abstract
| - The Dishwasher is a side-scrolling Beat'Em Up series released for the Xbox Live Arcade by (formerly) one-man design team Ska Studios. The first game, Dead Samurai, went up for sale in April 2009, with the sequel, Vampire Smile, following suit two years later. The Dishwasher starts the eponymous Dishwasher, a dishwasher working in a bleak world where humans are choosing to be mass-converted into cyborgs and the undead run amok. One day, he wakes up in the restaurant kitchen with mild amnesia, a big hole in his chest where his heart should be, and an army of cyborgs out for his head. For lack of anything better to do, he picks up a couple of meat cleavers and carves his way through a tale involving evil supercomputers, long-lost siblings, an alien chef, and shotgun-wielding vampire cowboy assassins. The games' plots are presented as a series of gritty comic strips which can sometimes make it a challenge to see whether the story is taking the piss or not. The games have attracted some flak for their art style and threadbare, usually ridiculous story, but also attract considerable acclaim for their frenetic combat (reminiscent of Devil May Cry and other combo-based beat 'em ups with scads of bloody finishing moves to boot) and impressive production values; everything from the cutscenes to the music are provided by Ska Studios. On top of a fairly involved story mode, both games also feature co-op play (although the first game's second player interaction is limited to a helper much like in Super Mario Galaxy) and Arcade modes consisting of fifty increasingly difficult challenges. Both are available for 800 MS points each on Xbox Live.
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