This was making us very excited until we remembered about just how many people really hated the first one. Citing the save system, the punishing time you had to complete missions in and the most annoying videogame character of all time (Otis), the first Dead Rising was not popular with many people. But screw them, once you’d levelled up a bit and restarted about five times, then the original Dead Rising became an incredible game combining time and item management with pretty cool combat and excellently hilarious bloody gore.

The initial information is scant, but suspicions have been confirmed about where the sequel is set – the Las Vegas analogue called Fortune City, which, if this casino is anything like the ones in Vegas, should provide a huge area for you to run around while fending off zombies with a large variety of improvised weapons.

These weapons (ie pretty much anything you can pick up and throw at a zombie), include roulette wheels and giant display mobile phones. Hopefully they’ll all have gruesome special attacks just like in the first game, because everyone remembers just how much fun it was sticking a showerhead in a zombie’s face and watching the fountain that erupted from their skull.

What’s not shown in these screens, but you can see it in the promotional video, is another weapon that hasn’t been put to good use since Gladiators (the ITV one, not the Sky version), and even then it wasn’t so much of a weapon. We’re talking about the Atlaspheres – the big metal hamsterball things. In the video you can see the new character taking on a roomful of zombies and crushing them below his ball. And as for the new character? Well, he’s definitely not Frank West, the gurning camera guy who saved the day before (or didn’t depending on how much you played the original), though he does do a fine line in snarling faces himself.

This sequel is set several years after the events in the first game, and it looks like Frank did his best to contain the outbreak, but it just wasn’t enough. The plague has spread to other cities in America, despite the fact the government has developed a vaccine and apparently has the situation under control. But then that’s what they said about Willamette.

Presumably Dead Rising 2 will continue with the rescuing of survivors and fighting off zombies and crazies with whatever weapon comes to hand. And we’re intrigued by the screenshot of the main character on the scrambler bike, mostly because it looks like he’s doing some sort of stunt, rather than just riding along flatly. But we’re guessing the rather fun photography aspect will be taken out.

We’re only basing this on the fact the new guy doesn’t have a camera round his neck, but he’s in a massive hotel/casino so there’s bound to be a disposable he can pick up. It’ll be interesting to see how Capcom deals with the complaints about the last game, though we hope they don’t change too much as it really built the tension when you only had minutes to go and a thousand zombies to cut through.