"Every time you look at me
My heart is jumpin, it's easy to see
You drive me crazy
I just cant sleep
Im so excited, I'm in too deep
Ohh...crazy, but it feels alright
Baby, thinkin of you keeps me up all night "
Britney Spears lyrics hardly fit this topic, but I don't really feel like writing an intro paragraph. Crazy Train lyrics would have been too obvious, anyway.
It's 9:53am and the mall opens at 10:00am. This is just the product of me killing time on my iPod until I can get my hands on more Astonishing X-Men comics. That's what I've been doing when not busy pondering the psychological workings of a fictional character.
Seven minutes. Seven minutes is all I have to play with you. Let's talk about Dead Rising.
In a similar vein to Fight Club's Tyler Durden, every once in a while Chuck sees another version of himself running around and killing zombies alongside him. Also like Fight Club, one of these Chucks are usually well dressed while the other is just insane.
Tyler's ability to be both Edward Norton and Brad Pit at the same time was a coping mechanism, birthed through mental instability and nurtured through a horrible life. It's entirely Feasible that after seeing his Wife die in Vegas, Chuck Greene might have just kinda snapped in a similar way.
It's weird how crazy EVERYONE acts in this game, actually. Take Leon Bell for example. Imagine hearing "You just lost your wife in Vegas so you must suck at killing zombies! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!" If I were Chuck I'd pick up my motorcycle and bash it over the dude's skull.
The whole "Terror is Reality" thing is pretty damned crazy in itself. A game show about killing zombies for a high score. Seriously. Quotes like "you've gotta risk it all to win big!" and "they took our Williamette! They took our Las Vegas! Now it's time for a little payback, America!" are clear cut cries for help when killing caged zombies with a zamboni.
There is even a Zombie Rights group. It's clear as day that many people have lost their sanity. They cannot accept what has happened to them, and therefore stand behind lost causes and reality shows to help them cope.
This is the nature of the human race. We bury or cremate our loved ones. We buy a monument like a headstone, or scatter their ashes in an area they liked out of respect to them. We mourn them because we loved them in life. It hurts emotionally, but time heals most wounds. We get over their deaths a little at a time, and then we move on with our lives.
The people in Dead Rising cannot do this because they are stuck in a Groundhog Day-like situation, where they're forced to relive the same several days of zombie outbreak hell over and over and over again.
Chuck's probably tried every possible strategy to find a way to release him from this torment, but even getting an S rank ending in overtime mode doesn't set him free. He has to start all over again, this time making an effort to try on all clothes, or spraypaint all Zombrex posters, or kill 72,000 zombies while dressed in a Servbot mask and short shorts.
Yeah, he's crazy. He has every right to be, considering what he's expected to live through. Sometimes the craziest ones are the quietest and calmest. Chuck doesn't talk much and shows no emotion except in dealing with his daughter Katey.
Someone who kills as remorselessly as Chuck is probably desensitized as all hell. Like when you encounter the magicians, Chuck seems more pissed at the fact that they suck than that they just cut a woman in half.
Living in a perpetual cycle of nothing but murder and mayhem will do that to you. After a while things stop having moral weight. It's such a sad, sad story.
I feel really bad for Chuck, because the truth is, he isn't doing anything that none of us wouldn't do in the same situation. I've never killed anybody, and don't even like hunting, but the second something tries to eat me I am going to fight for my life. It's the law of the jungle, but unfortunately the jungle has no place in man's society. That's why Predator 2 failed at the box office.
Chuck simply has no hope of meshing back in with mankind. The best that he could hope for is that somebody will take care of Katey when he's institutionalized. That's the only real conclusion that Dead Rising could have...
But I have an idea for a heck of a spinoff...
Chuck wakes up in a padded room. Frank West is in an adjacent cell, taking pictures at nothing and yelling "FANTASTIC!" over, and over, and over again. Because the two find themselves in an oddly similar situation, they decide to bust out using improvised weapons and flash photography, and begin looking for Chuck's daughter.
And that's why Capcom should hire me.
