Dead Rising came out in 2006 and has since been made a platinum title. This means that you should be able to track down a copy for relatively cheap, or you can purchase and download it from Xbox Live Marketplace for around $20.
The story is, well, as relevant as you want it to be. You play as Frank West, a photo-journalist checking out an “outbreak” story in a fictional small U.S. town in Colorado. The town has been quarantined by the National Guard, so Frank charters a chopper to drop him off inside the town, and instructs the pilot to pick him up again from the same spot (the roof of a shopping mall), in three days. To finish the game you could just stay on the roof and wait for the chopper to come back in 72 (game) hours, but there’s no fun in that now, is there?
Venturing inside the mall, you discover that *gasp* the town has become infested with zombies and there are a handful of uninfected individuals trying to survive the outbreak. Again, as Frank you can choose to try and save as many of the uninfected as possible, or not. It is kind of like: sure, you can help some of the survivors, but you don’t have to. No pressure.
Now, what makes DR so much fun is the zombies; hordes and hordes of zombies. In fact there is an achievement for killing 53,594 of them (which happens to be the population of the whole town). The game takes place within the shopping mall, which is large and you can unlock different areas of it as you progress through the story (if you choose to do so). Almost anything in this environment can be used as a weapon: rubbish bins, road cones, water pistols (not very effective), bowling balls, pot plants. And there are shops full of all sorts of potential zombie killing awesomeness; sports, music, hardware and antiques. As Frank gets better at killing zombies he is able to unlock new zombie-killing moves and abilities; the progression system works much like an RPG.
DR is a fun and funny game; it’s a horror-comedy game, not a serious spooker like Silent Hill or Resident Evil. It is more like the movie Zombieland than Dawn of the Dead, although there are obvious similarities. DR offers some serious replayability, (I’ve had it for years and still pop it in for a bit of fun) and the sequel is just around the bend. Dead Rising 2 is set in a much larger environment (resembling Las Vegas) with significantly more zombies. I can’t wait!

9/10

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