Aside from being a game where you run around a shopping mall murdering the living dead, the original Dead Rising from 2006 is a clownish satire of sleazy tabloid photojournalism. It expresses this by way of its scoring system, where you earn “Prestige points” for snapping pictures that fit one of five categories: “Brutal” scenes of characters being slain; moments of “Horror”, such as the spectacle of an approaching horde; comical “Outtakes”, like characters caught in bizarre poses; moments of “Drama”, such as people reacting to discoveries; and “Erotic” photos of women alive or undead, which range from snaps of exposed underwear to close-ups of cleavage.
The Erotica tag has, however, been chopped from the Dead Rising Deluxe Remaster, in what Capcom gingerly suggest isn’t “a response to a changing cultural climate”, but expressive of the view that earning points from such photos is not “an appropriate reward for survival and not a skill required of a journalist trying to stay alive”.
