I hate mall crowds. Wandering about my local consumer labyrinth, I find myself eternally stuck behind some pimp-strutting teens, or a long line of girls with their arms linked in an unbreakable chain, even as some hirsute cromagnon besides me loudly wheezes and smashes his feet down on the back of my Achilles' Heel, impatient at my slow progress. The effluviate mundanity of a reprehensible, stinking humanity surrounds me. "Hey baby, how's about's the digits?" a sunken chested moron says to the right of me, talking to a fat girl in a baby t-shirt languishing seductively against a trash-can, slurping at a smoothe. I hate these people so much, I just want to grab each and every one of them by the sides of their heads and continue to exert pressure until their eyes squirt onto my face like the whites of a couple of soft-boiled eggs.

Dead Rising allows me to live out this fantasy in real-time. After all, as Romero taught us, the fetid throb of humanity is a perfect analogue for the soulless reanimated corpse, except you can kill them with zero moral or legal qualms. Zombies are the same as consumer zombies.

So what's this post about? Christ if I know. I went off on a tangent there. Actually, now that I think about it, it's about this interactive map for Dead Rising's mall that I found. It's pretty swank... an expert simulacrum of your local mall's "You Are Here" overhead, with each shop alphanumerically labeled and a hovering word balloon describing what you can find there. Extremely useful. Florian Eckhardt

Interactive Dead Rising Map [Cybermike]

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