Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball review (Xbox)

The other interactive portion of Xtreme Beach Volleyball is the hopping game. This minigame is played poolside, and it is essentially a means for you to get comfortable with the analog buttons. Floating blocks are placed in a pool, and you have to hop from block to block without falling in the water. A hard push of A hops two spaces, while a soft press moves one space. It's pretty silly. It also earns you money, but not nearly as much as a game of volleyball would.

As mentioned, the game has a large shopping element, though the way it handles your inventory is a little clunky. You can keep items in your inventory and use them, wear them, and so on. Or, in your hotel room, you can put items into your collection, which serves as a checklist of what you've seen. Considering that your vacation ends after 14 days with no real resolution or climax, completing each girl's collection seems to be the only real goal here, as the collection and inventory stays with that girl from game to game. Weirdly enough, some items--such as a handful of DOA3 commercials and a trailer for Tecmo's upcoming Ninja Gaiden game--can't be viewed directly from your collection. Instead, you have to remove them from the collection and put them back into your inventory before you can actually watch the videos. Considering that most items have little to no actual purpose in the game, this extra step is totally unnecessary.

Now that you have an understanding about the activities you can engage in on Zack Island, let's talk about what Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball is really about: dressing up the girls in skimpy bikinis and accessories and, well, looking at them. The graphics are on par with those of Dead or Alive 3, meaning they're impressive, and the skimpy outfits give the whole thing the feel of a virtual pinup calendar. The game occasionally gives you limited camera control, letting you move around a little bit and, perhaps more importantly, zoom in for a closer look. The game has well over 100 bikinis to purchase and try out and plenty of other accessories, like hair clips, shoes, wristbands, hats, and so on.

Considering how much of the game is clearly focused on looking at 3D models of girls dressed in bathing suits, you'd expect that the voyeuristic portion of the game would be incredibly well developed, allowing you to view the action from any angle, quickly change outfits and locations on the fly, and so on. But even this portion of the game feels like it was thrown together without concern for the final product. There are only a few different spots to put the girls in, and each girl has a limited number of animations, so you'll be looking at the same routine of Lisa rolling around in the sand over and over again, or the same animation of a girl inching her way along a tree trunk. Also, the show doesn't last very long before kicking you back out to the menu, costing you a segment of daylight in the process. If you're a big fan of any of the DOA characters, it's true that you'll get some enjoyment out of viewing the girls in various outfits, but the real lack of variety in the locales and animation really prevents this part of the game from having long-term appeal.

The lack of animation extends to the volleyball section of the game as well. Each character will go into a series of idle animations--usually stretching--when she hasn't moved for a second or two. The characters won't break out of this idle animation until you do something, so you'll occasionally see a girl go from stretching out a leg immediately into a ball-hitting animation, which looks very awkward. More pronouced head tracking animation--having the girls' heads and eyes follow the ball as it moves around the court--would have added some more visual flair to the game and also would have helped out with the game's slow-moving camera. For a game that deliberately puts little emphasis on its gameplay and instead shines a bright, bright spotlight on its graphics, you'd expect little details and other small touches to run rampant throughout the visual presentation--so it's actually a little shocking that the game ends up looking less than perfect. That said, the character models do look fantastic, and the swimsuits seem well designed, for the most part. The beaches are appropriately sandy, and the sand is deformed and displaced as the girls move around. The lighting is well done, accurately depicting different times of day. It's true, the graphics are the best part of Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball.

Like the graphics, the sound in Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball mostly gets the job done but falls a little short. Stylistically, the licensed soundtrack is composed mostly of pop songs, though there's a little reggae and ska thrown in for good measure. Christina Aguilera is the most recognizable name on the soundtrack, though other acts like Reel Big Fish, Big Mountain, and Bob Marley make appearances. Mercifully, the game allows you to use custom soundtracks. The sound effects are fairly generic and minimal. The slaps of hands hitting volleyballs are about as accurate as you'd expect, and there isn't much more than that. With the exception of the dialogue in the intro and closing movies, all the game's speech is in Japanese. While this is on par with the previous entry in the series, the Japanese speech seems rather out of place in a volleyball game. The fact that a fair portion of it isn't subtitled doesn't help matters, though 95 percent of the speech is useless anyway. The intro and closing movies depict Zack's misadventures in getting and losing his island, and his voice was provided by former basketball player and occasional pro wrestler Dennis Rodman. Rodman had to record only a couple of lines of speech for these movies, but even those sound ham-fisted and completely phoned-in. Someone shouting, "Once more, with feeling!" at Rodman wouldn't have hurt.

What is Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball? It's a volleyball game with very little volleyball. It's a poorly designed casino. It's a virtual pinup calendar that could have used some more variety. It's a shopping simulation. And, perhaps most of all, Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball is a graphical showcase that makes for a pretty uneventful game. With no real beginning or end to the festivities, you could theoretically play the game forever. But once you've mastered the volleyball, the gameplay portion becomes a nuisance that stands between you and the completion of your item collection, and the virtual peep-show portion of the game isn't done well enough to score solidly in the fan-service department. It's easy to get the impression that someone once had significantly higher hopes and dreams for the game, but the end product feels empty and utterly unfinished, making it best suited for a curious rental than anything else. Hopefully Tecmo's Team Ninja has finally gotten the "sexy polygonal models" thing out of its system and will get back to basics for its next project.