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Rating: Crappy From the beginning, Dead Or Alive looks like a complete Virtua Fighter rip-off. It has the exact same control set-up (guard, punch, and kick), and the original Dead Or Alive arcade game was actually created using the same arcade board Sega used to create Virtua Fighter 2 (the out-dated Model 2 board). There's even a character in the game that looks like a complete and total rip-off of VF2's Shun Di! Indeed, this is the closest thing to Virtua Fighter that PlayStation owners will ever get, although I don't see why they would want Virtua Fighter in the first place since the Tekken series is better anyway... Moving on, Dead Or Alive has a rendered intro that is put to shame by Tekken 2 (which is more than a year and a half old). The graphics are good, with solid looking polygons that have no jagged edges whatsoever, but it's nothing spectacular. The sound leaves a lot to be desired, with grating music and un-translated Japanese voice-overs that are annoying instead of cool like the Street Fighter series' Japanese voice-overs. The sound annoyed me enough that I had to turn it off before I had even played the game for ten minutes. One of the most insulting features in the game is the horribly over-done breast bouncing, which causes the over-sized female fighters to jiggle like there's no tomorrow with even the slightest movement. Thankfully, this can be turned off in the options menu, but it shouldn't have been put in the game in the first place, as it does nothing but cement the stereotypical role women always seem to end up playing in video games. This kind of thing has no place in video games and does more to take away from the game than it does to make it more entertaining. The battles themselves are way too short. Each hit causes more damage than it probably should, which leads to quick, luck-based battles. With little real skill involved in winning, it makes the game extremely frustrating when you lose and somehow unsatisfying when you win. Also, the battles end with the fighters just anti-climatically falling over, with none of the cool "stunned" effects that the final hits in Tekken 3 bring. PlayStation fighting fans should leave Dead Or Alive on the shelf.
© 2001 ivan@mastergamer.com