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Review
By: |
Ramz |
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Date: |
01/25/2003 |
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Released: |
01/22/2003 |
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Publisher: |
Tecmo |
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Developer: |
Team Ninja |
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Platform: |
Xbox |
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Rating: |
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Dead Or Alive
Xtreme Beach Volleyball was certainly a release that I was
anticipating a few months ago, which was the initial release
date for the game. However, Tecmo decided to delay the game’s
release in order to incorporate a plethora of extras and to
try and get the game in perfect working order. Tecmo suddenly
announced the new drop date of January 21. After reading about
the delay my hopes had dropped. My high expectations of the
game had fell into the pits for I was now not confident that
enough time had be given to the games development. Therefore,
the game would be pushed back and most likely it would be
rushed just to get it onto the store shelves in time. I am
afraid that this time my reservations were
very correct. |
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DOA: Xtreme
Volleyball is an attempt at creating an extreme volleyball
environment; however, I am not sure what Tecmo’s definition of
extreme is. If you consider pampering your partner with
compacts, sun lotion, and various other items then this is
your game. But before I get too far ahead of myself, let’s
start at the beginning.
DOA Xtreme Volleyball has 2 modes of play: Exhibition or Go to
Zack Island. The exhibition is just what is seems, a
'practice' match that allows you to choose any of the
characters for your two man team. You can choose the bathing
suit of your choice and it even allows the opportunity to
choose the 'attitude' of your partner. Giving her confidence
causes her to be a little more aggressive and may not make for
the perfect teammate, depending on your style and 'strategy'.
I will warn you now though; the game doesn’t leave for much of
a strategy, thanks Tecmo. After choosing your two man team,
and your opponents two man team you have 10 courts to choose
from. The courses all look beautiful and probably couldn’t
look much better. What I found strange was in the other game
mode you only have 4 courts available to play on. I guess that
Tecmo has tried to make the Exhibition more appealing by
adding a few extra bells and whistles...I guess.
The second mode takes place on Zack Island. Eight girls are
invited to the island in hopes of participating in a
coordinated Dead or Alive fighting tournament. To their
dismay, they are informed that the tournament idea was only a
ploy to get them to the island; there will be no tournament.
So, now what? Well the girls suddenly have a change of heart
and decide to make the best of the next 14 days. That is the
story in the nutshell, but for all you looking for a more
in-depth description here is the booklet excerpt:
"With lady Luck over his shoulder, Zack hit the jackpot at the
casino and became an instant millionaire. Using some of his
winnings, Zack purchased an island in the South Seas and named
it Zack Island. He then declared that he would host the 4th
Dead or Alive tournament there. Although they felt it was a
little suspicious, the contestants continued to gather on Zack
Island. However, for some reason the only contestants invited
were women. Just what does Zach have up his sleeve?"
It may seem a bit on the cheesy side, but this is mild
compared to what I am about to write. My recommendation would
be to try and maintain the mindset that this is only a video
game. Of course, most of this wouldn't make sense in reality,
heck even the volleyball aspect doesn't make sense in reality.
Tecmo has certainly dropped the ball here.
Once you decide to visit Zack Island you are welcomed with an
impressive visual display before you are given a mini tour of
the island. The tour is rather annoying and doesn’t give you
any information that you wouldn’t be able to acquire without
it. But to be fair, the tour gives you a small amount of
information on the Sports Shop, Accessory Shop, etc. These are
places that you can visit and spend money for gifts. The gifts
can be for you, your partner, or some other random player if
you are thinking of trying to pair up with them. Shortly into
your 14 day stay you will also get a chance to shop at one of
Zack’s personal shops, although the need for this extra shop
seems highly irrelevant. In any case, you will have plenty of
places to buy the conveniences that you need for both you and
your friends (partner or future partner).
After your brief tour you will have the opportunity to choose
a partner. You will not have all of the girls at your
disposal; instead at first you will have a few options. Once
you choose a partner you will be able to try and team up with
another girl, but that is not so easy. In fact, keeping the
player that you first choose may be somewhat difficult. Your
teammates have a mind of their own and all of a sudden can
decide to no longer play with you. So, to try and keep them
happy the shops must come into play. Not only are you supposed
to buy yourself things to keep up your morale, but Tecmo
expects you to shower your partner in all sorts of gifts to
keep her morale high as well. Believe it or not, this unique
sense of happiness is visible in your teammate’s game play.
