Dead Rising: Chop Till You Drop (2009) Review — The Most Interesting Bad Game
Chop Till You Drop is Capcom’s diminished Wii port of their Xbox 360 title Dead Rising. I’ll say right now that this game is terrible but absolutely fascinating, and I’d recommend reading my review of the base game first.
History’s Creepin’ In
Dead Rising was originally released in 2006 and intended to be a launch title for the Xbox 360 but was pushed back a year. Nonetheless, it was a great demonstration of what 7th generation hardware was capable of, with its (comparatively) higher resolution models, textures and NPCs on screen at one time. Although the Wii was also 7th generation, it prioritised accessibility in its controller over power and its architecture was identical to the previous gen’s GameCube, just higher spec. Understandably, this all meant huge cuts to the game besides resolution and texture quality.
The other big reason for the drastic changes is the engine. The decision to port Dead Rising to the Wii stemmed from the success of the Wii port of Resident Evil 4. The big difference here of course is that RE4 was originally developed for GameCube. Porting the game to a next-gen platform with virtually identical internal architecture made sense, not to mention its inclusion of pointer aiming and motion controls and content originally added to the PS2 version. Players who missed out or didn’t own a GameCube now had the chance to play the game, with its only notable differences being the addition of content and mechanics.
Dead Rising was ported not only from more powerful hardware, but downgraded from Capcom’s then-new MT Framework engine (which was developed alongside Dead Rising and Lost Planet) to the Resident Evil 4 engine by Tose Software, a Japanese game development studio with a focus on staff anonymity.
Bored Again
Game engines are versatile and don’t dictate the way a game running on it plays, but due to time and budget constraints, this port just feels like a Dead Rising mod for Resident Evil 4. It retains RE4’s weapons, some animations and its core gameplay from Resident Evil 4, notably its tank controls.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, many paths in the mall are inexplicably blocked off and serve no purpose than to frustrate and waste your time. This forces you to take the exact same route through Paradise Plaza every single time, as well as making you backtrack from the top floor restaurant down to the park access door and past the stupid barricades all the way back to the security room (the main hub area that you’ll be escorting survivors back to). For context, in the original game you can just use the other set of stairs (the ones closest to the security room) and you’re almost there already.
This whole thing is dumb, and it’s made even more irritating by Ronald the foodie, an early survivor in the game. Like in the original, you have to give him a food item when you find him in the downstairs restaurant, but in CTYD, he specifically makes a beeline to the upper restaurant to make you find and give him an item in there, only to have to then backtrack down the same stairs and through the unnecessary ground floor maze, all because the other stairs are inaccessible for no reason.
The Wii version also lacks the overall game timer, the entire photography mechanic, Infinity Mode and the original inventory system. This is especially the case for guns; you only need one of each gun at a time as Frank has a reserve of all ammo types, just like RE4. In the original game, each gun had its own set amount of ammo. This also means more of a focus on gunplay than using anything around you as a melee weapon. You even have a pistol to use during the opening invasion of the mall, despite the significant lack of zombies present.
The lack of the game timer now means the loss of day/night cycle transitions and freedom to rescue and ignore whoever you feel like. All story cases are mandatory, as is rescuing survivors. At the start of each “case” (chapter), Otis will force you to choose from the available survivors to rescue. Once you’ve completed all of these scoops one at a time, then you’re able to proceed with the story cases, with the time of day changing accordingly. The ordering of survivors to rescue was drastically changed, likely to keep the early game survivors close to the security room. As the game progresses, survivors are found further out.
The holding bays are now separate rooms requiring load screens to transition between, likely to avoid having to render the amount of survivor NPCs you’re forced to save as you progress. Speaking of which, the hardware limitations cut the amount of zombies in any one area by several hundred, and the poor draw distance means more come into view only a few feet away. Nighttime visibility is also horrific. Arguably more realistic, but a pain to navigate if the room you’re playing in has too much or too little light. There’s actually an option in the menu to brighten nighttime visibility, but it doesn’t do enough.
