Dead Or Alive Ultimate
Older gen bouncing breasts, you gotta love it.
Tags: Dead Or Alive Ultimate Categories: Reviews, Xbox Reviews
Posted by Travis on Dec 5th, 2004
| Title | Players | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Dead Or Alive Ultimate (title page) | 1 - 2 | ||
| Developer | Publisher | Genre | Online |
| Fighting | Yes | ||
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Tecmo’s Dead or Alive franchise has been around for years now and has gained a loyal following. After three successful installments in the franchise, Tecmo’s Team Ninja decided it was time to go back and revisit the first two games in the series and recreate these classic games for the Xbox console. Created as a “tribute to all of our fans”, the Dead or Alive franchise is now very much alive and well on Xbox LIVE! – the venerable fighting series hits online play.
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The Dead or Alive franchise has never been popular with many hardcore fighting fans because its fighting engine doesn’t boast the same depth and polish so evident in many of its 3D brethren. DOA games basically boil down to three buttons: a punch, a kick, and a guard. With only three buttons at your disposal, Dead or Alive Ultimate becomes extremely easy to pick up and run with. Each of the 15 characters in DOAU has roughly 70 to 80 different moves and combos, all of which can be viewed in-game; most of the combos are slight variations of one another in order to throw off an opponent’s guard. It is vitally important to perfect and execute as many of these combos while you fight due to the reversal system.
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The DOA 1 game is virtually unchanged from years ago. The game should feel familiar to those who played it and offer a nice bit of nostalgia. The game can be played online now, and that is really what Tecmo was touting for the game. Switching focus to the meatier side of the package, the new DOA 2 has quite a bit going for it. The characters’ attack combinations haven’t been altered from the original version, and the countering system is a little more strict than it was in DOA 3 making pulling off the devastating moves a little trickier. Again, the big addition here is the ability to fight online against other human opponents.
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Each one of the game’s 15 characters starts with two available costumes, but each time you run through the Story mode (or Time Attack for the secret characters), you unlock a new costume. Each girl has anywhere from 13-20 costumes while the boys have around 6-10 costumes in total. The final boss, Tengu, whom you can unlock, has 3 costumes. In total, there are hundreds of costumes to earn, so that means you’ll really have to pound away at the single-player mode’s longevity. This was a smart addition, especially considering that fighting games usually don’t have any real driving motive outside of running through the game repeatedly with different characters. In DOA2U¸ the costume attainment not only provides incentive for continually completing the single-player mode, but also means that you learn how to use, and perfect, each character. By going through the game a multiple number of times with all the characters, you’ll be able to see which one best fits your fighting style–then you can go hell-for-leather with that character and gradually perfect the ability to dispense some serious online beat downs.
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So what exactly is new in the game? Well, aside from the online play DOAU brings back almost every included stage to ever appear in a DOA game since DOA2, though they have all received extreme makeovers of course. Team Ninja has given the game a complete facelift, adding interactive environments, more breakaway points, and making the stages all seem totally fantastic. In fact, these arenas even make those in DOA3 look suddenly mediocre. Almost every stage has something eye catching playing out in the background, be it a police car chasing someone in the Downtown arena, or a menacing lion watching over your fight in the Safari arena. What’s more is that most of the arenas are also extremely interactive too. Watch as you knock someone over a hippo and it squeals in discontent, or you smash an opponent against a street sign and it sign comes tumbling down onto your heads. Some environments also feature subtle, yet jaw-dropping effects such as hundreds of cherry blossom petals falling to the floor or, during the final boss battle, the changing of the seasons!
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Graphics are what they are. The backgrounds have all been redone and touched up but the overall graphics are the same as the original. TECMO did a great job at the time, but now the graphics look antiquated and disappointing. It would have been a fine line to update the graphics engines on recreated games, but there is little to look forward to compared to recent games, such as Tekken or Soul caliber. That being said, its still DOA. The sound in the game is good, but not quite up to par with the rest of the package. The character voices are nice as are the sound effects, but the music in the game is fairly bland and while it may have been fine when the original game released, game audio has come a long way since then.
