A workout is certainly one way to burn off some excess anxiety after a long, stressful day at work. For wound-up video gamers, though, it's a lot more fun to fire up the console and plow through endless waves of zombies.

"Dead Rising" (rated M for mature; Xbox 360) delivers the chance to do just that, but its one terrible design decision often makes the experience more infuriating than pleasurable.

Let's start with what's so good: It's a zombie game! Duh. "Dead Rising" in particular redefines crowd control, throwing up hundreds of lumbering corpses at once on-screen and a sickly hilarious selection of impromptu weapons.

You play as Frank West, a sneering freelance photojournalist who helicopters into a small Colorado town overcome with zombies. He has 72 hours (these are faster game hours, not real hours) to snap some good pictures and escape with a decent story. Top that, Geraldo!

The game play occurs in a quintessential American setting: the suburban shopping mall. Though, in this case, chopping mall might be more apt. You'll have access to a wide array of products to smash those nasty former humans.

The Willamette Parkview Mall houses a multitude of retail zones that serve as different levels, and you'll meet quite a few trapped shoppers who will assign missions for experience points.

Pistols and crowbars certainly get the job done, but there are even more effective tools if you can find them, such as snowblowers. (I'll spare you the details.)

Basically, anything you can pick up is a potential weapon. As a result, there are so many ways to kill the zombies it never gets old.

The zombies may be mindless, but in such large groups it doesn't take long to be surrounded by hundreds of them.

One thing's inevitable: You will be overwhelmed at some point. And you will die.

Hopefully, you remembered to save.

Except, for some unimaginable reason, "Dead Rising" only provides for one game save on the console's hard drive.

Worse, you can't save wherever you please. Instead, you have to run back to the start of the game (and wait through a litany of long loading screens), or find a restroom to record your progress.

It's this kind of game design decision that really kills the fun in an otherwise decent, lighthearted zombie game.