Island paradise
After the tournament featured in Dead or Alive 3, Zack has run into considerable wealth. Like all individuals with overwhelming monetary resources, Zack has used his funds to purchase all sorts of cars, gadgets, and even an island. On Zack Island, Zack has built a holiday resort, complete with shops, hotel and even a casino. He decides to invite the girls from Dead or Alive to participate in a volleyball tournament to be hosted on Zack Island.
Barbie for men
Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball is broken up into two main parts; Vacation mode and Exhibition matches. The vacation is essentially the core gameplay component, and most of your play time will be spent here. Exhibition mode allows you (or a friend) to pick any two of the Dead or Alive girls, and go head to head against two other girls in a game of beach volleyball.
Vacation starts with the player selecting one of the DOA girls (including a new girl, Lisa). Once you land on the island, you can choose to take a tour with Lisa, or look around on your own. Your aim is to get a partner, and compete against the other girls on the island in games of beach volleyball. You’ve got two weeks on the island to find a partner and establish a good relationship with her. The whole relationship deal is fairly simple – you send presents to gain favour, and you lose favour by losing matches or trying to defect to another team. There’s a wide variety of gifts available in the shops spread throughout the island, ranging from swimsuits to hats to sub machine guns. Money for purchasing gifts is earned through playing volleyball, playing mini games (such as the pool hop) or buy gambling in the casino.
The volleyball section of the game is a very simplistic affair, relying on only two buttons to perform a majority of the moves required. More advanced moves, such as diving, are executed automatically, resulting in a less hands on affair than most would want. After a few minutes of play, the game disintegrates into a ‘volley, set, spike’ affair, until someone is uncoordinated enough to miss the ball. Strangely enough, DOA’s version of volleyball doesn’t follow the scoring standards of a normal volleyball match, resulting in matches being completely relatively quickly.
If you’ve ever felt the need to play dress ups with a bunch of shapely females, then you should probably ignore the rest of this paragraph; for the rest of you Dead of Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball is one of the shallowest gaming experiences you are ever likely to endure. Thanks to the Barbie doll-like vacation game mode, and the needlessly simplistic volleyball game, Dead or Alive: Xtreme Volleyball really suffers in the long term. First time through the vacation mode will take a little over two hours, and then its up to you whether you wish to collect the remaining items and bonuses the game has to offer, as the main portion of the gameplay has already been experienced. Four player exhibition matches are another feature that would have added a substantial amount of replay value to the mix, but sadly any such mode is absent.
Pure eye candy
It was pretty obvious from the outset that Tecmo’s main focus in Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball was the overall visual presentation. Outrageous attention to detail has been paid to each of the girls, thus making them look a ton better than they did in Dead or Alive 3. Detail on the faces could have used a little more work, but this doesn’t subtract from the overall look. The girls still lack a great deal of the real world proportions that real women have, but one can say that Tecmo aren’t really out to achieve realism here
. The animation of the girls is extremely fluid, both on and off the court, though you might question the ability of women to perform some of the actions do, considering their physique.
The island environments feature all sorts of incredible little details, such as realistic looking sand and some excellent lighting. The interaction between the characters and the environment is top notch – you can see where the girls have left footprints in the sand, they kick water up when they run, objects appear distorted when under water, and the girls even tan up if you want them too. The camera is more than functional during the little intermission movies and the replays, but can get in the way at certain points during the volleyball matches. The flow of the action is a constant 60 frames per second, and the game even includes a 60hz mode for some full speed, no borders action.
Dead of Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball’s default soundtrack is filled with mainstream pop artists such as the Spice Girls and Christina Aguilera, with a couple of punk bands, and a few classic artists such as Bob Marley thrown into the mix. If you don’t like the music which is provided, you can throw your own soundtracks into the game (Rocky soundtrack ahoy – Eye of the Tiger really works for the sparring videos). Dennis Rodman provides the voice for Zack, who coincidently has the only English voice in the game (which you can toggle back into Japanese), but his total dialog in the piece would add up to about 10 lines. On the flipside, the girls’ voices are still in Japanese, which saves us from experiencing another godawful dubbing job and retains the authenticity of being a Japanese game.
Shallow waters
If I were to be frank about Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball, I’d have to say it should have been a tech demo at E3 2001. The gameplay certainly lacks a lot of depth – vacation is almost like playing with a set of Barbie dolls and the volleyball is just too simple to really be enjoyable, while the rest of your time will be spent watching mini movies of girls rubbing themselves up against trees, and playing with swings and so on. A lot more could have been done with a concept like this – you could have added a tournament or league mode into the vacation setting to make the relationships and just the whole premise of the vacation make a lot more sense. A few extra RPG elements could have been added to the game, such as training your volleyball abilities instead of lazing around the island, hopping across inflatable pool toys. As it stands, Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball is not worth the full price of admission because everything you can really accomplish with the game can be done in a singular rental. A sequel with the elements previously mentioned could make for a much more interesting game (hint, hint Tecmo).
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