Dead Rising (Chop Till You Drop)
There was a singularly high profile Zombie Game released a week or two ago now, and I didn’t comment on it. While I’ve been letting Resident Evil 2 bake in my head for a few days after playing it initially.
I’m drawn to Raccoon City. As a kid, I actually couldn’t play the game at all, preferring the more action oriented Resident Evil 3 so the original release has been nestled in some dark corner of my mind where it can fester, and fester it has.
It seems pretty easy to draw parallels between George Romero’s Dead movies, as has surely been done thousands of times before and will persist until either Resident Evil or those original movies fade out of the cultural canon. Resident Evil might have different and far cheekier things to say about human nature and capitalism than Romero’s movies, but I always found it most interesting that the two series didn’t share more of an affinity for locations.
Nobody really wanted to play through Day of the Dead, but if you’re curious to you can always try out Capcom’s other franchise, Dead Rising. Though they abandoned the mall as a location after the second installment, even by then most people had long since stopped shopping at them.
If there’s one way to get the message through of the rot at the heart of capitalism, there’s really no better way to have done it than by showcasing the end of the world starting in a mall.
I still have to shop at malls, occasionally. Such is rural isolation in the southwest that while not entirely dependent on big-box retail, if I want something now instead of in a few days by Amazon I have to be willing to drive from one county to the next. Don’t imagine that the malls I shop at are still populated by teenagers and college kids, though – they’re likely just as emptied out and vacant as they are anywhere else. A few stores cling on for dear life, it always seems like there’s two bored townies in the food court with nowhere else to go and a ravenous hunger for Dairy Queen.
The Mall has traditionally always resembled churches. A worse critique might say something about how they’re monuments to mass-market purchasing as prayer and worship, but it’s really all there?
High ceilings, open air and natural lighting. Water features and trees displayed in arrangements that happen nowhere else in the natural world.
Dead Rising once made it to the Nintendo Wii in a form called Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop.
This too, has festered in a dark corner of my mind.
In Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop, a piece of software from an out of date console that was either released too far before it’s expiration date or too far after, the rot is more here than it ever was.
Now that malls in real life have become mostly abandoned places of once-worship, so too do the undead wander through them.
In the low fidelity, muddy textures of Chop Till You Drop’s mall, there’s no space reserved for the teeming hordes of the console original. Even the goofy excess of those games is downplayed – here you’ll primarily be dispensing with the undead with the various firearms you find littering the complex. Gone is the inherent goofiness of placing traffic cones over the chattering mouth of a once-was. Why mess around with all of that, when you can just shoot most of them?
Something about Chop Till You Drop still tastes bad, even though it was released far before the current popularity of shootings in public places. Like playing through the fantasy of a right-wing adjunct, taking his frustrations out on the masses in a now mostly abandoned shopping mall. I can’t imagine actually going to play it again now.
The mall here, much smaller and more intimate than the ones in the big-brother console titles is still communicated with that same vocabulary, too. The open spaces are the same, the natural lighting – joking about a food court with seating arranged in pews is too much maybe? Missing the abstraction of spaces prevalent in Capcom’s other Zombie franchise, some parts of Dead Rising feel a little too real today. Doubly so in this installment, when a trip to a real mall leaves you at most wandering into one or two other people. Less worry about cannibalism, I guess.
I wonder in 2019 what takes most of us back to these places. A good deal of our population is growing its own baby-boomer like nostalgia for a simpler time of teenage luxury capitalism and brick-and-mortar shopping. Maybe some of us are simply forced to, malls being one of the few holdouts in rural areas that large corporations are increasingly more ambivalent about supporting.
It’s clear that in the event of a viral apocalypse, perhaps the mall would be the strangest holdout of all, no different than expecting a church to keep you safe from harm. Empty and abandoned, a roof over your head in a place drained of everything we once thought gave it meaning.
