, there's always the feeling that there's a decent story behind the crazy you're battling with (more so than the people you end up rescuing, actually), and they're followed up with an equally well constructed sequence that provides some closure to the encounter.

One of the biggest issues people have with Dead Rising is that the save system isn't entirely friendly, with there only being one save slot (so if you want to save again, you have to overwrite the old save), and while we acknowledge the risk that one might save and not have enough time to cover the ground to get to the next story element, it didn't really bother us too much, since robust save systems are often abusable and go against the grain of what a survival horror game should feel like - and probably more importantly, the game is actually so much fun that when we came across a situation where we had to restart the game in order to see the main story through till the end, it didn't bother us because we enjoyed playing it.