Frank West is back! He’s covered wars, you know …
The rockstar photojournalist hero of Capcom’s groundbreaking zombie-survival hit Dead Rising returns in a new remaster later this year, which the publisher surprise-announced on Wednesday.
Dead Rising, Keiji Inafune’s homage to cult zombie flicks, and a progenitor of the undead apocalypse craze that has endured as a motif, if not a genre, more than 15 years later, comes back with updated visuals “a brand-new look” and what sounds like a new voice actor for West himself.
At any rate, it’ll be a classic game with modern visuals playable natively on current hardware. Dead Rising was re-released for PlayStation 4 and Xbox One (as well as Windows PC) in September 2016, and is playable on PS5 and Xbox Series X, but only because of backward compatibility. This is a version specific to the newest family of hardware.
In Dead Rising, players are West, who drops into the town of Willamette, Colo. to get a firsthand look at what the government isn’t telling us about this zombie outbreak and infestation.
He ends up in the Willamette Parkview Mall, where he loots stores and scavenges items to construct weapons and traps that help him survive a three-day undead onslaught until help arrives. Dead Rising’s makers were very careful never to mention noted grindhouse thriller director George A. Romero or his cult hit Dawn of the Dead, but it’s clear Dead Rising takes great inspiration from both.
Dead Rising was for a time a major franchise in Capcom’s library, spawning a 2010 sequel for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (starring a different protagonist, the motocross star Chuck Greene), then a stranger and more poorly received Xbox One console exclusive in 2013. Inafune, one of the original designers of the Mega Man franchise, left Capcom in 2010 shortly before Dead Rising 2’s launch (Greene’s yellow and black racing jacket, which says Ijiek, is an homage to the series creator) to start Comcept, the studio behind Mighty No. 9, a crowdfunded spiritual successor to Mega Man.
Dead Rising 4 returned the show to Colorado in 2016 for PS4 and Xbox One, in a game that drew indifferent-to-middling interest. Its studio, Capcom Vancouver, was closed two years later.
In any case, the news that Frank West is back on assignment should excite older fans who remember him at the vanguard of something that today seems so cliché — one compos mentis human against a brainless horde, since copied by Left 4 Dead; Call of Duty’s Zombies mode (beginning with 2008’s World at War); the Dying Light franchise and Days Gone.
Dead Rising: Deluxe Remaster doesn’t have a firm launch date, but should arrive later in 2024.
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