Dead Rising 2 Officially Unveiled

Zombies have been an almost integral part of the gaming industry. There's no other experience as intense as knowing that legions of undead are following you and can hardly wait to eat you if you make one wrong step.

That's why plenty of zombie shooters have appeared in recent years. But although a lot have offered some pretty entertaining experiences, it was Capcom's Dead Rising, released in 2006 for the Xbox 360, that really made a difference. The game featured photo journalist Frank West as he traveled to a remote little town that was rumored to be infected with a virus that turned everyone into a zombie. It offered a very intense experience coupled with the fact that you had to take photos in order to have proof of the existence of zombies.

Now, as Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop, an adaptation of the first title, is getting ready to be released for the Wii, Capcom has unveiled the sequel to the first game. Cleverly entitled Dead Rising 2, it takes place two years after the first one, and it reveals that the virus wasn't contained at the end of the original game and it has now spread across North America. 

“The sequel to the 1.5 million-plus selling Dead Rising, Dead Rising 2 will take the franchise to a new level of zombie-killing fun with tens of thousands of zombies, the all new gambling paradise of Fortune City to explore and conquer plus a host of new in-game objects that can all be used as deadly weapons to stave off the zombie assault,” reads the official press statement.

Although it seems that we won't get to play as Frank once again, from the few screenshots released by the Japanese company vehicles and other objects will help an alleged stunt man escape the hordes of undead monsters. Developed in partnership with Canadian developer Blue Castle Games, the production will be overseen by key people who worked on the first game and by Capcom's global head of research and development Keiji Inafune.

So it seems that players will once again be able to start fighting zombies, but this time the shopping mall of the first one will be replaced by a casino setting. Also, most importantly, the game will be multiplatform, available for both the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 but also for the PC, part of the new partnership between the Japanese company and the PC Gaming Alliance.