The PaddleSaw? Our New Favorite Weapon.

January 28, 2010 – Fact. Killing zombies is fun. Fact. Killing zombies with a PaddleSaw (a paddle with a chainsaw on either end) is more than fun, it’s downright brilliant. Dead Rising 2 will feature the ability to customize your own weapons and create such inventive creations as the PaddleSaw. It will also allow for nearly 6,000 zombies on screen at once. That’s a lot of walking dead to plow through, and a man’s gotta be inventive to do it.

There are no further details from developer Blue Castle Games about the weapon customization system, but in the original Dead Rising, gamers were able to utilize almost anything in the environment to fight off zombies. It was easy to go into a toy store, collect teddy bear masks and stuff them on the top of zombies’ heads, preventing them from being able to bite you and making for a hilarious looking crowd of zombie teddy bears. You could use everything from baseball bats to flat screen TVs to a lawnmower as a weapon and Dead Rising 2 seems to be one-upping its predecessor by allowing you to combine weapons into super weapons.

My friends and I used to try and see how many kills we could notch with Frank West, the first game’s protagonist, before we finally died. We would then try to surpass one another, killing one hundred, two hundred, five hundred, a thousand zombies before falling. If Dead Rising 2‘s weapon creation system is any indication, those kill numbers might be small fries when the game comes out sometime this year.

Dead Rising 2 is being developed by Blue Castle Games and will be published by Capcom. It will be released on the Xbox 360 and PS3.