Forget what you know about Dead Rising 2, as players will experience a re-imagining of the Fortune City outbreak. Just think of this as a little tease for what kinds of diabolical devices you’ll be able to craft when you get your hands on the game August 31.Photojournalist and original hero of Dead Rising's Willamette incident, Frank West, takes center stage once again in Dead Rising 2: Off the Record. It’s by no means a comprehensive guide-there are going to be a ton more combinations in the game. Now that you have a bit more background, here’s a look at the weapon combos that we know will be in the game. And going forward with the combo weapons, we took a trip to Home Depot over here and walked the aisles and went, ‘What would be fun to kill zombies with over here? What if you took this thing and that thing and brought them together?’” And on top of that we sort of built on the research and going into the field to malls and casinos to see what types of objects are around, because you need that reality to populate the world and ground the player. Some were box type items, there were single-handed items and slicing and so on. “One thing we did when we broke the design down for DR1 is looked at how the weapons sort of fell into categories. “With the weapons, I think some of it was just playing DR1 and seeing what worked,” adds Jason Leigh, the game’s senior producer.
We go from that and think, ‘How do we turn a ficus plant into something deadly?’ That’s where Jason and his weapons team took over.” If you’re in a mall, that sort of lets you walk around a mall and go, ‘Oh, I’d like to beat somebody with that or put that over someone’s head.’ We added the casinos to it, so it was a whole other exploration of what does this environment provide us as a base. If you’re in a meat-packing plant, you’re going to have slabs of meat and cleavers and whatever. “We have to come up with our base weapons and our environment provides it. “It kind of starts with our environment,” says the game’s executive producer and Blue Castle Games’ co-founder Rob Barrett. Looking at the dizzying amount of weapons available-of which we’ve only seen a handful-had us wondering how exactly a team comes up with such a crazy roster of tools. While discovering weapons through luck, happenstance, or message-board postings is a serviceable solution, players who manage to track down those combo cards and earn them “legitimately” gain enhanced attacks from those weapons.
Combinations can be discovered through trial and error or by discovering combo cards and gaining inspiration from a variety of posters advertising an upcoming action movie. Players can combine certain objects at the tool benches, which are scattered throughout Fortune City. Maybe you couldn’t combine two items with a hammer and nails, but tape is so versatile.” “If it was a screwdriver or a hammer it would be a different thing. “I think the duct tape plays well into it, because you can pretty much tape anything,” says Shinsaku Ohara, Dead Rising 2’s producer. In contrast, Greene scores extra PPs by using hybrid weapons that he cobbles together using liberal amounts of ingenuity and the handyman’s secret weapon.
It’s just that West earned the bulk of his level-enhancing prestige points by snapping photos of the mayhem around him. That’s not to say West was above getting his hands dirty-he could sling CD cases, break boards over heads, and auger the undead in half with the best of them. Frank West may have let his camera do some of his dirty work in Dead Rising, but the sequel’s Chuck Greene is definitely more of a hands-on kind of guy.