Powerbits 2.0

What's new for TGS? While the game wasn't on display on the TGS show floor, Capcom held a nearby event to allow the media to go hands-on with the single-player mode and check out four of the game's multiplayer challenges.

The single-player portion consisted of exactly what you'd expect from a Dead Rising sequel -- I ran around, picked up weapons (ranging from swords to chairs to chainsaws to guns to wheelchairs to guitars) and swung them at zombies. The demo took place in the above-mentioned casino, complete with a money-catching minigame where I stood in a glass cage and jammed on a button to grab the bills flying around. Once I was able to kill 300 zombies in 10 minutes, I unlocked a "prize round" with a machine gun-equipped wheelchair.

Multiplayer deviates a bit from the Dead Rising formula, both because the original game didn't have any multiplayer and because of the game show/wrestling arena setting where an announcer guides four players through different challenges. When I played, this meant first running around in American Gladiators-style hamster balls, where only one player at a time glows, and thus has the ability to score points by running over zombies and running into posts. So if you're not glowing, you try to run into the player who is, and if you are glowing you try to run into everything else.

Next up was a game where each player had to put hats and dynamite on zombies' heads as quickly as possible, and then press a button to make them explode. And after that came a game where you had to ram zombies onto a ledge to register as much weight as possible on said ledge.

After finishing these three rounds, the menu tallied up the scores and used those to determine however many seconds' worth of head start each player got in the final round -- which consisted of riding a motorcycle with blades sticking out the sides through zombie crowds and attempting to make contact with specific higher-point-giving zombies. Naturally, the winner of this final round won the game (and no, it wasn't me).

What's our take? It's always a risk when a new developer takes over a franchise, but after going hands-on, I'm impressed by how close the single-player mode feels to the original Dead Rising. Sure, the main character looks different, and if you got hung up on the controls being a bit stiff or sloppy in the original, you'll still feel the same way, but this is clearly a proper Dead Rising sequel with the kitchen sink approach intact, and it looks fantastic so far.

I'm also happy to see that multiplayer is playing to the series' strengths, with the zombie playground theme carrying over into the different modes in creative ways. It's hard to say at this point how much staying power the multiplayer modes will have -- they give off of a party game feel, and seem like they'll be fun in short bursts -- but they clearly fit in with what the rest of the game is all about: ridiculousness.

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