10. Dead Rising
There's a chance you probably missed the true ending of Dead Rising. The only way to actually unlock the damn thing was to do specific events over the course of the game, many which could only be accomplished by the very narrowest of margins. If you didn't achieve them and didn't have a save you could reload, you'd be completely screwed until another playthrough. Fighting against the appalling AI of the people you were meant to rescue really didn't help matters either. About 75% of the time characters you'd rescue would just meander merrily into the nearest group of undead hungry chappies and chapettes, basically acting like a walking slab of meat for them to have a chomp on. If you did manage to do everything right, you'd eventually unlock a new game mode called Overtime, a little add-on that expanded upon the storyline and tied everything up in the end. If you didn't do this you got a selection of different endings, ranging from the bizarre to the bad. This isn't about them though; this is about the canonical ending you receive at the successful completion of Overtime.
Original Ending Frank West, photographer, zombie slayer and wearer of strange clothing, is left reeling from discovering that he may be infected with the zombie virus, little parasitic hornets are planted in children across the world ready to go viral and that everybody he saved over the past few hours has been killed anyway. It all comes to a head on top of a tank surrounded by zombies in a hand-to-hand fight with the leader of a Special Forces unit sent in to clean up the zombie mess. This big burly gentleman wants to kill Frank for some reason or another due to a government clean-up project, but Frank really doesn't like that and proceeds to beat the gentleman to death before kicking him down into the zombie folk below. Frank then has a bit scream at the sky and we're told that he escaped and forced the government to accept partial responsibility for the outbreak of the virus thanks to his journalistic photos of zombies wandering around with strange implements on their heads.
Alternate Having learned that Special Forces are coming to clean-up the zombie attack on the mall, Frank hatches a plan to fight off the Special Forces unit with the help of those he rescued and also plans to capture documented footage of both the zombie attack and the Special Forces' mission to eradicate all life, whether infected or not, from the mall. The emphasis on Frank forming a cure for the virus should remain prominent as part of the storyline, as this feeds directly into the use of Zombrex in Dead Rising 2. The plot to stop the Special Forces unit should play into the hordes of the undead within the mall the survivors use the undead in the tunnels (of which there are thousands) to overwhelm the special forces unit and escape from the mall with the help of Frank and the Special Forces' equipment. Frank documents all of this with his camera, cleverly skewing the footage so that it looks as if the Special Forces unit were killed by accident. The scene with the tank then takes place, as you still need a bit of an epic ending that ends on a cliffhanger, don't you?
This fixes my major gripe with the canonical ending of the game, which sees all of the survivors die. It just makes it feel as if rescuing them was pointless.Alternate Alternate EndingChanneling the spirit of Megaman thanks to wearing his costume and using his blaster, Frank upgrades himself into an awesome super-powered killing machine that eradicates everything in his way and becomes lord of the zombies. Whenever one tries to eat him, he simply shoots it in the face with a blast of energy.