Dead Rising games have always been difficult, but gamers haven't always been happy about that. What's a fair way to make a game tough, and what isn't? With each new Dead Rising release, the game creators at Capcom have been tweaking their answer and reconsidering what players want.

With Dead Rising 2: Off The Record, a remake of the last Dead Rising game sporting a new lead character, they're tweaking their series' difficulty again.

"The game definitely is a demanding game," Jason Leigh, executive producer of Dead Rising 2 and Dead Rising 2: Off The Record studio Capcom Vancouver told me after unveiling the game last week in Miami."

He promises a game that features "a tougher Frank West and a deadlier Fortune City," a faux Las Vegas filled with more aggressive zombies than those featured in the same city in Dead Rising 2.

Leigh's team and their colleagues at Capcom in Japan aren't simply intensifying the difficulty in an already-tricky series. They're having mercy on players in other areas, allowing gamers to use multiple save slots — a feature from Dead Rising 2 that wasn't included in Dead Rising 1 — and by finally check-pointing the player's progress after loading a new area or right before the start of a new boss battle.

Compare the tension from the first Dead Rising vs. that of this Off The Record re-make: in the former, you'd walk through the game world perpetually worried that if you died, you'd be bounced back to the last save point in the game; in the new one you can rely on checkpoints to catch you. In the original, if you didn't like where you'd gotten your character stuck, you couldn't load an older save file. You'd have to bring your hero back to the beginning of the game (though he'd be more powerful, mercifully.) Even aggravations of the second game, like having to re-play the parts before a boss battle, will be gone in Off The Record.

Leigh knows that many players today aren't looking for murderously difficult games, so these features may please them. "People expect an experience, whereas in the past they expected challenge," he told me. "I think one of the reasons a lot of modern games do well is that they deliver an incredibly well-executed experience and put you in [a] setting. Because of that, perhaps, players are more forgiving about difficulty and, even if they sail through, they'll go, 'Well, it wasn't that hard, but did I ever enjoy the ride along the way!'

"In the past, it was more hardcore: 'Did I ever get challenged?' And now it's more of a: 'Did you impress me with the visuals, the voice-acting and the story? Did I feel like I lived a cool experience along the way?'"

When I heard Leigh put it that way, I took him for a man who is building his house against the wind. He hears the howls for easier games or at least detects the breezy acceptance of painless pleasures. Yet here he is helping to lead the development of another Dead Rising. The series may not be as sadistic in difficulty as a Super Meat Boy, but it's more of a hair-puller than most. The easier systems in Off The Record may meet modern gamers' expectations, but I pointed out to Leigh that his team is in a prime position to push gamers to toughen up, if they want to.

"One of the great things about the sandbox with the zombies," he said, referring to the open world, go-anywhere design of Dead Rising games, "is you can choose to barrel through [the zombies] or you can choose to skirt them. You still have to fight them eventually. There's no one path where you can't fight them, but it almost a choose-your-own-difficulty kind of game, depending on how you play it."

Choose your own difficulty, Dead Rising gamers. What'll it be?

Chuck Greene wasn't the hero of Dead Rising 2. Chuck Greene wasn't the man who faced down the slow flood of zombies stumbling through the casinos of Fortune City. Chuck didn't whack a few hundred zombies with baseball bats and halt the groans of many more with sharp objects.

Chuck Greene didn't do these things.

Frank West did.

In Dead Rising 2: Off The Record, the bigger, smarter disc-based version of Dead Rising 2 coming to PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC this fall, the hero of last year's Dead Rising 2 has been replaced. Off The Record is a what-if: What if Frank West, hero of the first Dead Rising, was the hero of DR2?

Off the Record is one of the more unusual extensions of an existing game. It was supposed to have been a simple director's cut, according to Jason Leigh, the game's executive producer from Dead Rising 2 studio Capcom Vancouver. He introduced the game to a group of reporters, Kotaku included, at a showcase for Capcom games last week in Miami. His team had planned to make the type of polished, extended edition of their game that other Capcom developers had done with Resident Evil games, but the project has changed into a full-blown re-make that tells Dead Rising 2's story as it would unfold with a different — and popular — character who killed zombies in Dead Rising 1.

"If you'd been there what would you have done differently?" Frank West grumbles at the beginning of the Off The Record trailer. "My answer: everything."

Well, not everything is different in this remake. Off the Record will return gamers to Fortune City, bringing them through a tweaked version of events featured in Dead Rising 2. Leigh said the game will include new areas, new psychos, use new combo weapons as well as a new save system that automatically checkpoints a player's progress when they enter new areas, reach key story points or get to the start of a boss battle.