In addition to the roadblocks, the park was made significantly smaller (which honestly isn’t a bad thing) and the maintenance tunnels cannot be traversed on foot; if the vehicle you’re in is destroyed, it’s a game over. Not that there’s much to do down here anyway — its driving controls are janky, there’s no unlock for 53.594 zombie kills or a tunnel key as a shortcut between mall plazas. Greg, a rescuable survivor, still unlocks the shortcut between Paradise and Wonderland Plazas, as well as warping you to and from Cletus’ shop to buy guns and ammo between cases. He’ll also extort you for money by warping you to and from relevant areas, saving a lot of time in bringing back survivors but costing you thousands of dollars to do so. There’s a zombie outbreak and you’re still getting scammed. Cletus survives in this version for this purpose, as a use for the shoehorned money you get from completing missions, killing zombies and destroying cash registers.
Two new zombie types were added, the poodle (from the game’s opening) and birds. The birds are annoying to listen to and the poodles are annoying to run away from, or attack (without wasting ammo on). Several psychopaths (bosses) such as Jo and Kent were cut from survivor scoops and turned into special zombies instead, while the convicts became a quick-time event boss battle during Sophie’s rescue mission. They never spawn outside of this, which is a mercy — in the original game they respawned every time the player entered the park even if all three of them were killed last time the player was there. They are a menace when their AI pathing doesn’t get stuck against a tree — given the game’s bad controls.
While the original game’s controls can feel a little dated by more modern standards, the Xbox 360 controller at least had enough buttons for everything. The Wii game relies on the Z+A combo to differentiate interactions from attacks, motion controls for attacking and quick-time events, and uses the tiny + button to call survivors over, all the while completely forgetting that the nunchuck has a C button.
Oh, and by the way, it only supports nunchuck controls. RE4 on Wii supported the Classic Controller and even GameCube pads. Clearly the compatibility was there in the engine, but I guess they really wanted to focus on that pointer aiming.
Completion of the main story unlocks Odd Jobs and Second Amendment. The former is a list of varied tasks to complete around the mall, and the latter is the same, but based around gunplay. Like survivor rescue missions, these give you superficial scores and rankings. Getting S ranks for every mission in these modes gives you the laser sword and real mega buster respectively, for use in the story mode.
This version has additional difficulty and gore settings too. I played on easy to make the experience less painful, I can’t imagine how frustrating hard difficulty must be. I also played with red blood of course, but invisible and classic Ganondorf green blood are also options.
Justified
Chop Till You Drop follows the same story as the original game, covering freelance photojournalist Frank West’s investigation of a zombie outbreak in the fictional Colorado town of Willamette. Working with Homeland Security, Frank sets out to uncover the truth behind the outbreak and rescue as many survivors as possible.
As mentioned before, story cases are no longer missable due to the removal of the game timer but they’re all there, with survivor rescue missions padded in-between them. The story remains identical but uses low-quality pre-rendered cutscenes, meaning Frank’s outfit are not reflected. Since the game was made linear, only Ending A (the canon ending) is present and the events of Overtime Mode (unlocked after achieving ending A in the original) were merged into the main game mode.
On A Mission
Most of the sounds in the game are retained, albeit in expectedly lower quality. The biggest difference is in the game’s music. Adam’s theme was changed to Kent’s for some reason, but all other surviving bosses had their themes returning, including the licensed tracks.
Cutscene audio is also unchanged, but every mission in the game inexplicably plays Brad’s theme when in the area of your objective. Of the 48 case files and survivor missions, he is present in 10 of them. When the game isn’t playing a cutscene or Brad’s theme, it plays the mall music everywhere. The rooftop, the security room, the helipad and the hideout. Everywhere.
Alpy’s Final Scoop (but smaller and in lower resolution)
Chop Till You Drop is a series of poor decisions as a result of one massive poor decision — porting the game to the Wii. The game isn’t ungodly terrible per se, it’s just very dry and not much fun.
CTYD is best experienced from afar, because in absolutely no way does this game outshine the original, yet its existence and the way the game exists to get it running on inferior hardware is fascinating, even moreso than the iOS and Java ‘versions’ that don’t resemble the original all that much.
Almost everything is here in CTYD, it’s just not worth your time. Even back in 2009, anyone who saw the GaGaGa SP music video tie-in surely thought it was wiser to hold out another year for Dead Rising 2.
Score: 40%
