Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 (Xbox 360)

Yeah, laugh it up. I rented and played what could be considered to be a softcore porn game. I won't make any lofty claims that I simply needed to review it for any particular reason, either. I was shamelessly fishing for easy achievement points, curious as to how it actually played, and curious exactly how porn-ish it could get. Lo and behold the points are far from easy, it plays almost exactly the way you would think it does, and it can get pretty damn porn-ish...but not in a way I would consider even remotely erotic.

The premise is ridiculous and completely transparent: take the girls from the Dead or Alive franchise and put them on an island taking a vacation wearing only swimsuits from morning till night. Arguably the point is to play volleyball, but I'll tell you right now that when the Microsoft VP in Japan went to announce the upcoming release he couldn't keep a straight face when he got to the phrase "sports game." Yes, you play volleyball and a host of other mini-games...but that's to collect money spent on the real point - hundreds of different swimsuits for the girls.

I'm not going to say the game is outright bad, because it isn't. It's well put-together, looks nice enough (creepy, gravity defying breasts aside), and certainly has a lot more meat than the previous iteration...I simply find the entire product pointless. It is in essence a collection of mini-games - including the volleyball - with sizable amounts of T&A as the bookends.

The only feature that really got my attention was the gift system. You can buy various items at a store on the island, wrap them up, and give them to the other girls as gifts. Naturally this means there are items you can only acquire as gifts from other girls, and naturally you have to give them the right combinations of gifts and compliments for them to part with the special items. This itself is trivial, but there's a sizable monkey wrench tossed into the system via the girls all having likes and dislikes that you have to puzzle out for yourself. We're not just talking about the gifts themselves, either...even the color of the wrapping paper and bow can tip the balance between well-received and disliked - and as you can probably guess there are many, many different kinds of bows and wrapping paper. The possible combinations are enormous, and you have to puzzle them out on your own. Well, unless you get desperate and go look up guides on the Web. (I still haven't decided if I'm impressed, frightened, or saddened that quite a few people spent the time and energy figuring all of the various combinations out.)

Unfortunately even that complex and in-depth set of tasks is completely trashed by what is perhaps the single most stupid feature of the game - an extremely linear time system. You wake up in the morning and can play one game and then it's afternoon. You can then play another game or lounge by the pool and it becomes evening. At that point you may head to the casino to play some extremely basic card games, send out a round of gifts from your hotel room, or choose to sleep and end the day. Each of the segments has a short "cutscene" of the new time, and of course you have to cycle through another day before the results of your gift giving are shown to you. This. Was. Maddening. It takes forever to do anything, and that reduced my "passing interest" in the game to "active dislike," and I sent the game back to Gamefly soon after.

Oh, and a side note for Tecmo and Team Ninja: enormous breasts that bounce in opposite directions are just creepy - not sexy.