Dead Rising 2 Multiplayer

The last round, Slicecycles, gets the most positive reception from the crowds assembled at Capcom's unveiling party. Each contestant rides a chainsaw-mounted motorcycle around another zombie-packed arena until you can't see through the bloody mist. Depending on your position at the beginning of the round, you get a few extra seconds' advantage over your opponents, and it's this final round that actually determines who wins. It's all bonkers, obviously, and incredibly flippant, but Dead Rising is a bonkers and flippant videogame. It would have been good to see co-operative multiplayer or something else more, well, substantial as Dead Rising 2's multiplayer component, but it would also have been boring; this nonsense technicolour gameshow fits the spirit of the game rather well.

Keiji Inafune feels that Dead Rising 2's capacity for creative violence ought still to surprise us - generating new and better ideas was one of the key motivations for opening the franchise up for collaboration with a Western developer. "What you're going to see in Dead Rising 2 is definitely more than you can even imagine when it comes to how creative the violence can get," he says, during the brief few minutes we manage to snatch with him at Terror is Reality's grand unveiling. "One of the key ways we've been able to do that is through working with Blue Castle. The original game was designed and created by in-house Japanese designers, and you're limited by your own culture in terms of the ideas you can come up with." (Who but the Canadians could have come up with the idea of sticking moose antlers on motocross cyclists in a zombie gameshow, after all?)

"By working with a Canadian developer we have truly been able to find the best of both worlds, and their ideas for what makes really good horror or violence or a nice blood-splatter effect are slightly different from what we'd be able to come up with on our own in Japan. By having that perfect mix we are able to accomplish something that is very new, and violent in a very creative fashion - even more so than in the original game."

Terror is Reality does rather throw the context of the single-player game into confusion; how does the gameshow concept tie in with the casino-town that new protagonist Chuck will be romping around, and why is he taking part in a zombie gameshow in the first place? It's not remotely clear how it all fits together. Whatever we expected from Dead Rising 2's multiplayer, it was absolutely nothing like this - and though it's definitely a Good Thing when games still have the capacity to surprise you, it might feel a little lightweight in the context of the final release. Capcom promises more than four different rounds for the final game, but for a lot of players, ten mini-games won't make up for a lack of co-operative multiplayer. Not even when they're as delightfully cracked as these.