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DOA2 / DOA2: Hardcore Dreamcast / PS2 Team Ninja/Tecmo - 1998 / 2000 Before we start, let me just explain this review. As I Hate This Game's 100th review, we (the
collective might of Sundu, Evil X, Ari, ManDown, and I, Hawke) decided to review a game together.
To make it worse, we decided on Dead or Alive 2. Now as any competant person knows, DOA2 comes
in two versions. DOA2: Hardcore for Playstation 2, and DOA: Unleaded for Dreamcast. So, in case
people wondered, Sundu, Evil X, ManDown, and Hawke went to high school together, where they
skipped class every day for a year to play DOA2 on Dreamcast. So we all claim to be experts in
the game. (In fact, we played the game so much, we burnt the lifebars and timer onto the screen
of the the TV we played on.) So we challenged Ari, played a few rounds, and wrote this review.
Here are our opinions, followed by the normal liked/disliked blah blah blah sections. Enjoy.
Let me start by saying that Ari sucks and is a wuss for he complains about the button
configuration too much. Enough on that. The problem with this game is that most videogame
fighting fanatics will have (well besides Ari and Sundu) is that they will start playing this
game and expect it to be a pretty Street-Fighter. Which it isn't. You will play this game the
first time and get through it just with attacks and blocks like most fighting games have. Then
someone will tell you, or you will run across randomly, or if you are a complete wuss, or a
girly-man, you will find in the instruction book this amazing thing called "counters." This will
add a whole new level to the game, a level that makes this game worth playing. For without the
counters, the game feels like a crappy street-fighter wannabe, albiet a pretty one. But with the
counters,it becomes "the most beautiful game ever. I mean, just watch Ayane flip out backwards,
pop her legs around Hayabusa's neck, crotch to the face, and flip him through the air,landing
again. Look how fluid she moves. Look how beautiful it is... Look how beautiful she is..."
-BAM- {Sundu punches Hawke in the gullet.} "Owww! What was that for? Ok, I'll stop dreaming.
Afterall, I don't have to wait long until DOA: Xtreme Beach Volleyball." Anyways, back to all
seriousness, the only thing I found wrong with this game is that most people don't realize that
whole counter ability, and thus leave angry at the game, that feels shallow. But if you try
pushing back and block right when the enemy hits, you find a new and better game. Try it
sometime, it is worth it. What else must I say about this game? Oh, yes, don't ever play
against ManDown when he plays as Ein. Good gravy, he's like a giant, terrible Dung Beetle,
ruling his mound of turd with an evil eye, watching for invaders and slashing, slashing their
necks off with his razor-sharp pincers. Wait. That don't make NO sense. It's a fool that looks
for logic in the chambers of the human heart. The End.
Good point Hawke. He's bitching and asking for the "good version" (PS2, not the ghetto Japanese and/or burned Dreamcast one we're playing now). Evil X here, back from a long hiatus devoted to struggling through college, all in the name of some ambiguous desire to be able to nail supermodels on a pile of cash by the time I'm thirty years old. At any rate, DOA 2. What can I say about this game that leaves me not consumed by rage? Nothing. We squandered our entire senior year (AT school, no less) on this God-forsaken game. By second semester, I pretty well quit playing it, because I understood that the game was the devil. Everyone else? Not so lucky. Even the assholes we went to high school with (read: the 65+ jerks, jocks, and other people who haven't assisted our website) would play this game without bitching. One ape went as far as stealing Puzzle Fighter from Sundu, and girls whined all the time about watching TV, even though the cable system sucked, and if it worked, nothing was ever on that people would agree to. Simply put, high school bit ass. No two ways about it. This game was a part of high school, and the Transitive Property of Ass-bitingness dictates that this game hereby bites ass as well. I will not touch a controller so long as the game is on, so Ari, Sundu, Hawke, and Man Down are having a four-player throwdown while I rant and ramble. So here's the DOA chronicles, the path this game follows when introduced into a heretofore unscarred society... First, the early days. The game looks great, so everyone latches on. People learn simple combos, and button mashing always works. The second stage: big combos. Fun for everyone. Third stage: whoa!! He just kicked that guy's ass BY BLOCKING. I'm gonna block too. No one ever attacks because counters are way too damn powerful. Fourth stage: Everyone just throws all the time, because everyone else is countering. Gay. Totally Gay. Liberacci gay. Fifth stage: Some people learn sick moves and combos and different characters, and just own. The rest of the kids get left back. The game becomes totally unbalanced because the mastery players in this stage can own any of the other four stages. Needless to say, maybe five people ever reached this stage in my high school class, so the game just wasn't fun when they were playing. Simply put, I HATE THIS GAME because of the suffering I incurred during the senior year of my high school career. In three words, it ruined me.
