Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Dead Rising 2: Case Zero

So the Dead Rising 2 "prologue", Case Zero, is going to contain about three hours of gameplay,  Capcom's Keiji Inafune told Kotaku.

Three hours if it's "rushed through," allegedly.

Here's a bit more:
Set two years after the Willamette incident of Dead Rising and Frank West and three years before the game show zombies of Dead Rising 2, Case Zero, Capcom's Keiji Inafune promises, will "bridge the gap" between the two games.

Well, it bridges that gap if you buy it, because it's a pay demo, not a free one.

Not a demo? Sure it is, unless they also release a free demo. If there's no free demo, and there's "prequel" content that you pay for before the full game is released, it's a demo.

Again, and I hate to harp on this, but it just seems to be the dominant theme day after day after day: big gaming companies are giving us less and less value.

I've had free demos last much longer than three hours. This isn't any new kind of content category: it's a price increase. A price increase on top the price increase that DLC gave us if we wanted to experience the "full" game. A price increase on top of "one-time use coupons" included in new games that are intended to gut the resale market. A price increase on top of the change in game price from $50 to $60 when the 360 and PS3 launched.

Good grief.

Price? No one knows, and (of course) Capcom doesn't want to tell us until the last minute, to mute what is certain to be a general level of outrage. But this is case zero, so to speak, in what looks like it could be an unfortunate, ugly trend.

I loved Dead Rising--it's still one of my favorite 360 games and one of the most entertaining of the next-gen games. It would have absolutely been a minute one purchase for me. Instead, though, I may well just rent it. So in their quest to get an extra $5 (or a bit more, possibly) out of me, they lost $60 instead.

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