A launch title for the Xbox, Dead or Alive 3 isn't nearly as gigantic of a step as DOA 2 was. But for everything DOA2 did, DOA3 offers more of it, in spades. While at first glance it may not seem like the visuals have improved that much, there's lots of little details that add a lot to the overall look and feel. And it's a testament to Team Ninja's prowess that this, one of the first games released for the Xbox, is still one the best looking. The arenas are even more insane - a gigantic waterfall that reaches miles into the sky, an aquarium full of indivially modeled fish - in one arena, knock your opponent out of a window and they'll shock themselves on the neon lights before hitting the ground. Some of the more open areas like the beach bring about some immersion-breaking invisible walls or obstacles that don't make any sense, but of course that's hard to avoid without ringout rules. The controls have been streamlined so you don't need to use both the digital and analog sticks, but otherwise the gameplay system is pretty much the same, save for the obligatory moveset updates. DOA 3 brings one terrible innovation that plagues every episode since then, though. Opponents can now bounce each other against walls on top of all the standard juggling, nearly doubling the possible lenght of a combo. Needless to say, this is really frustrating when you're the victim.

The new characters around include Christie, an icy haired assassin; Hitomi, the Japanese-German karate master, and Brad Wong, a drunken boxing style fighter. While Hitomi basically replaces Ein, who now turned (back) into Hayate, introducing the now fourth Ninja to the series, Brad Wong and Christie both bring with them unique and interesting fighting styles.

The developers finally gave characters their own endings, all CGI rendered, and most of them are actually pretty cool. The music isn't quite as good as previous titles, and for some reason, various licensed songs from Aerosmith appear in the game. About the only complaint otherwise is the final battle - where the perspective switches to behind the player and you attempt to attack the main bad guy who blasts you away with ease. It's even cheaper than any usual final boss, and since throws and counters are useless, you're limited to ordinary punch and kick moves. Once you get the tactics down, it's pretty painless, but still annoying. Probably the weakest boss in the whole series.

Unfortunately, there's not many costumes to unlock. The European and Japanese versions (which both came out after the American release) have extra costumes, but you can only obtain these otherwise by getting the Xbox Exhibition Vol 1 disc or old issues of the Official Xbox Magazine, which will add them to the game. Most of them aren't too terribly impressive, although Lei Fang gets an assortment of cool ones, Ayane's ninja outfit rocks (apparently enough to feature it on the Japanese cover) and Helena's harem girl digs are quite interesting too.

One of the first titles for the Xbox 360, Dead or Alive 4 is an odd choice to show off the power of the new system. Sure, it looks great, especially in high-def, but the improvements over Dead or Alive Ultimate for the original Xbox are fairly minor. Some of the new environments are pretty cool, especially the Vegas stage (where characters can get hit by cars if they dawdle in the middle of the street) or the dinosaur (!!) level, which features huge, animated raptors, pterodactyls and t-rexes. There are a few new characters - young pretty boy Eliot, who seems to be taking over for Gen Fu; Kokoro, whose enormous hair and flowing kimonos show off the new cloth physics; and La Mariposa, a masked wrestler who is pretty obviously Lisa from DOAX Volleyball. Most interesting is Nicole, a female version of the Spartan from Halo, you won't even know it was supposed to be a girl in there. If you're a fan of Halo, you'll welcome her, others my find her slightly misplaced. Sadly, none of them are as refreshing as Dead or Alive 3's newcomers in how they are played. Some of the veteran characters first appear to be missing from the roster, but they can all be unlocked.

The fighting engine is pretty much the same, but controls are a bit more rigid, for better or worse. While the game runs faster than previous titles, the physics feel a tiny bit more sluggish at the same time. Tecmo has also mucked with the counter system a bit to make them harder to pull off, but it's hardly noticeable and still feels pretty cheap. The uber-powerful final boss this time is Alpha-152, a translucent, flying naked clone of Kasumi who can wreck you something fierce. Overall DOA4 drastically cranks up the difficulty. While none of the former games was particularly hard even at the highest settings, Team Ninja obviously wanted to cater to their new reputation as hardcore game developers they've earned from Ninja Gaiden, so now the normal setting is at about the same level as "very hard" was before. You won't even find an "easy" option.

While there's a noticeable lack of cool costumes - more than Dead or Alive 3 but far less than Dead or Alive Ultimate - each character has a unique full motion video ending. They range from boring to absolutely hilarious - Zack and his girl face off against an army of skeletons, Lei Fang kicks some random guy off a train for accidentally groping her chest, Tina puts on a rock concert and uses an entire city block as her own personal amp, and Kasumi has a goofy (naked!) mermaid dream. Once again, the opening song is the not-so-brilliant Aerosmith song "Eat the Rich", and the rest of the soundtrack is fairly forgettable. The Xbox Live features are pretty much just like DoA Ultimate, although there's now a "lobby" where you can purchase cute little avatars. Character customization a la DOAX Volleyball would've been nice though - if Soul Calibur 3 has it, why not here? Overall, Dead or Alive 4 is a decent installment, even if it refuses to fix the balance flaws that the series continues to be maligned for.

Attention: Due to the difficulties of taking decent 3DS screenshots, the images in the sidebar are promo screens by Tecmo, which are rendered in a much higher resolution than the 3DS hardware can actually display. All other screenshots are photos taken with a digital camera in 2D mode.

After a long vacation on Zack Island, the Dead or Alive series finally went back to fighting games in 2011. Dead or Alive Dimensions is no entirely new episode, though, but rather a retelling of the story so far. After all, the story ark of the big feud between the Mugen-Tenshin ninja clan and DOATEC came to an end after the fourth tournament, although you are not to blame if you didn't notice it.

