Last week, those teases at Capcom dangled a remastered version of 2006 zombie action gem Dead Rising before the darting, entranced eyes of me specifically. The Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, presumably named so to differentiate it from the 2016 HD Remaster, now looks to be shambling ever closer to full remake territory if the new footage Capcom shared as part of yesterday’s NEXT showcase is anything to go by. Also, it’s coming to Steam! I’ve checked with the rest of the treehouse, and this means it’s also confirmed for PC. Get in!
For the video haters among you (moving pictures truly are the devil’s work), here’s a quick comparison between what looks like the 2016 HD version, and the upcoming (19th September 2024) Deluxe version:
Please, please, save your applause. Oh, sure. Some might say my coverage is “giving Digital Foundry a run for their money”. But I do this for you, not for petty accolades.
Elsewhere in the showcase, Director Ryosuke Murai sheds a bit more light on what exactly the “Deluxe Remaster” entails. It wouldn’t be an exaggeration, he says, to call it a remake, considering the amount of work that went into it. It’s a 4K/60 FPS job, with control tweaks like letting protag Frank move while aiming. I’m a bit less jazzed about the autosave feature, since the tension of having limited saves was one of the original’s main draws for me, but I’ll hold out to see how it’s implemented. That said, I absolutely welcome promised improvements to hopefully stop the idiot escortable NPCs being idiots quite so often. Do check out the above showcase for more details on the new tech.
If you missed Dead Rising the first time around, our Matt Jarvis does a great job of explaining why it was so great. I like it a lot, too. So much, in fact, that I once spent an entire day grinding out one of the most infamously ridiculous Xbox achievements of all time. ‘Zombie Genocider’ had you kill 53,594 – the population of the town the game is set in – zombies in a single playthrough. In reality, this meant I was sat on a sofa with a tenners of shit hash and a homemade Lucozade bottle bong, mowing a car back and forth through zombo-infested underground tunnels, for roughly eight solid hours of my life.
I regret nothing, although I will not be repeating the experience when the new version releases on Steam. Unless you all make it very clear in the comments that you’d very much read this sort of Gonzo self-flagellation games writing, in which case Graham might let me do it. Wait. What am I saying? No. Never again.