Keep her happy and she will play well and stick by your side.
On the contrary, neglect her and you will start to lose
matches and eventually she'll leave your duo. Tecmo has made
it so that you HAVE to use the shops or else you will end up
without a partner. Once you are without a partner it is
virtually impossible to find a new partner, unless you have
been buying her gifts from the get go. I don't feel as though
this is a glitch in the game, just something that takes a few
play-throughs to get used to. The booklet that accompanies the
game lists each girl’s hobbies, favorites, etc., so that when
you are in the midst of shopping you will not be without ideas
of what to buy.
Now that you have the basics under your belt it is time to
discuss the horrible scenario that has been built into DOA XVB.
The game is setup for you to spend 14 days on the private
island. Each day is broken into time slots: Morning, Daytime,
Evening, Etc. At the end of the day you MUST return to the
hotel. From the hotel you can visit the casino to try your
luck at various games. The hotel is also where you will
receive gifts from other players, give gifts, and sleep. It is
pretty uneventful and boring. The casino is a mini game that
allows you to take your chances and try to increase the total
money in your pot. The games are not well done and lack any
luster. They are not accurate to the games that you will see
in the real life casinos, but they do the job of adding yet
another mediocre mini game...Tecmo enough already.
After sleeping the night you wake up prepared for the
up-in-coming day. From the central location you can choose
matches to play in, attempt to link up with another teammate,
or you can visit the poolside where you can apply suntan
lotion and add accessories to your player. The poolside is
also a place to rest, eat or play yet another mini game. This
game is referred to as the hopping game. It is as crazy as it
sounds. The object is to use your player to jump across
floating objects in the pool. The point of the game is to get
you acquainted with the button sensitivity, but it is outright
silly. If you are successful at leaping across the width of
the pool then you rewarded to some money, although it is a
tiny amount. It is not worth your time or effort to use this
feature. After playing by the pool you can quit and save or
return to the central portion of the island. Once again, you
can choose matches to play or start a shopping endeavor. After
a few Tecmo days this becomes more of a chore than anything.
Playing matches will be your primary source of vacation money.
I have been rewarded up to 90,000 for one victory. The trouble
is that one match usually uses an entire portion of the day.
So playing 6 matches in one day may not be possible. Normally
after a match you return to your central location only to find
out that your day is over and you must return to your hotel or
you have little time left in the day. I am not so sure that I
like the system that Tecmo used. It just seems like no thought
went into the design. So, basically here is what a busy Tecmo
day would include. After leaving the hotel, start match in the
jungle environment. From there challenge the team on the
private beach. After that match, offer to replay the match in
the Jungle. Finally, your day is over and you are forced to
return to the hotel. Yes, three matches may be all that you
get in that day.
If you choose to play a match, note that you only have 4
possible places to play and usually one of them is locked so
that you cannot enter all 4 on any given day. And when one
does become unlocked then chances are that not all of the
courts will have players willing to play. So, basically at any
given time you will have the choice between two matches in two
of four locations, which is strange considering that the
exhibition mode offers 10 venues to play at.
Ok let’s get into the volleyball aspect:
It seems that when Tecmo built this game they disregarded the
actual game of volleyball. You will not find accurate rules or
even boundary lines. In place, your team can score a point no
matter who serves the ball and you don’t have the freedom to
hit the ball so far off target that it would even fall out of
bounds, therefore, boundary lines wouldn’t come in to play. On
top of that, Tecmo went with the word Xtreme in their game
title, but this game is really as far from 'xtreme' as it
gets. The game play is based on a 2 button system, similar to
the old school Nintendo’s Super Spike V-Ball...that is not
extreme. The A button returns the ball to the opponents court
and the B button passes the ball to your teammate. You can
also use the right analog stick to move your computer teammate
into position. During my time playing the game my computer
teammate did a decent job at getting into place on her own,
however, the right analog is there just in case she is off
kicking the sand instead of playing. Other than moving your
teammate with the analog, you have no control over what she
does. If she wants to be a ball hog and hit the ball over the
net instead of passing then she will. There are even times
when you don’t have control of your own player, other than the
timing her hit to spike the ball. For instance, if your
opponent loops one over the net, your player will be taken
over by the computer and jump towards the ball in any attempt
at a spike. It is your job to time the spike to perfection. If
you fail to do so you will mishit the ball into the net, or
you will just return it with very little power.