We'll control Frank and follow a narrative that fits West into these events. After the events of Dead Rising 1 when photojournalist Frank West fought a zombie outbreak at a mall in Willamette, Colorado, the story goes, he wrote a book about and then got a talk show (on which, Leigh speculated, West was probably rude to all of his guests). By the start of Off The Record, he's squandered his fame and fortune. Desparate for cash, he's agreed to take that path favored by many a washed-up celebrity: appear on a game show that involves killing zombies.

Last year's Dead Rising 2 began with Chuck Greene hopping on a motorbike and using it to buzzsaw through a pit of zombies. That was his big challenge in the Terror is Reality gameshow, a show he appeared on in order to earn some money and help his daughter, Katey, who needs medicine to stave off her zombie infection. Greene wins, collects his money from two bitchy hostesses while Tyrone King, emcee of the game show, bellows about how wonderful the show is.

Off The Record begins with West in red pro wrestling tights. He's on Terror Is Reality too, but his challenge is to beat back a wrestling ring full of zombies, ideally using the spinning blades in each of the ring's corners to his benefit. West spins his arms around, bashing zombies. He body slams some and hits them with steel chairs, then draws them into those spinning blades that make them mulch. West wins, collects his money from two bitchy hostesses while Tyrone King, emcee of the game show, bellows about how wonderful the show is.

Slicing zombies is something Frank West is good at. So is photography, the main gameplay deviation shown so far in Off The Record. Shortly after winning his round on Terror is Reality and taking his money, West is back in civilian clothes, camera around his neck. This man has covered wars, and soon he's snooping across the suspended walkways of a storage facility, snapping photos of some shady conversation between Tyrone King and a shady guy names Brandon. This interactive sequence allowed Leigh to show how the photography system works. It was in the first Dead Rising and works similarly in this remake, rewarding players with points for every key object or person in a well-framed shot. Those important elements are circled in the photo with colored rings that indicates their special category.

Photo categories revealed in that storage area included:

• Outtake, such as green and pink toy horse heads
• Horror, for some shots of those wrestling-ring spinning blade devices
• Brutality, for a photo of blenders that can be stuck on zombies' heads
• Erotica, for the poster of a woman's bust labeled Juggz and for long plastic objects Leigh called "massagers"

Frank snaps one final photo of the conversation as the game show host appears to have handed the second man a bomb. Suddenly, a few thugs in black suits surround Frank. They fight him, more aggressively than their type would have in the original Dead Rising 2, Leigh explained, due to an improvement in their artificial intelligence. (Enemies, including zombies, are tougher in this new game).

As Greene did before him, West wanders the backstage area of Terror Is Reality a little more, has a passive-aggressive flirtatious run-in with the show's hostesses and then finds his way to an elevator. The elevator starts, then stops. West hears the crash of catastrophe, a boom and then the beginning of the panic. A zombie outbreak has begun. Like Greene, he squeezes out of the elevator and finds bedlam, people running through the halls, zombies overrunning the facility, lots of death.

Brutal as they are, Dead Rising games are comedic and soon West is doing sillier things than beating zombies with a baseball bat; he's beating them with an electric guitar and cracking one-liners. He's also snapping lots of photos, each quick snap of zombie crowd filling the screen with 10, 20, 30 indicators of each zombie captured in the single photo. The group shots earn more points, which, as is series tradition, will be used to make West more powerful.

We weren't shown new combo weapons, new characters, new fighting moves nor Dead Rising 2's Chuck Greene, should he be alive in this version of events. But, like Greene, West briefly takes refuge in a locker room. In Dead Rising 2, Greene found Katey hiding in a locker. In Off The Record, a little girl's backpack is on the floor, near a big bloodstain. We're left to wonder.

Leigh said people should think of Off The Record as a "fan's version" of Dead Rising 2, suggesting that this new zombie-crowd-killer is aimed to be the ultimate gamer-crowd-pleaser. He promised that load times would be shorter. than they were in Dead Rising 2. Some difficulty spikes have been smoothed from the original Dead Rising 2, Leigh told me, because they annoyed the game's developers when they played the game. He declined to say if the game's inventory system would be revised. The one in Dead Rising 2 forced players to repeatedly re-create favorite combo weapons.

Co-op play will return in Off The Record, putting one player in control of Frank West, the other of Chuck Greene. We got no further details on that, nor on a new mode being added to the Dead Rising 2 series. Another reporter speculated that it might be a mode that frees the game of its three-day time-limit, the ticking deadline clock that guarantees a game over. Leigh wouldn't answer that.

Off The Record is an unusual creation. Fans of Dead Rising 2 have had three separate releases related tof the game in the last year, starting with its late-summer prologue through its December 2010 epilogue (which guest-starring Frank West). Do they want more? And do fence-sitters want the non-canonical but possibly ultimate edition of the game?

