Dead or Alive? Alive but fading fast.
Written: Mar 09 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Easy to pick up and play. Great for some laughs and friends.
Cons: Poor sounds, overemphasis on certain factors (i.e.large breasts), suitability to button mashing is regrettable.
The Bottom Line: Many good points, a few bad ones. Overall a good game, but not especially memorable. Get some friends together and enjoy the visuals.
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| andlar's Full Review: Dead Or Alive for PlayStation 1 |
Dead or Alive is another in a long line of fighting games. In every system, on every platform, you can always find a fighting game or ten. What makes DOA so special? Not a whole lot. It’s easy to pick up, takes a while to master, and still has a frustration capacity of ten, but it’s fun anyway. The visuals are good, with an emphasis on the female anatomy, but the audio is disappointing. There is no storyline, and the translations are incomplete, but it’s a fun game nonetheless.
It is very easy to sit down and start playing this game. If you want to do it well it takes much more work. Luckily there is a training mode that gives you many of the moves of each of the characters and how to do them. There are some amazing moves in this game. Every character has combinations requiring multiple button presses at precise intervals. There are also some really good ones that only require a couple taps and a roll. The variety is definitely there. However, if you don’t want to practice you don’t have to. A complete novice can defeat an experienced player with the use of the button fest technique. There are almost too many moves with completely illogical command paths in this game. A novice can beat a person this way, but the computer will really lay the smack down. Parts of this game are extremely simple; parts are amazingly difficult. I have had games where I used two continues beating all but the last two characters, then thirty on the second to last, then none on the final enemy. Something's wrong with that scenario.
Nothing’s wrong with the visuals in this game. Unfortunately the same can’t be said of the sound. There are a large number of costumes available as the game progresses. Every female character has fourteen different costumes the player can unlock. Some of these costumes are extremely amusing. The male characters have five. It is obvious what the target audience is. If the selection of costumes isn’t enough to determine the target audience, all you need to do is look at the option screen. See the option labeled "Bouncing Breasts"? Well, that’s all I need to see. What about what you can hear? I've been sitting here trying to come up with something to say about the FX and music, and I finally realized that I can’t do it, because the sounds are completely useless and irrelevant.
The same can be said about the plot. Admittedly, most players don't play fighting games for the story. Still, there's no reason to not include one at all. Of course, if you did have a story, it would be a good idea to have translated voices. So, without the story there’s no reason for the translations, right? Sure. I guess that makes the partial translation of the move list more of a bonus than an uncompleted requirement. Whatever happened to quality control?
So, what have we learned today? Dead or Alive is a very playable game, with some odd difficulty problems, but easy to pick up. The audio is terrible, but the visuals are definitely interesting, at least to the teenage male segment of the population. There is no plot. Does it really matter? Probably not. The unfortunate translation problems are more important, but even those don’t get in the way of the game itself. Do I still play this game? Yes, I do. Do I like this game? Yes, but there are other, better games out there. Final recommendation; play it with friends, have a good laugh, don’t get bogged down in the details.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
andlar
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Location: San Antonio TX, USA
Reviews written: 18
Trusted by: 3 members
About Me:
What's the point of 15 words? Who can say anything of interest? Definitely not me.
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