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What Happens With Dildos, Stays in Vegas

Destroy zombies as hero Chuck Greene in Dead Rising 2, set to be released this summer.

February 12, 2010
Credit: Capcom

Vitals

The biggest takeaway from a ten-minute session of Dead Rising 2? Protagonist Chuck Greene is a MacGyver-esque wunderkind when it comes to constructing anti-zombie weapons from common products. That, and such constructs produce some wacky word combinations, ranging from the mundane "spiked bat" to the terse-and-to-the-point ones like "knife gloves" or "paddlesaws."

For Microsoft's X10 event, the developers at Blue Castle prepared a special demo: Chuck has ten minutes to earn a certain number of Prestige Points (the experience point system in the game) in order to progress. If he doesn't hit the goal, then it's game over. If he does, then there's a special reward that he can use at the end of the round.

 

formally announced and demonstrated) lends itself to be very combat focused. I didn't really learn anything particularly new about the story, nor even about the multiplayer component. This demo is all about moment-to-moment zombie-slaying -- whether via constructed items or just stuff lying around the street.

As you can see from the video above, a critical new feature is weapon construction. Sure, you can goof around with items scattered around, such as street signs, pipes, and firearms. But, if you obtain the proper "combo card," you can go to a workbench and combine two items into a specific (and generally awesome) weapon. The demo at X10 has Chuck already having combo cards for creating the Paddlesaw (a chainsaw and an oar) or the Knife Gloves (a set of butcher knives and a pair of boxing gloves), but I also notice that he can "learn" combo cards by looking at posters or items in the world. Also, I couldn't verify for certain, but it seems like you can also just try experimenting with combinations to stumble onto new combo cards. For example, a watergun crossed with a can of gasoline becomes a flamethrower; jamming a bunch of nails into a propane tank produces a hefty-looking improvised explosive device (IED).

Of course, if you don't discover combo cards, or simply don't have the materials handy to construct them, you can take a shortcut via the pawn shop. Some dude has (wisely) taken over a gun store, and has stocked a bunch of pre-made weapons behind an extremely well-reinforced fence. You simply go up to the item in question, hit "B," watch your funds get deducted, and wait for the item to be tossed over the fence to you. Some of the stuff I picked up include the Porta-Mower (I didn't have a 2-by-4 or a lawnmower handy) and the Tesla Ball (I certainly didn't have a hamster ball nor an electric battery).

These new toys are pretty great to use on the thousands of zombies on the street; at one point, a Capcom employee noted that there were 1200 undead dudes clogging up the street. Some quirky tricks I see during my gameplay-session include jamming firecrackers into some zombie heads to provide a flamboyant distraction, to smashing an IED into a zombie and then shooting it from afar to burn a whole cluster, to the simple joy of pushing a zombie around in a wheelchair, and braking hard enough to hurl it forward. From this demo, Prestige Points seem to be earned through both killing zombies, and using combined items for bonus points (smacking a zombie with a blunt weapon gets you about 10 points, while using the Porta-Mower to shred a zombie nets you 120 points).

 

Originally published on 1UP.

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