Imagine being trapped in a shopping mall with a numberless horde of zombies bent on eating your brains. Suppose that all you have to fight them off with is whatever you can find on-hand. Now suppose that there are other humans trapped in the mall and that the only way they'll survive is if you fight your way to them and lead them back to safety.

I'm sure by halfway through the first sentence you guessed that I was talking about Dead Rising. The premise of the game got my attention immediately, but I've only recently got the hardware necessary to play the game. So far, I have to say that I find some things about it very frustrating indeed.

I get that the survivors scattered around the mall are terrified-sometimes injured-and that its the player's responsibility to keep them safe on the way back, I do. I can even dismiss the piss-poor AI of the survivors as simulating their confusion and panic. But why, by Odin's eyepatch, does their health drop if I'm not with them even when I leave them somewhere safe? I should be able to lead survivors to the Flexin' Gym and save, then leave them there while I go make more survivor pickups or hunt for weapons and food. I should be able, in a pinch, to drop some survivors off in a store, barricade them in to keep them safe, and strike out on my own. I should be able to leave one wounded survivor in a safe place temporarily while I carry another wounded survivor back to the Security Room.

I think game developers are the only ones that haven't gotten the idea by now that escort missions just aren't fun. This game could have broken that convention if only it wasn't so arbitrary and punitive, because carrying a woman with a sprained ankle through ravening mobs of the undead, setting her down only to lay into a group thats right in the way is tense and compelling, and at its best, its actually fun. Its just the ridiculous save system and the inflexibility of survivor-herding (say what you want about the difficulty of herding cats, but at least cats are smart enough not to walk directly into huge crowds of revenants) that cause frustration. Spending 20 minutes trying to get a group of these slackwits back to safety only to have one of them decide to run straight for the biggest group of zombies around and get killed is annoying as all heck.

So the question is, if its that annoying at those moments, why do I keep going back to the game and trying again? Well, I have to admit that there's something very compelling about the situation. I may find the people I'm rescuing to be annoying, useless sacks of zombie chow, but I still want to save them. Something clicks in and makes it almost impossible to resist trying to collect these hapless schmucks and get them out of harms way.

I actually tried to justify it to myself at first by saying I just wanted to save these people to cut down on potential zombie reinforcements, despite the facts that zombies infinitely respawn and that it would be much easier just to let them become zombies and then kill them than to get them to safety. When it comes right down to it, though, the real reason I keep going back to the game and keep trying to save the others despite themselves is simply because I can't NOT go back and try to save them.

I have no idea how I'd handle a situation like Dead Rising in real life. Maybe I'd be paralyzed with fear like survivor Aaron, and just let zombies walk up and eat me if someone wasn't constantly fending them off and pushing me along. I can't imagine that, though... I think my panic would be so adrenaline-charged that I'd have no problem moving or trying to attack zombies that came near me. I'm not saying I'd be strolling casually around the mall trying to get my shopping done despite the zombie infestation (although they can't be much worse than holiday crowds of humans at the Mall of America), but I think I'd be more spastically active than paralyzed.

So would I leave a safe room to brave the concourses of the dead and rescue others? Of course I like to think I would, but can anyone really know how they'll act in a crisis until they're in one? If I managed to force myself out there once, and actually brought back a survivor or two, would I be able to do it again? Would I consider my part done, and let someone else worry about rescuing any other stranded survivors? I know that if I did I'd never be able to forgive myself, but would I be able to force myself back out there again and again?

As a lover of science fiction, premise means a lot to me. If the central idea is something that sparks my imagination, I can forgive some clumsy dialog or plot progression in a sci-fi story, and likewise, I find the premise of Dead Rising interesting enough to play despite the poor survivor mechanics and the what-were-they-thinking save system. I found the question "what would you do in Frank's place?" to be interesting enough that when I was leading a couple of lame survivors back to safety, leapfrogging from one quasi-safe abandoned store to another, carrying one of them at a time, I let a main plot Case expire, ending any chance I have at progressing the main story, because I was too invested with the survivors to leave them or load an earlier game.

To be honest, I'm not even that sad to see the main plot dry up. Aside from a few zombie-bashing sessions to blow off steam, I'm playing this first time through as I would as if I were really there. I try as hard as I can to find my way to people and lead them back to safety, and have to make a lot of hard decisions along the way. This is what attracted me to the game in the first place, not Homeland Security agents or the mysterious old professors holed up in bookstores. What I've seen of the main storyline so far seems out of place anyway, and kind of... clumsy, like in the RE series.

Capcom should realize that they don't have to cram a conspiracy into every game--the introduction of Umbrella in the 2nd half of the original RE ruined any interest I had in the story, because it was unnecessary, hackneyed, and detracted from the spooky, zombie-filled mansion that was going so well up until then. If you look at the world of film (which is undisputedly the leader in all things zombie), a huge majority of the best cases don't have elaborate plots--they just have terror, gore, and oodles of zombies. When in doubt, Capcom, just remember this simple truth: sometimes zombies are enough.