It's not often that you arrive at a preview event with no idea what to expect [it is if I commission you - Ed]. Publishers tend to save their surprises for new announcements - once a game's out there in the public consciousness, there's a steady enough drip-feed of information to ensure that nothing comes as an enormous revelation. When Capcom's Keiji Inafune confirmed multiplayer for Dead Rising 2, I assumed we'd have co-op or ordinary zombie-killing competitions. I certainly didn't expect to be rolling a motocross racer in a bright yellow suit around a zombie-filled arena in a giant hamster ball whilst an enthusiastic commentator made comments about oral copulation with my mother, before donning a pair of moose antlers and tossing obese zombies onto a giant set of scales.

Terror is Reality, as Dead Rising 2's multiplayer component calls itself, is a four-player gameshow composed of four increasingly ridiculous mini-game rounds with increasingly ridiculous names. It's a gleeful lampoonery of everything zombie-related, an orgy of competitive comic violence - brightly coloured, bombastic and utterly barbaric. It smacks of the TV show Gladiators, both in the enjoyably ludicrous presentation (each player has their own primary-coloured motocross-suit onesie) and the content of the games themselves. It features an incredibly loudmouthed presenter with an obsession with sexual innuendo and a propensity for wearing sunglasses indoors, who provides the introduction and the between-round banter. (Hopefully he'll be skippable - most of his jokes wouldn't be funny more than once.)

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