You still need to do some of the side missions, otherwise you won't level and will have trouble later on. Even after you gain some levels, the rescue missions are still hard.
What makes Dead Rising so tough is the timing and the save system. If you spend too much time on the side missions, you will not have enough time to do the main missions and if you save at the wrong time, you might screw yourself over and have to restart from the beginning.

Gears is more straight forward and don't have these issues. I'm not very good with shooters but I actually found Gears to be fairly easy except for the final boss fight.

Oblivion is a lot of fun and it is one of the best games. If you get stuck as far as difficulty, you can adjust the slider while playing.

I'd also suggest Crackdown. It is NOT a GTA-style game, which is what it was advertised as. Think of it more as a police action 3D platformer. You should be able to get it cheap now.

Crackdown is good about 1 week, then it gets very repetitive/shallow. Get it for about $20 used, but don't pay more.

I disagree on just about every point you mentioned. You can level by killing or doing scoops, scoops give you better xp for time but you can level with both. One friend for example just drove around in the tunnels to get the genocider achievement, levels, and the megaman blaster to start the game.

Also you really don't need many levels, get a few up to level 10 or so and you won't have too much trouble really.

And the save system is what makes the game good IMO. The game is short, really short, its designed to be played multiple times doing mulitple things. Play it some to get a feel for it and get some levels, start over and work on the main story line maybe even finish it...just ignore anything you don't feel like doing its no biggie. Start over and try out the side scoops, do a couple main case's as needed or as wanted or don't, it doesn't matter.

Yes it is in theory possible to save and screw yourself over but in practice its extremely difficult. For the main cases you are told when/where your next step is so if you mess that up its your fault. If you're trying to complete everything then yes you could screw yourself over but saint and answering all of otis's calls achievements are really designed to take a game specifically to do them.

If you like a story with action I would definitely go with Dead Rising, it's not too tough and if it gets to the point where it is you can just start over from the beginning with more power than you originally had.

For $29 and $39 you can grab COD2 and Dead Rising for loads of fun. That way you can put $$$ away for Bioshock, Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed, Halo3, and COD4.

Kenny J