Hehe. Now none of you are reading. Someone else talk.
Dead or Alive 2. Hmm. Yes. When Sundu called me up to ask me to review this, he said "you lazy bum, why don't you write reviews no more?!" and I said "potato." cause I didn't have any other words to say at the time. Y'know, it's been about half a year since I laid my greedy thumbs on this game, but my memories of it are like this dream you have where you're a giant robot and everything's all PHEW PHEW PHEW!!! and flipping out and there are ninjas. Seriously, I don't know If I'm qualified to review this game, but if I don't, I will totally kick my mom in the face. Let me put it in terms of a zen enlightenment story: Once there was a high school student who was bored and so played DOA2 (little timmy). He thought the chicks were, like, hot, and made them older to have the boobies bounce more. One day, some other loser began to play DOA2 with timmy and was like "dude." As they played, timmy accidently did a counter and was enlightened. But everyone else got enlightened too, so there was much ass kicking of everyone's ass in a a collective ass kicking way that ended with everyone's ass totally kicked. and then the girls were like "we wanna use the TV" and everyone was like "no." So that about sums it up. It's kind of hard to review a game when all you can remember is that it was totally sweet, but I am somehow comforted in the fact that the above part of the review will not contribute in ANY WAY to how you veiw the game and was instead an excuse to rant about giant robots and zen enlightenment. I suppose I should actually say something about the game now. So here goes: I liked it when they punched each other. ManDown, reporting here for the first time ever, wants to tell you a little
story about a game called Dead or Alive 2. You know come to think of it,
I’ve never actually heard of DOA the original . . . hum . . . wonder what it’s
like. Hun-K here goes the story: 4 friends sit down to play this game
called DOA2 (Tag Battle style of course). One discovers counters/throws,
so they all discover counters and other such wonders. These friends
continue playing using new combos and slick (yes that’s right, SLICK)
counters, 248 matches later, none of them are friends anymore. After
extensive DOA2 counseling (aka. Playing DOA2 till the life/time meter is
burnt into the TV screen: WARNING can take up to 5 months) do the friends
begin communicating again. So the moral of the story: play this game
a lot. ManDown rates it as one of his top 2 all time favorite fighting
games ever possibly #1. Oh yeah and EIN rules.
Ahh, finally, my turn. This is Ari, reporting on the glory that is DOA2:Hardcore. While these kids were all squandering their secondary educations somewhere, playing the gimpy Dreamcast version (which, I believe, is still "thinking") I was honing my skills on this infinitely more advanced, far superior rendition. More stages, more options, MORE COSTUMES. Yes, those scantily clad lovelies become even scantilier... more scanty... scantilous... whatever-- the point is, the PS2 version actually rewards your continued gameplay with the ultimate objective of this or any other game...increasingly naked, beautifully rendered virtual women. On top of that, you get five "Tag Battle" mode stages in Hardcore (for you math whizzes out there, that's five TIMES as many as the Dreamcast). On top of that, there are, like, twice as many game stages, and, to further increase the fun, you can actually find new arenas within the existing ones by blasting your opponent off the waterfall in the stream stage, or through the wall at the top of the dragon hills, or into the chasm in the snow stage (Did Dreamcast even have a snow stage? I don't know. Sundu? Hawke? Someone want to speak up for that poor, inferior version? *crickets chirp*) Basically, everything that made the DC version great is here, like all the modes, the survival, the item collection, the cooperative tag battles, w/improvements, plus tons of all new stuff.
