I’m an Impatient Gamer. And I’ve Bought Dead Rising Four Times

I am an impatient gamer. I get bored quickly and while I often have the intentions to play a game through, in reality I don’t. It’s not (always) because they’re bad games, it’s just that unless there’s a really compelling reason for me to keep pushing I’ll simply leave it to collect dust. If a game is good, or more if I like it, I can get utterly enthralled with it. Fallout, Bioshock, Sim City 4 and Red Dead Redemption are recent examples of games that I just keep playing. Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is a game where I have played single missions for two or three hours because I kept setting off an alarm or didn’t knock that guard out quietly enough. This is a compulsive drive, one which will keep me playing until I do it right.

But this patience doesn’t extend to most games. I sat down with Red Faction Guerrilla a few months ago, a game I’d bought to fill in the gaps before Red Dead and I was enjoying the missions, the destruction mechanics were fun but still I found myself getting incredibly bored after a couple of hours of play. There wasn’t anything wrong with it, I just didn’t have the patience to engage with it. I would occasionally smash a building or throw cars with the mechs but that was about all I had time for.

Assassin’s Creed 2 had similar problems. I played through the story fairly quickly and while the ending was a bit rubbish I had enjoyed it for the most part. I kept the game for around three months after it came out, occasionally playing it. As it sat on the shelf, I would think to myself  ’I really want to play that’ then put the disc in a proceed to jump around in renaissance Italy. For about 20 minutes. That was all I could take before I became irritated and bored. It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why, but I think it stems from the total lack of anything interesting to do. I’m not the sort of person to collect every feather or do monotonous things like that, so other than having single button sword fights or jumping about, it was just lifeless. I’ve since traded in the game, but still I long to play it. I know full well that I will fall in love all over again, wish I’d never left it and jump around the city in total joy… for 20 minutes. Then our love-hate relationship will once again re-emerge and I’ll want to do nothing but throw the game out of the window. And I live by a river.

Other games like Far Cry 2 and Condemned are the same. Far Cry, while deeply flawed (having guys shoot at you every time you go past an outpost ruined the game) is still fun and I occasionally have this urge to buy it for cheap off of Amazon. But I know I’ll drive around for ten minutes, get killed driving past a guard post and immediately go back to dashboard like a petulant child.

There is, however, one game that excels in dragging me in, longing me to play just so it can then punch me in the mouth with with a huge plastic Lego head. A game I love and hate so much that I have bought and traded it in four times. Dead Rising was a game that had so much potential it hurts. You’re in a mall. With zombies. And loads of weapons. What more could you want? The first hour or so is a careful build-up to the open mall where the real fun begins. You talk to various people, meet the most irritating radio operator in the world and say various macho catchphrases. Then you’re presented with the game’s core feature: killing zombies. Guitars, toy light sabers, hockey sticks, skateboards, different kinds of guitars, they’re all yours. At the time, being able to draw that many characters on screen was also a fair achievement and it seemed that game’s reach was endless.

Then, Otis starts calling you. If you had an SD TV you couldn’t even read what he was saying, but he carried on. He’d say “go over there, there’s some people to save”, which you would do only to find that people needing saving had the worst AI imaginable. It was like carrying a priceless vase through a 18th century battlefield.

But there’s more. The characters, the moronic saving system that meant you could only save in toilets; something especially useful when you had an entourage of idiotic vases following you. Even the way Frank walks aggravates me like nothing so silly should. He constantly walks like he’s shat himself and his grunting every time he decapitates a zombie makes it even harder to tolerate him.

Yet, if I saw this game in a store for a fiver, I’d probably buy it. It’s like some sort of twisted masochism that I can’t escape from. I have a problem.

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