Video Game Review: Dead Rising 2 - Case Zero

In the United States, publishing monolith Macmillan has released pay-per-prologue ebooks for each installment of The Wheel of Time series since the turn of the millennium. The latest, Distinctions, just hit electronic shelves everywhere: $3 will net you a few thousand words meant to set the scene for Towers of Midnight, volume thirteen of Robert Jordan's sprawling fantasy saga.

Now. I'll confess to an utter dearth of interest in The Wheel of Time, even given Brandon Sanderson's involvement - pillory me if you will - so I don't suppose I can say with any certainty that Distinctions and its decade of antecedents are the calculated cash-ins they appear to be; certainly fans of the series eat them up, or else we wouldn't be seeing one for every new novel in the saga, would we? My raised eyebrows aside, I can see the purpose such premium taste-tests serve: the better to whet one's appetite (that is presupposing one has a hankering for such a dish) for the main course to come.

In literature, then, paid previews - at least for giants of the genre like Jordan (and Sanderson, evidently) - are old news. In other media, however... not so much. Case Zero, for instance, is something of a first in gaming: a payquel, they're calling it, though I've heard a few pundits bandying about the term "pre-DLC," too. It's a short, standalone experience, in any event; perhaps three hours in length - though your mileage may vary dramatically, depending on whether you mean to accomplish everything Case Zero has to offer or just to power through the story - it takes place, in narrative terms, a full three years before the events of Dead Rising 2, the belated sequel to a fan-favourite game due for release later this month. It introduces us to Chuck Greene, former motocross champion and DIY enthusiast, as well as his daughter, Katey.

Katey hasn't been keeping so well, sadly. In the aftermath of the outbreak in Santa Cabeza chronicled in the original Dead Rising, her mum fell tragically afoul of the zombie horde and bit - the beast - her own little girl. Chuck and Katey have been on the run ever since, the former stalling the onset of the undead plague in the latter with injections of Zombrex every twelve hours. Thus, they stop off in the unassuming little town of Still Creek to replenish their supplies of such, only for some opportunistic git to steal away in Chuck's truck, stranding the father and daughter in a town the military (read: evil authority figures) mean to blockade when night falls that very day.

The plot is so much stuff and nonsense, of course. This isn't The Reapers Are The Angels, by any stretch. At best, in narrative terms, it's Land of the Dead... but no-one's coming to Case Zero for its gripping storytelling, anyway. What plot there is serves singularly to justify an array of gameplay mechanics you'll either love or utterly loathe: the small, if surprisingly fully formed area in which you can face off against the never-ending zombie menace; the dreadfully oppressive march of time which inhibits you, as Chuck (in, for instance, a beer hat and a repurposed cocktail waitress' dress), from doing everything there is to be done in this Dead Rising payquel. The acquired mechanics of that Xbox 360 launch game are back in full force in Case Zero, you see. Three hours will get you from start to finish, yes, but only if you ignore the twelve Still Creek survivors, who each have their own demands on your limited time and resources, and leave off the new core mechanic, which is to say fashioning ridiculous new weapons out of the scrap abandoned around town.

For each new weapon you craft - from the hilariously unhelpful drill helmet through to the paddlesaw, with which you can carve a bloody path through the horde - Chuck will earn PP, and thus level up, gaining a largely random buff to one of his abilities. You might win more health, an additional inventory slot (and inventory management is as high a priority as ever it was in the original game), a new move, or else a combo card, which multiplies the PP you get for each kill with a particular combination weapon. There are a few other ways to earn PP - by saving a survivor, say, or completing a chapter of the short story - but combination weapons are your prime source of income in terms of experience. There are nine on offer in Case Zero alone... well, eight and a handy beer hat!

And it's great time. Scouring the streets of Still Creek for cast-off equipment and making something supremely fun out of a traffic cone and a tin of spraypaint - if lamentably unhelpful - easily supplants the photography component of the original game; those who feared Blue Castle Games would lose what essentially defined Dead Rising in so doing should be pleasantly surprised. There's more depth, I dare say, and certainly more flexibility to the workbench action in Case Zero than there ever was to Frank Castle's old Kodak.

For myself, I don't S-Rank many games. I play a whole lot of the things - love you LoveFilm! - but I'm mostly in them for the fun, and the glazed-eye grind to kill however many thousands of enemies for some paltry gamerscore is not often that. Initially, in fact, I wasn't even sure I'd part with my hard-earned for Case Zero, but the pittance Capcom are pushing it for - 400 MSP (spacebucks to the value of $5 or just shy of £4) - made the sale a no-brainer. In terms of value for money, then, there's so much game in here that the publishers are practically giving Case Zero away, and though the quirky mechanics of Dead Rising return in full force, once the initial frustration over having to drop your spiked bat to pick up a shiny new broadsword wears off, it feels... it feels like coming home. Technically, this ballsy payquel is far from perfect: there are wonky animations, dodgy textures, a bit of framiness and load times a touch too long. That said, what Case Zero is, from top to bottom, is fun - and isn't that all that matters, in the end?

Dead Rising 2, here I come!

How I Lost My Brandon Sanderson Virginity

Brandon Sanderson is a name that's been gaining traction in fantasy circles for years now, like a pebble let loose down a slope quilted in soft snow: the further he's travelled, the bigger he's gotten. Exponentially so. He's accumulated such staggering momentum going from Elantris in 2005 through to Warbreaker and the much ballyhooed-about Mistborn trilogy... and it wouldn't do to forget his contribution to the last movements of The Wheel of Time, would it? In terms of awareness - and no doubt sales - that latter alone has seen Sanderson accelerate from mach five to faster than light in such a short space of time that he has to be the envy of every gradually rising genre author on the face of the planet.

