PS2 title suggests Dead Rising Wii is a cop-out
Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 5:19pm by DerekWe’ve heard ad nauseam Wii just isn’t powerful enough to replicate the massive zombie infestations of the original Dead Rising.
Above is a video comparison of Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop and Hitman: Blood Money, a two-year-old game running on a PS2. It originally surfaced in August, but it seems many of us missed it.
I won’t say a word. You can decide for yourself whether or not you believe Wii is less powerful than hardware developed a decade ago.
Tremendous thanks to Infendo reader Elmer for this link!
October 10th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
That’s the frustration I have with some developers on the Wii. They use the fact that the Wii isn’t as powerful as PS3 and 360 to make poor titles, when there are many games that do so much more on old systems.
That being said, Capcom has done some amazing titles for the Wii and have more to come.
October 10th, 2008 at 5:41 pm
You have to keep something else in mind. In Hitman all of those people only did one thing: walk when things are fine, and run when bullets started flying. In Dead Rising, each one of those zombies has it’s own enemy AI attached to it. I’m not saying the Wii probably can’t do it, but there’s a lot more going on that this video couldn’t possibly show.
October 10th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Correction: In Hitman, they don’t even run away. They just keep walking around like nothing is happening even when the person standing directly in front of them is riddled with bullets before their very stupid eyes.
October 10th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
In Hitman, you could watch the people disappear and reappear on the edge of the screen…
October 10th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
This game looks like a boring mess, graphics and otherwise. I would have prefered and exactly port of Lost Planet instead.
October 10th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Josh Styles, you have a point. But the massive zombie hoards in Dead Rising on the 360 weren’t exactly rich in AI, either.
October 10th, 2008 at 6:54 pm
Capcom totally screwed the pooch with this one, plain and simple. There are similar crowd scenes in Jade Empire on the Xbox, but the people in the crowd are considerably more optimized in both geometry and textures than the actual interactive NPCs and player characters. Most of them didn’t even have collision. Either way, Capcom is still on the shit-list for this. Smoke and mirrors can do amazing things and simply put, Chop till you Drop is by far the most substantial example of sheer lack of effort going into many 3rd party Wii titles. This makes it a lot harder for those 3rd party games where the developer has busted their ass to make a great game to get the respect they deserve. I don’t want to hear any technical limitation arguments from anyone on this. Everyone remember the old Mario 128 demo for the Game Cube from way back when? No excuses, Capcom, you’ve just seriously pissed off a lot of people.
PS: They’re freakin’ Zombies. They’re not supposed to be intelligent, artificially or otherwise. There supposed to just lumber about getting shot at or blown up and biting you when you get too close.
October 10th, 2008 at 8:54 pm
I don’t know the blame seems to fall on the producer or the money he was given to do the project. I say this because VS, and monster hunter looks like works of skill while dead rising is a port hack of a bad 360 game that people actually liked.
Hey maybe they should delay it or just put it off and make another game? No one likes this game.
October 10th, 2008 at 9:55 pm
It’s not about believing the Wii has less power than the PS2, that is absolutely false. The GC itself was more powerful than the PS2 (they had to downgrade RE4 on the PS2), so even if the Wii were merely a GC it can do better.
Honestly, I don’t see why the Hitman people can do such massive crows and the Capcom guys can’t. Both are mindless masses, so I don’t see “AI” as a real counterpoint.
Oh well, I’m still hoping this tanks. Hopefully Capcom will soon stop porting everything to the Wii and make something new.
October 10th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
I’m not going to say anything about the Hitman comparison, because I honestly have no idea how they coded the crowd/zombies and how much went into their AI.
I will say, however, that Dead Rising’s controls look incredibly clunky and awful. Steering a shopping cart should be that hard. I can pull 180’s on one with a finicky wheel no problem.
October 10th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
shouldn’t*
October 10th, 2008 at 10:18 pm
Seeing this video is clear to anyone how much Capcom is being cheap with this project. The problem lies in trying to use the RE4 engine, which was designed with completely different goals. I am not surprised is not working well. I am rather surprised on how low Capcom perceive their Wii customers.
October 10th, 2008 at 10:28 pm
All I know is that Final Fantasy XII is on the PS2 and still looks better than any game on the Wii so far. There is no excuse for that.
October 10th, 2008 at 10:53 pm
if every zombie in dead rising has more sophisticated AI then was in RE4 then capcom is doing it wrong.
Those zombies do nothing but lurch towards you no matter what you do and grab at you when you are nearby.
What is this need for AI so advanced they have trouble getting 100 units on screen at once. Why is it taking them so long to do so, and why do they even to this day, only show video with a tiny amount of zombies on screen at once.
It is very much a lack of passion for the port that is allowing such laziness, or capcom had better do one of 2 things.
Start explaining the difficulty (Wii has alot of memory and more CPU then even the gamecube to work some magic) or they need to shut up about the game til they can show something worthy of the title
Honestly, i would hope for the second option. I dont think they can really explain their lack of abilities in a satisfying way.
October 11th, 2008 at 2:37 am
This game really ticked me off when it was announced for the Wii and especially when i saw the video mentioned above.
Its a VERY poor effort, and apparently news from TGA pus the release date in Feb 2009, thats before the Conduit. Now compare the most recent builds of both those games.
Sheech, i mean seriously….. why are they wasting their resources(what little they botheres investing) on such a terrible game in the first place?
It’s games like this that are giving the Wii a bad rap in gaming circles.
October 11th, 2008 at 5:17 am
The quality of 3rd party titles appears to have improved since Nintendo’s last show and I think this effort from Capcom is probably one of the last of the half arsed first generation of Wii titles.
With any luck, it’ll take on board the absolute pasting it’s getting on the internet for this and do the game properly.
And to be perfectly honest, I never actually doubted the Wii was capable of having a large number of zombies on screen at once.
October 11th, 2008 at 7:02 am
As I said to Paul 2 in the original article, it’s true that the Hitman game was hardly smart but how smart are Zombies anyway? And it’s not like that scenario was the crux of Hitman. And it’s not like it was running on 2 gamecubes duck taped together. And it’s not like it pushed that system to its limits. And it’s not like the Zombies were more varied. And it’s not like the Zombies had great collision detection. And it’s not like the crowd did nothing.
They did about five things. They meandered, they cowered, they ran away, they shot back, they died.
Replace that with zombie aimless shuffle, zombie notice, zombie stagger for meat, zombie maul and zombie crunch and you have Dead Rising.
October 11th, 2008 at 1:11 pm
I say we should boycott Dead Rising until they put a decent amount of zombies in it. Maybe we could even do a web petition stating that.
October 11th, 2008 at 2:01 pm
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October 11th, 2008 at 6:16 pm
I’m sure there’s more code that goes into Zombie AI than we know compared to “retards-that-don’t-run-when-shot-at” AI. I would think that if the graphics were downgraded THAT badly from the original then there should definitely be enough room for more enemies on screen. Or, maybe this video is from an early part of the game where there just aren’t that many zombies. I really hope Capcom puts a little more effort (if any at all) into making this an enjoyable Wii port. I loved RE4:Wii Edition and they haven’t really failed me yet.
October 11th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
It’s the beggining of the game as you play more, more zombies will be added.
October 12th, 2008 at 8:34 pm
Capcom is so cheap by using the crappy RE4 engine, all the developers are, in fact the NGC is more powerfull than the PS2, the Wii is more powerfull than the NGC and the original XBOX (except for the resolution thing).
The Wii and the PS3 are suffering the same problem, there are a few or none software wich get the best of each system
October 12th, 2008 at 10:29 pm
Crappy port, crappy port what’cha gonna do?