This is a return journey filled with twists. If nothing else, it's the sure choice for those who believe that it might be cool to be a former motorcycle racing champion, but it's cooler to be a grouchy, jaded journalist.

Blood spattered across his pants and canary-yellow racing jacket, Chuck Greene stands uncomfortably in front of the bathroom stall.

He sighs, he groans, bloody bat clenched in his right hand.

There are zombies to kill. There is a name to clear, a daughter to save.

But not just yet. Right now it's time for me to have a shower.

Like Facebook's FarmVille and the iPhone's Smurf Village, Dead Rising 2's most important gameplay mechanic is time.

And right now I have five hours of it to burn before I can do anything meaningful in Dead Rising 2's $10 add-on title Case West. So I park the zombie-killing hero in a zombie-free bathroom and go take a shower.

It's the first time in nearly 40 years of playing games that a video game has encouraged me to leave it running while I go to do other things.

This idea of time management isn't new to the Dead Rising series. But somehow over the course of two games and two expansions it's been flipped on its head.

In the original Dead Rising, the notion of time was presented as a fatal deadline. You've only got so much of it before photojournalist Frank West has to head out of dodge. Delivered as a deadline, time became a way for the makers of the game to crank up the suspense.

The same held true for Case Zero, the short, but poignant prequel to Dead Rising 2. You only have so much time to find the parts for a ride out of town and land some life-saving Zombrex for your doe-eyed daughter.

But by Dead Rising 2 the nature and important of time started to change. Suddenly time wasn't something that sped up the pacing of the game, it was something that slowed it down.

As I mentioned in my review of the game, Dead Rising 2's pivotal moments, the things that move the story along and march you and your rag-tag band of zombie-outbreak survivors toward the ultimate conclusion, are all pinned immovably to specific times in the game.

For instance, you have to dose your daughter with Zombrex every 24 hours.

Initially, those time pegs force you to take risks, to speed through zombie-infested casinos and cheap buffets on the hunt for the drug. But in Dead Rising 2 those time pegs quickly begin to anchor your freedom in the game. Once you've accomplished the task at hand, you're often left with the choice of whiling away your time killing zombies or hanging out in the shelter looking at your watch, waiting for the next plot-moving mission to start.

There were things you could do to pass the time beyond inventively killing zombies, but the risk often outweighed the reward of those side missions.

With the recently released Case West, there aren't really any side missions anymore. Sure you can roam around the big lab looking for an unknown number of bland, personality-free scientists, scientists sort of to blame for the whole mess. But why would you want to do that? There's no reward and in the flow of the story it's sort of crazy to even think about helping the monsters who in previous games first created the zombie outbreak and then profited off of it.

So instead you wait. First a little, a few minutes here and there between the game's missions, but finally, as you begin to wrap up the game and head toward the conclusion you're thrown a four to five hour delay.

You can choose to go play hide and seek with scientists. You can hang with your buddy Frank West and take pictures. You can inventively kill zombies some more. Or you can do what I did. Go have a shower. Fix yourself a sandwich maybe. Read a book. Watch a movie.

And that's when it hit me: I'm playing FarmVille with zombies. Smurf Village with guns. This is the point in the game, the endless, mindless waiting, when I would have gladly dropped an extra 50 cents to speed up time.

Let's just hope Capcom doesn't realize that.

No memes about covering wars, you know, in this new trailer for Dead Rising 2: Case West. Just the return of Dead Rising's intrepid photog and a hint at the story behind his team-up with the sequel's motocross-racing protagonist.

Dead Rising 2: Case West is exclusive to the Xbox 360 and arrives Dec. 27. It will be 800 Microsoft Points.

A man is taking a photo in a video game. Yay. But, no! This is Frank West in the new Dead Rising 2 downloadable expansion. This is the return of photography.

The beloved photography system from man-vs.-zombies game Dead Rising didn't make it into this fall's Dead Rising 2. But it it is back, as is Dead Rising 1 hero Frank West, in DR2's Case West expansion which also features the sequel's protagonist, Chuck Greene.

From the Dead Rising people at Capcom:

Frank AND Chuck are now able to take photographs of key evidence that will provide indisputable proof of Phenotrans' part in the zombie outbreaks, not just in Fortune City, but across the United States. As the story unfolds expect to see cameo appearances from other characters from Dead Rising that will provide further links to the original game.

Taking photos of zombies was oddly fun in the first game. It was a welcome break from slicing them to bits, an enjoyable challenge to get the perfect shot.

Case West is described as an Xbox 360 exclusive, whatever that means in an era of "exclusives" that eventually show up on rival platforms. No release date for Case West yet.

Dead Rising 2: Case West - The Return of the Camera(s) [Capcom Unity Blog]