An excellent Survival Horror Game.

User Rating: 9 | Dead Rising X360
Dead Rising. While not a unique concept, I can't say I've ever seen a game like it. The Premise is that you are a Journalist, Frank West, going to cover an "incident" in Willamette, Colorado. After Waiting through a Cutscene of Cheesey Jokes and mediocre Voice acting, you start taking pictures of the Carnage. Eventually, you land on the mall, after a semi-dramatic chase scene. A Latino Man starts leading you towards the whole "Zombie" theme, but frank has learning disabilities and doesn't figure it out until Dr. phil comes along and starts screaming at you. Then " Brad", Who seems nothing like the main character from Dawn of The dead, starts yelling at you. You go to the security room, and go through the thinly veiled tutorial stage, and rescue some obese people on the rooftop, and take them back to the security room. And now the game really starts. The Idea is to save people and learn more about whats going on.
You save people by finding them, convincing them to join you, an escort them back to the Security room. The people can give you more info, or just PP to upgrade with, so eitherway their valuable. Saving people is actually very challenging, due to the number of closed gates and passageways, plus the number of zombies. But the reward is ussually worth it. Saving the game, unfortunately, is challenging also. I've never gotten the point of taking the save option from the startmenu and putting it into a save point, but it seems to be the new thing. It's not as bad as you would be led to believe. There are roughly 3 save points per section of the mall, sometimes only 2, sometimes upto 4. All you've got to do is go to one of the save points and hit B. it isn't the most efficent way to save a game, but it isn't the devil spawn they make it out to be. The game is pretty challenging, and could take a couple of attempts to beat, but the gameplay is fun, and lets you be creative. The claim " use anything as a weapon" is really true; you can use pipes, cash registers, pies, knives, garden tools, buckets, furniture, TVs..... The story isn't award winning, but it is somewhat entertaining, and helps to justify your running around. The sound: Wow. The gut wrenching cracks and crunches of running things over has never been better, audio-wise. The Graphics are nice, not great, but there is evidence of alot of effort, and I haven't seen ANY glitches, or tearing, or "cutting" or anything like that. The game does tend to make your Xbox freeze, probably due to inefficent coding casusing overload, but it was a launch title, so give it some respect. Overall, the game is pretty good, but the simple fun of running through the mall and using everything as a WMD makes it that much better.
I give this Game A "Buy! Buy! Buy!" ( for Mad Money Fans)