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Dead or Alive: XBV Review |
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Dead or Alive: XBV
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Subject to the ridicule and sneers of many a game store employee, thousands of gamers walked into their local gamestores and plunked down fifty dollars for what many referred to as the “boobie” game. Otherwise known as Tecmo’s Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. Sure, the chests are quite large and bouncy, and the bodies are firm, but behind that rather racy front, there is actually a volleyball game tucked away neatly in there. A good one even.
At first glance, volleyball seems to be the last thing on the mind of the creators of DOAXBV, with casinos, hopping games, tanning, shopping, and gift-giving, all available for whichever girl you decided to play as. The girls are the very same girls as in the fighting game Dead or Alive 3 released last year for the Xbox, with the exception of Lisa, who is Zack’s girlfriend. Zack apparently won the Dead or Alive 3 tournament, and purchased the island and invited the DOA girls there to vacation.
The DOA girls thought they were invited there for a new DOA tournament, but once they get there, they found out that the tournament was a sham. So being the resourceful girls they are, they decide to play some volleyball instead. Sure… why not.
The volleyball controls are simple enough, with only the A and B buttons being used for pretty much every move, with timing and thumbstick position altering each button’s use slightly. Basically, the A button is for serves, shots, blocks, and spikes; the B button is for sets and faking spikes. Either the D-pad or the left thumbstick can be used to move your player, and alter the direction of shots and serves.
The AI is surprisingly good, and is quite challenging. Some teams fare better than others, and depending on how well you’ve played and how well you’ve treated your partner, your team may be great or entirely off. If you aren’t a very good player, nor do you give gifts that your partner likes, you’ll find yourself without a partner and scrounging for gifts to give another girl so she’ll consider teaming up with you.
Each girl has certain likes and dislikes, and thru researching the provided manual, it’s fairly easy to tell what would be good gifts for each one. However, if you have a bad history, even the best gifts will be thrown in the garbage. Nothing torques you off more than spending a million Zack dollars on a swimsuit for a girl who tosses it into the garbage the next day. Better off saving the suit for yourself.
One rather visible flaw in the game is not having some sort of satisfaction meter for your partner. Many times it’s difficult to tell whether or not your partner likes you until she leaves you. While this may be more true to life… it’s rather troubling in a game where you need a partner to play the main game.
Another gripe is the camera. While it’s not all that bad, it does not allow all four players to be visible at once in that it does not pan out far enough to do so. The camera swings back and forth between the two sides, causing the player to lose sight of their team when the ball in on the opposite side of the court. It could have easily been remedied by panning the camera out slightly more than it does in it’s current form, but as it stands the camera is serviceable enough, and only rarely, is such a camera flaw cause for a lost point.
Even with its minor flaws, the game itself is solid and fairly addictive. The AI is varied enough so that you never feel like you’re dominating or even get the feeling that you’ll win every match, although you’ll quickly find out which particular team you can wail on for the most part due to your teams strengths and their weaknesses.
Each “season” is 14 days, in which you can have up to 3 games a day, after which you can actually choose to play as an entirely different girl to play thru yet another 2 weeks on the beach. The nice touch is, that after you’ve played thru a few seasons, the items the girls have given and received remain in each girls inventory, and so do their dispositions towards each other, so becoming a friend to someone who was once your enemy is not always easy. If a girl dislikes you enough, she won’t just throw them away, she’ll refuse to even accept them at all. Good luck pairing up with that girl. Which, in a way, makes this game more of a sim than some may realize.
Dead or Alive has always been a the top of the food chain graphically, and DOA Xtreme Beach Volleyball is no exception. More than most developers, Tecmo and Team Ninja have learned how to make the Xbox hardware shine. The water effects, the lush environments, the beautiful backgrounds, the deforming sand, and of course the voluptuous beauties are all rendered with close to CG quality graphics.
There are virtually no loading times once the game is in motion. The only loading time at all is when the disc is first inserted into the drive, and never again. This is even a marked improvement from DOA3, as it has the loading time each time the disc was inserted, although there were still no loading times during the game itself. Judging from this alone, it looks like Team Ninja has been doing their homework and it shows.
Only a few slight graphical imperfections arise in the form of clipping. Hair an body parts sometimes slightly encroach on other items or bodies, but not so much that they are unforgivable in an otherwise stunningly depicted game.
The sounds of beach volleyball aren’t really much more than a few thunking sounds when the ball is hit in different fashions, a few lines of dialogue for each character, and the requisite music for the background. The important lines of dialogue are spoken in Japanese with English subtitles, and the in-game dialogue is essentially English terms such as “nice spike” and “nice serve”, etc., spoken in a Japanese accent. So they come off as “nisu supiku” and ”nisu saabu”. A little humorous and cute at first, it does get a tiny bit old, as the in game dialogue doesn’t really vary much from that path.
It is a good thing that Tecmo did include a soundtrack feature as well in DOAXBV so the gamer can select their own tracks to play during the game in the menus. The provided music is overwhelmingly poppy and light, and fits perfectly with the tone of the game overall. With liscenced music from Christina Aguilera, Bob Marley, Meja, Baja Men, Reel Big Fish, and B*witched, there are more than a few to choose from. However, there is something to be said for having the girls spike and jiggle while the Foo Fighters or Crystal Method spins in the background..
Being a sports game, replayablity is almost built in. There is no real way to “beat” the game in the traditional sense, so as long as you enjoy the game itself the first time thru, there’s no reason you wouldn’t want to continue. There is no 4 player option or system link play, so only two people can play at any given time, which for a 4 man volleyball game, seems more than a little strange. It seems it would have been fairly easy to incorporate 4-player play, and added to the overall value as well, so hopefully if there are any further games in the series, this will be considered.
I will be the first to admit that DOAXBV was uncomfortable for me at first. Not for any other reason than just not being accustomed to games that have scantily clad women lounging on the beach, rolling in the sand, and bouncing on blocks, as large parts of their gameplay. (Complete with a full Zoom feature on many parts of the game) However, once I got into the volleyball aspect, and began to buy gifts and give them not for the sheer vanity of it, but to make my teammate play better, the game started to show its true colors. What it is, is a very good volleyball game played by beautifully rendered women. Can you ogle the women all day long if you wish… sure. Do you have to in order to enjoy the game in it’s entirely? No way. Once the game becomes real to you, the pretty visuals take a back seat.
Review By: JakeT
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