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One worthy tradition that DOAU continues is that of multi-tiered stages. At any point during a battle, it’s possible to knock your opponent from one level (of certain stages) and continue the fight down below. However, instead of just a few locations on a stage to hurl someone from, many stages now offer four or five. Also new to this game are the slopes, which you can knock someone down and see them tumble to the lower level. Each character also has an athletic slope move, which, when initiated at the correct moment, lets your character knock an opponent down a slope in a ’special’ way. For instance, Zack’s slope move sees him leap on the back of his victim and ride him down onto the level beneath. Slopes effects range from tumbling down a small cliff to plummeting headlong down a huge flight of stairs; and while they are cool to watch (much like the counters), some of them penalize you with far too much damage. If you just knock someone down the steps in the Dragon Hill or Great Wall levels, they will lose almost half their life in a matter of seconds, which is much too powerful for my tastes.
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With a game like DOAU it’s hard to point out flaws as the game is simply a remake of the games from yesteryear. The sound has already been mentioned, but gameplay-wise it is identical to the past games that it is based on. Those who have grown accustomed to the DOA 3 controls may find it hard to go back to the old style of DOA 2. These problems will not be apparent to those that are new to the series, but for fans, they will be noticed.
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Dead or Alive Ultimate offers a different take on the online fighter phenomenon, perhaps more so than any other previous online game. Instead of players seeking other player to battle against, Team Ninja has implemented the ingenious idea of creating rooms where up to 8 combatants can come together and play. Ensuing fights are still 1-on-1, but the other players in the room are still allowed to watch the match and chat. In each room, the host will choose which type of game mode he wishes to play. There are 6 different types of online modes you can partake in: Winner Stays, Loser Stays, Tournament, Survival, Team Battle, and Kumite (where the champion keeps fighting until he or she quits). Using these modes, the battles become much more interesting than the 1-on-1 online matches of other fighting games, where you are forced to play a single opponent over and over unless you quit. DOAU not only allows you to play different people, making things fresher, it also allows you to watch other people play, and perhaps learn a few things from them along the way.
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Dead or Alive Ultimate also keeps track of the stats for you and everyone else around you while online. Many different statistics can be accessed while online, such as which characters are winning the most fights, and which are being used the most by players, as well as the online reliability of individual players. Of course, the game also ranks its players using a grade and point system. Each time you win a round, you are awarded points and each time you lose, you lose points. Depending on your grade and the grade of your opponent, you may also gain (or lose) extra points. For instance, if you are a rank ‘C’ and manage to beat a rank ‘A’ opponent, you will then earn a bunch of extra points, while the rank ‘A’ player will, conversely, lose a bunch. It’s a simple, yet effective and functional ranking system.
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Tecmo has crammed a lot of extras into this game ensuring a long life span. With literally hundreds of costumes to unlock, hidden characters, and new system voices, you could be playing this game for quite some time, not to mention the online option which offers limitless challenges. One of the extras I’d like to touch on is the new system voice feature which allows you to change the “announcer” of the matches. This feature may seem small, and it is a novelty to be sure; however, it is a great bonus for fans of the series and shows some creative thinking on the developer’s part.
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In the end Dead or Alive Ultimate is a great package for long time fans of the series and for new comers who want to test themselves against opponents online. Is there room for improvement? Sure, but what’s here is good and is the best online, 3D fighting the industry has seen and will likely remain so for the duration of the current-generation console life span.
| What Works | Score |
|---|---|
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+ It's DOA + It's online + Interactive stages |
6.8 |
| What Doesn't | |
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- Poor graphics - Little depth - Simplistic controls |
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| Under the Shrink-wrap | |
| In case you didn't catch it, here is the selling points: 1) Its DOA, 2) Its DOA on the Xbox, 3) Its on Xbox LIVE! - either that does it for you or it doesn't. | |
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Tags: Dead Or Alive Ultimate
Posted by Travis on Dec 5th, 2004 and is filed under Reviews, Xbox Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can post a comment, or trackback from your own site.
