When Dead Rising first came out it was...well, it was one of the few games you could play on the 360. It wasn't great, but it squeaked by as something unique on a console that was still trying to find its identity. Once in Vancouver, steeped in game design and the attending developers, it became apparent that it was -- like all Japanese games (and I'm not afraid to say that) tragically flawed.
Dead Rising created tension that wasn't there by forcing one slot saving in bathrooms, sending you on badly designed "save the suicidal zombie bait" quests with draconian time limits, and freely admitting that you would probably die and lose all your saves (with their persistent character progression, which they assumed people would use for multiple new game plus' after repeated failure).
While I've always seen game director Keiji Inafune as the only Japanese videogame figure that has some idea of what's going on in the West, it's still distinctly Japanese in its ways of saying to the player "No, fuck you - try again".
After starting up Dead Rising 2, I had to shut it off after ten minutes of muted zombie killing, after equal time spent watching terribly cheesy cutscenes. On Twitter,
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