Dead Rising

The 2006 Dead Rising dropped photojournalist Frank West into the zombie-overrun Willamette shopping mall and set the rules the series would keep for years: a huge open mall stuffed with shelves the player can turn almost anything from into a weapon, from kitchen knives to lawnmowers, timed side missions that pass in real time whether the player acts or not, and human psychopaths who end up being tougher threats than the zombie hordes themselves. Depending on the player's choices and speed, the game could end several different ways, and Capcom paired near-parodic humour with a genuinely tense sense that the clock never stops.

Dead Rising 2 (2010) moved the setting to Fortune City, a fictional stand-in for Las Vegas, and handed the lead role to former motocross rider Chuck Greene, searching for a cure for his infected daughter while uncovering the truth behind the zombie-fighting TV show he gets pulled into. Its biggest addition was weapon combining - welding a chainsaw to a kayak paddle, or nailing a baseball bat full of spikes - turning improvised weapon crafting into a discipline of its own. The Off the Record expansion sent the story back to Willamette and brought Frank West back into the game.

Dead Rising 3 (2013) launched alongside the Xbox One with new protagonist Nick Ramos, expanding the fictional Los Perdidos into a much bigger, car-friendly open world, letting players combine weapons on the fly without a workbench, and easing off the strict time limit in favour of freer exploration. That made the series more approachable, but it also drifted from the ticking-clock tension that had defined the first game.