Serving can be as hard as you make it. There are 3 types of
servers with 3 degrees of difficulty. Neither of them seems
any more affecting than the others; however, in match play you
will get bonus money for performing the more difficult serves.
Don’t expect to ace your opponent as serving is strategic
enough to allow you to place the ball into less guarded areas
of the court. Aside from serving, you have the basics:
receiving, tossing, spiking and blocking. Each of those
categories have slight modifications that you can make with
the press of a button or the timing in which you hit the
button, but none of the adjustments are crucial to winning.
The engine has also built in formations. Three formations
exist; however, I won every match during my 14 day stay with
the normal shift. Normal is the default; normal is all that is
needed. The other two may be nice for generating a list of
features, but they are pointless to include. Besides the court
is so small, that the various formations aren't even evident
when applied.
Tecmo also graced us with the Nice System. This system rewards
your team money for 'nice' plays. The trouble being that you
never know when you have completed Tecmo’s definition of
niceness. At the end of the match you will see your total
money earned, as well as your Nice Rewards bonus money, but it
never explicitly states what it was from. There are instant
replays in the game, but I am not convinced that every instant
replay is a product of the nice system, it didn’t correlate.
As you can probably tell, Tecmo didn’t spend much time with
the Volleyball aspect. I am fairly certain that 90% of the
development went into the graphics, but who knows. The game is
surprisingly shallow and leaves too much for your imagination.
The game worries so much on the non important things that it
fails to leave out any decency in the most important aspect;
the volleyball. It baffles me that a game with volleyball in
the title could be this poorly in representing the sport. I
would like to go on about the game play, but aside from
pressing A and B at the right moments there is little to say.
Of course the game as a few other intricacies, but they are
minor. For instance, the black button will shuffle the
soundtrack, the trigger buttons can be used to shift the
camera during the movie scenes and replays, etc...Again petty.
Now it is time to focus on the games staple. Seeing that they
cast aside the most important feature of the game, they
definitely spent ample time with the graphics. In fact, DOA
has the best graphics that I have witnessed in a video game.
All of the textures are perfect, the shadows are perfect, and
the lighting is perfect. It is all perfect. The sand shuffles
under the players’ feet and by the end of the match you can
tell that a major activity has taken place. The animations are
also very well done, but they could have given us a few more
to look at. During the movies you will often see the same
things over and over, but the graphics are so well done that
you won’t mind it a few times.
From the initial movie scene to the ending cinematic this game
sparkles in every sense of the word. The water looks amazing
as it glistens off the rocky surfaces. I was in awe from the
initial movie clip and remained that way until it was
depressed by everything else. I am not going to keep
exploiting the graphical side of the game because it just goes
to show that the graphics do not make the game....not this
time, not ever.
On to the wish wash of the beaches, yup you guessed it, the
sound. I am not one that gets ga ga over a games sound, so
don’t be surprised to find this paragraph flowing with little
detail. The sound has a built in worn out set of tracks
ranging from Christina Aguilera to Bob Marley to Baha Men. At
first listen it isn’t terrible, but after a few hours of
playing you will be turning it down. The sound effects are
also nothing special. The voices are all gibberish, so after
10 minutes you'll be hammering your brain or looking for the
volume button. But I rarely let the sound impact a game for
me, so this is all minor in my opinion.
Ok, so Tecmo disregarded beach volleyball, big deal right?
Well not so fast. The game may be the first game in history to
offer the player NO benefit. What I mean by that is: The game
has no objective. There is no volleyball tournament to enter,
no standings, nothing like that. At the end of your 14 day
stay you will see a cut screen and wallah the credits. The
only objective that I could think of was to fill your player’s
inventory with all of the accessories and bathing suits. I
have played through the game a few times and neither time have
I felt good about it. The game not only stays far away from
the actual sport of beach volleyball, but it fails incorporate
any ending. This sure didn’t make you want to play it again
and I am afraid that you will feel the same way. (I only
played through a few times in order to give an accurate
rendition with my review).
In conclusion, I wouldn’t recommend this game to anyone. It
may not be a bad idea to rent the game, but I am pretty
certain that after 5 days you will be taking this back with no
regrets. The game fails to add anything that would keep a
player interested and on top of that ends up falling as far
from extreme volleyball as you could possibly get. The eye
candy is superb, but everything else falters. As for now, it
is late and I have played way too much of this game today, but
before I exit...Ill pass on the dreaded 2.0 Planet rating.
Ramz Rating: 2 out of 5 Planets
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