Dimension sets out to fill all the gaping holes in the series' formerly extremely thin narration, by leading players through a Chronicle mode, which covers all four tournaments, with extensive cutscenes and fixed character choices for each episode. Your mileage may vary, though, whether the story is to be called fleshened out or just drawn out. Especially the first two chapters are mostly concerned with turning Kasumi into an even more insufferable Mary Sue than before. One would have hoped for the opposite after Tomonobu "she's my daughter" took his leave, but apparently the new Team Ninja desired to prove once more that they're really bad at storytelling (see Other M). That said, after taking the focus off of her, the third and fourth chapter are actually okay.

While the game contains only one (hidden) new character with ninja-boss Shiden, it features the biggest roster in the series yet, as every character from the series (with the exception of the Spartan) is playable, including the bosses. Even Genra is turned into a normal fighter and much less annoying in consequence. There's also a rather high number of stages. A couple of them are new, but most taken over from Dead or Alive 3, 4 and Ultimate. Backdrops that go crazy with many animated or breakable objects, like the aquarium, the safari or the seaside market, are generally avoided, though. As a nod to Other M, there's also a Metroid stage. A teaser had hinted at the possible inclusion of Samus Aran as well, but she's not in the game.

No experiments have been made with the fighting engine, which is closest to Dead or Alive 3, ditching the stiff controls from DOA4 and the arbitrary input exception for mid-kick counters. Cheap counter abuse is back as ever, together with the extreme disadvantage when being bounced against a wall.

Dead or Alive Dimensions (3DS)

The additional playing modes are the same as ever, but each brings new annoying issues. Worst of all, with the exception of Free Play you'll find no difficulty setting in the options. Instead the arcade, survival and tag match modes offer a number of courses, each with their own difficulty level, but of course the game forces you through the laughably easy stages in order to unlock the "hard" ones. After Dead or Alive 4 had been the hardest game in the series yet, Dimensions is unquestonably the easiest one. Survival mode is especially ridiculous, as only the bosses after every 10 enemies might or might not require you to actually look at the screen to win. Technically, the last 20-or-so fights in the 100 enemies challenge are somewhat worthwile, but by the time any formerly sane person has long lost that quality out of boredom. You certainly won't be looking forward to try again when losing after 80+ fodder enemies.

The greatest fail is tag mode, which always teams you up with an AI partner instead of giving you control over both characters. The AI is simply terrible, switching you in at the most inconvenient moments. The recovery rate for the resting character is insane, though, that's why most of the tag challenges put you up against bosses that easily deal 80% damage with a single attack.

You might be looking towards online play after being disappointed by the single player modes, but online is a letdown, too. Most matches fought for this review had terrible lag, and while you can turn down a challenge based on an opponent's fighting record, the game doesn't give you a ping or any other orientation for the connection quality. Oh, and there's no tag multiplayer at all.

Dead or Alive Dimensions (3DS)

Finally, there's a totally stupid "Showcase" mode, in which you take 3D pictures of the fighters standing in boring poses. Or more precisely, one boring pose in the beginning, as the rest has to be unlocked, a whole 1000 different "figurines," one more boring than the other and often the same poses just in different costumes. One assumes the premise for the mode was "OK, we really want to use the 3DS waggle abilities, but we've just got no ideas at all."

Interestingly, when you walk past other DOA players with their 3DS in sleep mode, you get so-called "Throwdown" challenges against their... I don't know what it is, at either rate you fight something, maybe an AI based on farming combat data or just a mathc against their favorite character. Every once in a while, Tecmo also puts up official throwdown challenge with completely arbitrary difficulty. Beating them gives you "special rewards" (read: more boring figurines unlocked).

Costume-wise, there isn't too much you can unlock by playing the game, because, tune in the next forced inclusion of silly 3DS features, the rest of them has to be downloaded. But you can't download them at will or even buy them, no you have to wait for Nintendo's schedule of one costume a day, and leave your 3DS lying around whith activated wireless internet connection, until the game downlaods it automatically. There's up to three downloadable costumes per character, and the schedule seems to be in random order, so be prepared for months of waiting until you got everything. Meta-game rewards are fun and all, but do they need to be done in such a stupid and ridiculous manner? Of course, if you play the game in five years or so, chances are you won't get the costumes at all, anymore. The amount of overall costumes per character is about on par with Dead or Alive 2 Hardcore, but most are well known, with fresh designs mostly reserved for the newer characters that didn't get the DOA Ultimate treatment.

Aside from the confinement to smaller, less eventful fighting areas, DOA Dimensions looks close enough at least to its big brothers on the original Xbox. Keen observers while notice simplified hair physics, which incidentally results in much fewer clipping errors. The pull behind the graphics of course is supposed to come with the 3D. The game doesn't add any fancy additional exploitation effects other than a focus blur during the pre- and post-fight taunts, but the effect is used quite convincingly, aside from one glitch in the snow stage that makes the characters appear as if they were transparent. The 3D mode comes with a noticeable framerate drop, though.

The "small" version of Dead or Alive might be actually the biggest in content yet, but if you never liked the Dead or Alive series, it does nothing to try and win you over. Even if you're a fan, it finds plenty ways to annoy you with unnecessary limitations and backfiring features. The core mechanics are as solid as ever, but after so many revisions the formula is really starting to get old. For anyone who always wanted to be enlightened about the DOA canon, this is just the right fix, but otherwise it stands only on its merit of being the first handheld version in the series, and one of the very few early 3DS games at all.

Dead or Alive Dimensions (3DS)