Got it for the PC recently. So far it looks better then the 360 version, mostly due to antialiasing, and no slowdown with a fuckload of zombies on the screen, but the game is bugging the hell out of me.

The hero swings everything like he's in a higher gravity then normal, really, really fucking slow and the way he moves is annoying. It's jerky, and when you swing you're pretty much locked in the animation. It's like that took every fighting game made recently and ripped out most of the smoothness.

Now Chuck is a normal dude, so he shouldn't be swinging around a sledgehammer or a sword like War from Darksiders, say the first little bit of this vid with the jumping and sped up fighting style

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But the controls should be way more fluid then this, skip to 2 minutes in or so

[yt]youNA9-Hd54[/yt]

The game itself has some funny moments, but I've gotten killed many times now when I was locked in an attack animation, got out of it, and gotten dogpiled by zombies. The computer version has an annoying as shit method of getting the zombies off you as well. Shake your mouse around like Michael J Fox trying to clear an etch a sketch. Seriously. I'd throw a zombie off me and it'd take a second or two to stop moving the screen.

The game is clearly meant to be a console game, with a half ass porting job done. No better textures, just less jaggys, faster loading, and really small play areas to be able to be handled by the consoles. The biggest areas I've seen so far were in the case zero demo, which was outside on a street surrounded by buildings, still limiting the sight lines pretty hard.

The weapons are the best part, dropping a lawnmower on a zombie and grinding him into blood splatter is pretty awesome, but so far, all the weapons break or wear out. I should be able to take a Louisville slugger and beat more then 10 zombies in the head with it. A thin wooden rake shouldnt have nearly the same durability. A giant sledgehammer seemed like it broke faster.

I get why they made weapons break so fast, it adds to the urgency of the game, but they're scattered everywhere, and you wind up wasting a lot of time grabbing stuff with it's complete stop pick up animation, time the zombies use to rush you. I like the idea of comboing stuff, nails and wooden bat, nails and propane tank, knives and boxing gloves, and killing zombies long range with the metal bat, which launches a baseball that you home run hit into a zombie's brain box, is amusing.

You also have a time limit on your playing. You daughter needs her shot to keep her from turning into a zombie between certain time periods, and you don't have a lot of fuck around time in the single player so far to even enjoy it. Couple that with saving survivors and having to babysit them back to base, and you just don't have enough time for fun stuff. Granted my first mission with a time limit on it wasn't very far away from her shot time, maybe if I go on one right after he shot I'll get longer to cause mayhem.

DONT PUT FUCKING TIME LIMITS IN A SANDBOX GAME. That was one of the major failures from the first game, and they totally threw it right back in. I'll be getting a trainer to disable that shit, I play to have fun, not to time manage a nitwit in a mall.

So far it gets a 3/5 from me. Bad controls, bad fighting animation, middle of the road graphics, and yet it's treating my PC like a bitch. Crysis didn't peg my CPU cores at 90-100% like this game does nonstop. RAM isn't really being close to maxed out, but it's cpu heavy as hell. Run it in a window, or alt tab out and it uses so much less it's insane. I ran it in a window, turned on utorrent with about 900k/sec stuff coming in, threw a movie on the other monitor in the living room, virus scanned a different drive, and was playing music over DR2 (2 sound outputs, Dualview turned on rocks) and didn't come anywhere near the CPU use of the game in fullscreen.

Edit: And how the hell are people zombified with one nibble, and yet Chuck routinely goes down under a dogpile of bites with no problems? and why the fuck isn't he kevlared and masked up? A bite = undeath, and you walk around in shorts and a tee? Are you out of your fucking mind?

 

I just started Darksiders and Dead Rising 2 two days apart from each other. Get the fuck outta my head, Middy.

Tuxedo, dress shoes, grey hair, rocker glasses. Fuck yeah.

 

I've been playing Darksiders for like 2 months. The first boss, the bat thing, literally made me fling the controller at the wall. It is fucking INSANE if you've missed some of the lifestones on the way there. Then the rest of the game for awhile will be easy, then retarded hard. I play it for a bit, get annoyed with it, and walk away for a week or two. Need to finish it.

And you need to pick up your room Tehan and take your trash out, that fucking sandwich wrapper has been sitting there forever.

/stalker

 

Don't stress too much about the time limit, really. If it comes down to it, you can "start over" with all of your shit intact.

Spoiler

If you get the S ending, there's an Overtime mode. No time limits there

So far, I'm loving the hell out of this game. The weapons break kinda fast, but after a while you can hold so many of them that it's hardly an issue. You get hand-to-hand abilities that can throw zombies off pretty early on (you should have the jump kick pretty much right away), so getting new equipment isn't even remotely a challenge unless you're fighting a psychopath.

And if the durability of the weapons really is an issue for you, there are in-game and out-game solutions. For example, if you like bladed weaponry (like the Knife Gloves), there's a book for Edged weapons here, which is here on the first floor map.

Other than that, well...there's a trainer out already for the PC version. You can give yourself infinite ammo, durability, etc. through it.

