A fan service game if there ever was one, Xtreme Beach Volleyball puts all of the female characters (plus a new one, Lisa) onto a desert island to frolic around in bathing suits and play sports. The cracker-thin premise is that Zack lures the ladies to a tropical island for a fighting tournament (told in the most ridiculous intro in video gaming history) and attempts to woo them.

Calling this a sports title is almost inaccurate, as the game is really 50% volleyball, 50% lesbian simulator. Sure, you do spend a good amount of time hitting the courts, but you have to remember that volleyball requires two people to a team. You've got to find a partner amongst the other girls and make her happy by purchasing the right gifts - essentially making this a modified dating sim. You never really need to play volleyball, really - it's just a way to get cash so you can buy any of the hundreds of items, ranging from swimsuits to accessories like hats, sunglasses and even nail polish. In effect, all you do is really play dress up with the Dead or Alive chicks and watch them play smack a ball around for a few minutes. And if you don't want to do that, you can litereally just spy on them as play like little girls on swingsets, frolic in the water, straddle trees and do stretching exercises. Creepy? Yeah, a little. But it's all pretty tame compared to some of the other stuff weirder stuff that's come out in Japan.

The volleyball portion is only barely more evolved than, say, Pong. You can either whack the ball over the net or pass it to your partner, at two varying strength levels. You don't even really need to position yourself much, as the game practically does that for you as well. You won't find much in the way of strategy, but it's simplicity helps make it an amusing distraction.

You could probably say that for the whole game. There's very little in the way of deep gameplay, challenge or even satisfaction (unless you're one of those obsessive types that absolutely needs to have every swimsuit on every girl in the game, although you can unlock some cool promo videos from the other Dead or Alive games), but it's actually a good relaxation game, the kind where you can just set your mind on autopilot, put on your favorite song (use the custom playlist, the default licensed songs are garbage) and just bum around.

Despite the fact that DOA Xtreme Volleyball is rated M for all of the skin-baring attire, it's really no worse than the swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated. And only the intro features any of the purported nudity that the back label promises. However, a bunch of hackers took it upon themselves to strip their favorite ladies and have them play around buck nekkid. Naturally, this requires a modified Xbox, and while it's not 100% perfect - the strings for some of the swimsuits are still evident - these guys actually did some reasonably good work. Of course, Tecmo frowns upon this immensely - I'm guessing that big, long diatribe about copyright law and infringement in the intro was to prevent people from doing stuff like this, especially considering some people in Japan got sued for creating a nude hack for Kasumi in DOA3 - but it's an amusing testament to how far some people would go to see naked video game women.

DOA Xtreme Beach Volleyball also contains the most ridiculous intros known in existence. The first features the various girls playing around on the beach, including the infamous bit of Lei Fang feeding Hitomi a strawberry before she playfully bites on her finger.

The other intro details how Zach got his money, which includes but is not limited to: (1) a Titanic parody, (2) a jetpack, and (3) a dance number in a casino. When you finish your vacation on the island, Zach gets eaten by a shark for some reason. Help! This game makes NO SENSE!

DoA Xtreme Beach Volleyball was a decently entertaining piece of software and certainly got the vacation feeling right, but at the same time it suffered from very shallow gameplay and various problems that left much to be desired. So with the announcement of DoA Extreme 2, there immediately came to mind a ton of changes that could make this mediocre but atmospheric game into a good one, and when Waverace styled jetski races were thrown into the package, one could have almost gotten excited about the sequel. But when the game finally was released, most of these hopes should be squashed, but let's start at the beginning...

Starting from the intro, you'll discover at once that the blatant voyeurism was even raised - exponentially! Almost the whole FMV consists of embarassing perspectives and shows very clearly that Team Ninja had made some "adjustments" to the women's body proportions, resembling mostly the very first Dead or Alive game in this respect. They even grub out an even fancier version extreme, "improved" juggle physics - breasts are now animated independently of each other - that make you think their busts contain a higher percentage of liquid than the ocean water. It's also kinda cheap that they recycled the same old title song from its predecessor, like many other songs that where already annoying the first time - so once again it is highly recommended to replace them with your own favourite music.

What's the story, you ask? NO! DON'T ASK! If you had bet that DoA Xtreme Beach Volleyball was as ridiculous as a video game can get story wise, you've now lost your money. No really, I won't tell you. Go watch the cinematics yourself. Or better, don't... nnngh, alright, here goes, don't say I didn't warn you: Zack seeks out his sunken island in a submarine and rises it above sea level again using the "you-know-what". It shoots a rocket into space, which calls an UFO to project Zack's face upon the earth's surface and send a tractor beam, perfectly restoring the island. Of course, to prevent the volcano from destrying it again, it has to be closed off by tying a huge rock to its crater.

The Volleyball game certainly could have used some deeper mechanics, but it is exactly the same. Actually, it's worse, because the partner AI is actually dumber than before, and most of the time your partner won't even try to catch the ball coming from your opponents. The casino makes its return, as well as pool hopping, which can now be played competitive. But there's also a bunch of new mini games, namely tug-of-war, a water slide, a footrace, and the utterly ridiculous butt-battle. Most of these feel quite random, though and are hardly worth using the Zack dollars it costs to unlock them.

But the addition we've all been waiting for is the jetski race, right? This one actually plays quite well, except turning around after you for whatever reason come to face the wrong direction is a major pain in the ass. It has a stunt system, which certainly isn't as elaborate as Waverace 64, but it does its part to make the races entertaining. You can buy various jetskis with different stats, and the more often you play the race during a vacation, you get to play more different courses. This is still rather mediocre, but by far the best part of the whole game. Well, the best gameplay part, anyway. The water looks like jelly, though.

