One of my goals while I'm on vacation this week is to unlock the "genocider" achievement in Dead Rising on the 360, which entails crushing, decapitating, disemboweling, slicing, shooting and burning more than 53,000 zombies. Good times.

But as much as I love this game -- game of the year for me, so far, as it keeps getting better the more I play it -- I do wonder if the absurd carnage in Dead Rising gets a free pass that it wouldn't in other titles. Such as Grand Theft Auto.

I mean, I'm happily grinding thousands of innocent people -- which is what the zombies really are -- into hamburger so I can unlock a costume of Mega Man. Imagine if Rockstar had a hidden feature in one of their games that rewarded you for butchering the population of a medium-sized town? The ensuing firestorm would be hot enough to melt the sun. But since it's not Rockstar, and since they're zombies, it's all fine and dandy. And I suspect that the developers of Dead Rising knew just how far they could go, since they were smart enough not to include any zombie children for you to massacre.

Anyway, bottom line: GTA is amoral trash. Dead Rising FTW!