Really, though, that shouldn't be necessary. The zombies are a complete non-threat unless you're really stupid about fighting them, and from my personal experience, fighting psychopaths at a low level isn't a great idea, though there are drinks and weapons you can create to make it a bit easier.

I'm loving this game. It's a MASSIVE improvement over the first one, from what I've played (of the first one. I'm in my second run of this one).

Just my $.02.

EDIT: Oh, and there's a poker minigame. I hate it. I hate it so much. It takes forever to end. Ughhhh.

 

1. Get mugged by looters
2. Spawn naked in random bathroom
3. Proceed to finish missions
4. Watch cut scenes of you naked
5. ???
6. Profit

 

Funnier when you're in women's clothing with a full beard or with one of those crazy masks they've got strewn about, but still rad.

 

Made some mods for the game.

Unlimited durability made the weapons system way more interesting for me. I hated making something cool by gathering the parts and having it fall apart so soon. I throw away stuff pretty often to just use something different, not because I have to, but because I want to. I don't like being forced to play a certain way, even if I'll wind up playing like that later on.

The modders made a teleport system for Chuck to be able to go from the safehouse to the entry of the casino's by himself. Huge time saver, and made the game fun for me. I hated running all over, because I'd get distracted and wind up having missions expire on me. Again, freedom to play how I want.

The ability to pocket anything. I made an awesome battery + rake weapon that would clear out tons of zombies. Yet I can't switch to something else? Why the fuck can I have a dynamite shooting bow, a lightsaber, fucking guitar with an amp struck to it, and a super soaker with a fire extinguisher duck taped to it, in my unlimited bag of holding, but not the shock rake?

FOV increase from 43 to 60+. I always felt like I couldn't see anything, and I don't know why the hell so many third person games from the consoles always limit the shit out your field of view. Changing the fov was a game changer, I could see better, fight better, move around better.

Now they need to change the way you pick stuff up and I'll give this a 3.5-4/5 from me. I still wind up picking up stuff I'm not directly looking at, or dropping my shock rake for the casino chair when I'm trying to use the gambling machine. Modding is slowly starting to work some kinks out, but modders shouldn't have to fix your damned game.

 

I tried playing the first Dead Rising. I can definitely see the appeal of killing zombies in a shopping mall and everything, but the controls were shit, the story was shit, the character models were shit, the weapons broke too fast for it to be fun and the AI for the survivors was just awful. Took it back the day after.

From the sounds of it, this isn't much better. Figures.

 

I don't see most of those things as issues, to be completely honest. Aside from the field of view thing, all of that pretty much makes sense. It's a large area and you're given a fuckload of time to do things. Don't waste your time dicking around and you can get just about all of it done with time to spare. A teleport does open up between Palisades Mall and a bathroom just outside the saferoom, but then, Palisades and Royal Flush are pretty fucking far away from each other.

This is a game based around a random dude killing zombies and crazy people with items he picks up off the ground. Don't expect infinite ammo or for items to last forever, that doesn't make sense. Weapons are everywhere, especially given the ability to make your own. If you're willing to make several items at a time- which is not an unreasonable thing, considering Royal Flush has the materials for two blambows just sitting around- you should almost never run out of items. If you do? Look at the map. Maintenance rooms are everywhere, it's not exactly hard to get more.

I mean, I understand griping about some of these things as gameplay elements, but...honestly, you're not griping about flaws. You're griping about features. It's broken in a few ways, but the ones you've listed are not actually flaws.

TL;DR: I get defensive for no reason. :facepalm

Edit: Also, Sion: for what it's worth, the survivor AI has been massively improved. The controls...well, I don't want to say they're better, because from the sounds of things, you didn't exactly give the game a chance to begin with. I mentioned it earlier in this thread, but at the low levels, Dead Rising is supposed to be hard. It gets easier as you level up, and there are methods to get shit to last longer (for example, an early psychopath in DR1 drops mini-chainsaws. If you're not too crazy about using them, and you grab the three weapons books, it will last an entire 72-hour game session.)

 

But Middy doesn't want to play a hardcore game for hardcore people such as yourself. He wants to fuck around killing zombies and still have time enough to rescue people and see the story. I'm probably going to track down and install some of those mods myself, because hell, I like fucking around and killing zombies too.

Are there any books that increase the durability of Chuck-made weapons?

 

So I've been told. I dunno. I could easily borrow it from a friend and try again. Though I think most of my problems came from it not being what I expected. That being, an easy, only-an-idiot-could-fail-it free-roam game where I could waste time killing zombies in inventive ways for a few hours at a time. I guess it's a case of "Did Not Do The Research."

 

Though I still have the game I had the same impression. I just couldn't get into it especially with the time limit crap. The whole controlling/viewpoint only caused frustrations.

Maybe the game works for people who have the patience to play through the steep frustration curve and get used to its serious problems.

 

Dead Rising games do eventually become that kind of game, Sion, just not at first. At the early levels, it's going to be frustrating to do much of anything. By contrast, when you're level 50 even (most of) the psychopaths aren't much of a threat.