Now I tend to read all the big genre releases - just to keep up with the scene, such as it is. But... I really don't care for The Wheel of Time. I'm sorry, guys; nothing the late and oft-lamented Robert Jordan wrote in his lifetime spoke to me at all. And though I'm more interested in the series now that Sanderson has taken the reins than I ever have been before, I'm not one to jump into a multi-volume epic fantasy on book twelve, nor can I foresee an occasion when I have the time to catch up on the multitude of doorstoppers before it, so I passed on The Gathering Storm, as I'll skip Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light. I mean no slight on either author in so doing, but The Wheel of Time just isn't for me.

Sanderson's original work, however, is another thing entirely, though I'll 'fess up here and now: despite owning a complete set of the beautifully rejacketed Mistborn trilogy, he's another of the long list of prolific fantasy authors I've somehow managed to miss. Courtesy of #bookfail, a new feature I'm working on for The Speculative Scotsman about the gaping holes in my own experience of genre fiction, you'll soon have the opportunity to learn which other speculative greats I am ignorant of. George R. R. Martin, anyone? Richard Morgan?

But let's not get ahead of ourselves just yet.

Because over the weekend, I made a move towards remedying one such glaring oversight: with the generous excerpt of The Way of Kings posted on tor.com - the equivalent of 50 pages in length - I finally popped my Brandon Sanderson cherry. You'll know about this promotional blitz already, I'm sure. Aidan covered it on A Dribble of Ink; as did Patrick, Werthead and everyone's favourite albino carebear, along with near enough every other blogger. And don't think I wouldn't have too, had it not been for Mark Charan Newton week.

As is, I'm coming late to the party, but I'm coming armed to the teeth. See, I've actually read the excerpt - and this, I would add, isn't something I usually do. The sheer frustration of starting a story via such a thing and then having to wait months to read the rest of it usually wins out, in my case. But I'm told there's a galley of The Way of Kings winging its way to me as I write this, and so I thought, what the hell, and dug in.

And it's a curious thing, this excerpt. It's taken from the very beginning of the book - indeed, from the very beginning of a series that Sanderson has said could last for ten volumes - and it's a huge book at that, clocking in at just shy of 400,000 words. Suffice it say, then, that it's all about introductions. In the prelude to The Stormlight Archive, we meet Kalak, one of ten immortal men caught in a seemingly endless cycle of death and destruction. In the aftermath of an horrendous battle with a thunderclast, an "enormous stone beast... with unnaturally long limbs that sprouted from granite shoulder," another of the immortals informs Kalak that they have decided to end the centuries-old Oathpact that binds them together. They go on their way, vowing not to seek one another out...

And from prelude to prologue, set 4500 years later. In To Kill, Sanderson introduces us to Szeth, a Truthless, which is to say an assassin, tasked by the Parshendi with the murder of Gavilar, the Alethi King. There's talk of stormlight, shardblades, magic, culture and uprising, and then there's a huge fight during which gravity takes a backseat.

In the three brief chapters which follow, three more narrators: Cenn, an anxious and inexperienced new recruit caught in a brutal border skirmish; Kaladin, Cenn's former commander, now a particularly dangerous slave with designs on his freedom; and Shallan, the last hope of a once-great family, who hopes to become the ward of a heretic Princess.

It's a lot to take in, all told, and without the context of what comes after, I fatigued a little each time Sanderson introduced a new perspective to the narrative. And yet each of the tale-tellers holds their own. Each serves to illuminate a different aspect of the world of The Stormlight Archive, and though, come to that, there's a fair amount of worldbuilding, Sanderson filters it well. Shallan's arrival in Kharbranth, after following in the wake of the Princess for six months, is as good a reason as any to show off the so-called City of Bells, just as Cenn's recruitment is an ideal means to introduce the reader to the wars which rage to this day.

And there's nary a lull in the action. From the prelude through to the first chapter, there's no short supply of fights and flights, adeptly told and brutal in their way without ever erring on the war-porn that's come to be so prevalent in modern fantasy - Sanderson even dispatches a major character in that time, though I won't say who. Kaladin and Shallan's chapters, meanwhile, are less literally action-packed, but even in these sequences there's movement, a sense of purposefulness that keep you interested. And hardly a page goes by without Sanderson introduction one fascinating new aspect of his world or another: from sprens, tiny creatures that are essentially externalisations of elements and emotions, as the daemons were to the soul in His Dark Materials, to marble-skinned parshmen and the aforementioned thunderclasts, the flora and fauna of The Stormlight Archive appear by all accounts rich, detailed, and moreover, intriguing.

The word on the street is that Tor will make more excerpts from The Way of Kings available as we close in on the release date in late August, and were it not for the ARC I have on the way - you do not need to tell me how lucky I am, incidentally - you could be sure I'd read them as and when they appear. This excerpt mightn't have been the best introduction to the work of Brandon Sanderson, what with all the (mostly necessary) scene-setting and the lack of any further context against which to measure the (somewhat overwhelming) cast of characters introduced herein, but I can say with certainly that I'm desperate to read more of The Way of Kings.

And isn't that exactly what excerpts such as this are supposed to achieve?