Other than that, it's pretty much the same formula, you earn money playing the various (mini-) games, use it to buy new swimming suits or gifts for your partners, and try to gift them with your character's suits, since once again, buying suits is restricted to a small fraction of the whole lot for each character. Getting the girls to accept the more expensive ones is still as random, annoying and tiresome. If the game really excels the game at anything, than it's wasting your time. Not only have to gift them again and again, you'll also spend half the while waiting for text to scroll or new screens to load. At least now you can give them the same swimsuit again and again as long as they don't open the package, and don't need to buy it anew each time. By the way, the only DLC for the game are packs to buy parts of the whole item collection with MS points. Thank you Tecmo, for giving us the choice whether we prefer to get ripped off for time or for money.

The only element they put a lot of effort into to improve it seems was the voyeurism. While the first game was restricting certain perspectives, you now have much more free control over the camera, and you actually get a camera to take snapshots of the girls "relaxing" or "being friendly" to each other, and then a better one with different zoom functions and color modes. Also, there are more revealing swimsuits for each girl, and they get suntan lines when changing them. The graphics have improved about as much over the first game as DoA 4 has improved over DoA3, but at least in HD mode, the characters somehow look like have a greasy oil film on their skin all the time. In addition to watching them sit around the jungle and straddle trees, you can even have them dance at a stripper pole. Classy!

Despite the fun jetski racing, it's difficult to recommend the game even over DoA Xtreme 1, unless you're really into CGI voyeurism. But still, the newer game as well is great to just throw it in and have some vacation feeling while carelessly pressing a few controller buttons and listening to your favourite music. If you're open to that kind of entertainment, give it a try, but don't spend a lot of money on it.

One would think it'd be rather embarassing to play a game like Dead or Alive Xtreme in public, but nonetheless Tecmo brought the series to the PSP. Dead or Alive Paradise could be seen as a port of the Xbox 360 game, but the jetski and tug-of-war games are noticeably missing. The developers tried to make up for them with the new character Rio, who works in the casino but is otherwise bland and boring.

For lack of analogue buttons on the PSP, the idiot proof simplistic controls had to be sacrificed. The same goes for the gorgeousness of the graphics, which look still nice for a PSP game, but the Dead or Alive Xtreme series was always a relaxed couch game, and it's flair doesn't lend itself too well to a handheld format.

The rest is the same as ever, play monotous beach volleyball matches, engage in the few forgettable mini games and creep up on the girls with your camera when they go sunbathing. Another DOA Beach Volleyball game no one really needs.

Dead or Alive Paradise (PSP)

Alright, folks, a Shinobi is a Ninja who left their ninja kingdom, sunglasses make a perfect martial artist, and Natassia Malthe is Japanese. Ladies and Gentleman, if your brain isn't switched to standby mode by now, you're not going to enjoy this movie!

The main focus lies on five of the female protagonists from the game, Kasumi (sadly played by pancake-face Devon Aoki), Ayane (played by the caucasian Natassia Malthe, as mentioned before), Christie, Tina and Helena. Hayate and Hayabusa play a role, too, all the other characters from the games up until Dead or Alive 3 make their appearance, but are mostly degraded to extras, the void of story-relevant males filled with some rather annoying new characters. And of course there's the main villain, Donovan, to whom is alluded to in most of the games, but he never made an appearance there.

The story is as ridiculous as it is in the games (maybe even more). Donovan lures the best fighters in the world to a fighting tournament, to record their fighting data and make himself the greatest warrior of them all (by putting on bloody sunglasses, for chrissakes). Most of the (important) personage has their own very personal reasons to enter the tournament, too, which are, for the most part, very similar to the games. So, also a lot of the sideplots are carried over. Kasumi is in search for her lost brother, Zack constantly tries to hit on Tina, and so on. A lot of the individual fighting styles got lost in the transition to live action, though, and most of the time it's just the generic "martial arts" we've seen more than enough from the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the much-to-close but cheaply done replication of some of the ingame costumes makes the "actors" look like cosplayers.

Still, the movie knows what it really has to do right to emulate the appeal of the game, so we get a lot of ambiguous camera angles and lots of scantily clad females fighing. It even has a volleyball scene. On the other hand, it can also be described as a feministic movie somehow. Every single male character is displayed either as a jerk, an idiot, a dim-witted muscle head, a geek, or combinations of these, always overshadowed by the strong and clever women. They even get "philosophic" with plays on some hilarious pseudo-"ancient asian wisdom", though most of that got cut in the theatrical release, it is available as bonus content on DVD.

All in all, the movie does nothing really good, and even some things really bad, but can be quite enjoyable if it is watched as what it is, boundlessly stupid high gloss trash action. As long as no one tries to take it seriously or think about anything while watching it, no one's gonna get hurt.

So yeah, you've looked through the article, and you've seen lots of scantily clad girls. You might walk away thinking that Dead or Alive is just another cheesecake fest, a successor to Tomb Raider, just in a different genre. It's clear that Tecmo thinks the same way - just take a look at the advertisement for Xtreme Beach Volleyball below, or the infamous "she kicks high" commercial for Dead or Alive 3 (where a bunch of slack-jawed weenies ogle the game in motion.) And, quite honestly, it's unquestionably one of the major reasons behind the game's popularity, as the overall character designs have been the best looking of any fighting game on the market for a while. But look beyond that, and there's an exciting, fast paced game underneath that, while maybe lacking the more technical fighting system of Virtua Fighter or the colorful cast of Soul Calibur and Tekken, more than makes up for it with blazing ferocity.

The fifth major installment in the series is currently in development, and Tecmo showed an early gameplay video at TGS 2011. Interestingly, they seemed to downplay the usual sex appeal, as the footage showed Hayate and Hayabusa fighting. If the official poster is to believed, they now apparently model Kasumi's face after Devon Aoki. *shudder