Tehan: the thing is, you can do all of those things. The thing is, Dead Rising also encourages doing things over several playthroughs, which is why some of the better weapons- such as the Real Mega Buster from the first game- you can't even get on your first run. Dedicate a run to fucking around, killing zombies and occasionally rescuing people, dedicate a run to saving people and doing story. If you're trying to do all three at once, you definitely need to do the zombie massacring in moderation. DR2 has pretty generous time limits, but you do have to pay attention to them.

EDIT: One actually negative thing about the games, though, is that they have the grindiest fucking achievements. Kill 72,000 zombies in one session? Reeeeaally? D:

 

Not everyone has the time, patience, or stubbornness to play through a game multiple times. The only reason I've restarted DR2 once so far is because of the leveling thing, and at the moment it's languishing unplayed because just fucking around is boring and I've already played the first day's worth of story missions. Is actual beatable campaign interlaced with ample screwing-around opportunities really so much to ask?

 

Assuming you played non-stop, the total length of the "72 hours" adds up to about 6 actual hours. A decent length for a game is usually in the 10-20 hour range for action games, and something outlandishly longer for other ones. You can quit and restart the story at any time within that 72 hour game by just letting yourself die, keeping all of the experience you earned in that run.

You're not wrong, but considering a first run of DR games should not be the campaign (you're in a massive mall/city filled with zombies and ample weapons to kill them with and all you care about is the story? Really?), you can realistically finish the two runs in 12 hours or less. Saving survivors grants a fuckload of experience and there's a lot of that (plus psychopaths to try to kill) in the first run, so if you get bored killing zombies, there's always that, and hey, it'll make you stronger for the story run, which- in DR2, at least- actually has a beatable campaign interlaced with ample screwing around opportunities. You just need to have a FEW levels on your belt for it to not be crazy hard.

All that being said, I'll stop white-knighting the game. If it's really that terrible for asking you to fuck around with a massive area to explore, maybe saving a few people for a few hours before you get to the story, then maybe this game really just isn't for you.

 

Don't get me wrong, I enjoy the game when I can stand treating paths I've already trod, but I'd enjoy it a fair bit more if I could fuck around in between the story more, didn't have to constantly replace weapons, and didn't have to hike (on foot, at an unupgraded walking speed) from one side of the mall to the other every five minutes.

I like sandbox games. I also like story-driven games with a leveling system. Sandbox games with a leveling system make me twitchy, however. Not a criticism of the game, just pointing out where it doesn't mesh exactly with my preferences.

 

True, but it's annoying as fuck to try to just go into what's supposed to be a sandbox game, and deal with shitty controls, weapons that break way too fast, and the other stuff I mentioned. Yeah I can make more, but unless the cutscene is skippable on the consoles (it's not on my pc, maybe I have a problem), I don't see how you can justify having to watch that shit every time you want to make something. Making four things in a row drove me nuts. Once you get the combo card, you should be able to have an inventory and make that shit, the smaller stuff anyway.

This should be a game to just screw around with, with a decent story, like GTA, imho. I don't like time limits, I don't like being forced to play a certain way. I don't want to have to play with time constraints in order to be able to fuck around. I want to be able to find a bow, a tomahawk, and an indian headdress and go fuck up some zombies from on top of a perch if I want to while making offensive jokes about scalping if I want to, without worrying that some really, really, really ugly modeled little girl is going to zombify. Despite the fact that I don't turn... even though I get bit a hundred times more then she did in one play through.

AI is better? I had those two married gun nuts to rescue. I had to basically wipe out the entire map to keep them from getting stuck on stuff, or just blindly running into throngs of zombies, and they spent half the time walking through each other's crossfire, or my own. Then the bastards turned on me after the second time I hit them with a bat, like 30 feet from the safehouse. Much rage was had. I did give the people trying to rip off the one casino shotguns though, and that was pretty good, but with pistols or melee weapons they all seem retarded.

With the mods I stuck in, it becomes a lot more playable, and enjoyable to me as a game, instead of a race against a stopwatch, with a lot of long ass walks in between. It doesn't matter if they give you 5 hours realtime to do a mission. If all you want to do is log in and fuck off, you should be able to do that in a glorified sandbox game.

I can see a few weapons that'd let you do that without an assload of work, but yeah, that's pretty high, lol.

And you're shitting me, the single player is only 6 hours... jesus christ. I think I spent longer then that screwing around in the demo for Case Zero

 

I've heard the only realistic way to get that 72k is to buy the hummer key, get the book, and spend all three days just going back and forth, mowing down zombies. The estimation I read said that you should reach 72k with only two hours to spare.

 

That's if you don't fuck up, Tehan. If you fuck up at any point in time, you could just barely hit the mark or, as with happened with me, fall way behind and just fail it. The other genocider achievement is much saner.

And yeah, the "just created a thing" cutscene is skippable.

Also, survivor AI: they'll actually avoid zombies if possible in this game. In DR1, the stupid fucks literally run at the zombies and stop to try and fend them off. The AI may not necessarily be great, but it's vastly improved.

 

I stand corrected then, that's pretty harsh.

Odd it doesnt skip for me on PC. Maybe it's the version I have.

Thats more or less exactly what they do unless I use the "go here" option. Otherwise they seem to always get caught up on stuff I can get around easily.

Also, white knight it all you want, you always need those for good discussion.