Ok, enough touting the PS2 version. Here are the particulars of the game. Regular fighting
controls, a block button, up jumps, down crouches. The analog moves you in the third dimension,
but most fighting's done with the basic D-pad motions in 2-d. The four (really three) operative
buttons are "punch," "kick," "free" (I'll explain in a minute), and "throw" (actually just a
combination of free and punch). The remaining buttons can be assigned to anything else you want,
to save you trying to hit more than one at a time. Think of Tekken for almost all of this game,
except that this is prettier than any Tekken, including 4 (except the cinemas in 4...but
definitely better in-game graphics) and the move lists here are actually shorter than a Tolstoy
novel. Each character has a manageable few punch-kick combos, a few less throws and throw combos
(also involving only a single D-pad entry and a single button push, unlike Tekken, where it takes
a fifteen-button series to chain a boston crab into a figure-four leg lock), and about six
"Counters". This last category, however, is what sets this game miles above any other "3d"
fighter. By using the free button, combined with the d-pad in the UB, B, or DB position (don't
worry about UB...you won't jump accidentally) you can counter any punch or kick in the
corresponding High, Middle, or Low range. The beauty of this game system is that, like
rock-paper-scissors, counters beat attacks, attacks beat throws, throws beat counters. This
means that every match evolves along with the players as they learn each other's patterns and
determine which type of move to use next. The damage is balanced heavily in favor of counters,
which usually come after being hit with a series of attacks, then throws, which have the least
range and tend to hit less, and finally attacks, where each attack singly does little, but the
combinations add up. All these elements are arranged so perfectly that even a novice fighter, if
he or she will just alternate use of the three essential buttons, may actually have an enjoyable
and not entirely one-sided fight with a veteran. Anyway, it's a great game. Put a fork in me;
I'm done.
I'm sorry, all I heard was "blah blah blah, I'm a dirty tramp." The Dreamcast is the coolesT
And i HaVE meNtAL pruBLeMS BEcAuSe i aM a CraCK BabY FrOm ZimBABwE. What? Sorry, flashback to
the worst reviewer ever. Everone has pretty much covered everything about the game, and sort of
about the game, and completely not about the game, Evil X, so I'm sort of at a loss. But come
rain or snow or three pompous assholes, ok, maybe just one who may or may not have written
immediately before me, I will write something. Looking back, I notice that no one really
discussed the great downfall of the game (Evil X had a flashback and that doesn't count): single
player. Single player essentially had two modes, win and lose. Choose win until you think you
are good, then choose lose and, well, lose. While you play through win mode, which takes
approximately 3 seconds with advanced stages of elbow burrito, you may notice something
resembling a plot. If you do, you aren't playing DOA2. Instead, you've probably started
watching a porno because that is what DOA2 really is, a porno with more clothes and less plot.
Here is the average porno plot:
Dead or Alive 2 plot:
See? What was that? At least in the porno I know exactly what I am getting. What the heck
is DOA2 providing? Voluptuous, high-kicking, male rabbits. What? Males? What's a Tengu and why
are we fighting him?
What I liked: The graphics, duh. The fact that Team Ninja could have made a game with women jiggling their breasteses and made NO Fighting Depth, but they didn't. Wait, they did make a game where women jiggle their breasteses, but THERE IS FIGHTING DEPTH. And lots of it. What I disliked: the PS2 version switches the controls around a bit, and the loading times for the "Dead or Alive Engine" are long. Not too long, but long enough to complain. Take forever with the loading -Sundu and Man Down. What to expect: A deep fighting engine when you find it. What not to expect: Street Fighter. Mortal Kombat. DOA Extreme Beach Volleyball. That comes later. What sets it apart from the genre: It manages to do 3-D fighting well, and has hot chicks. Wait, all fighting games have hot chicks. Ratings on: Controls: 7 - Good, sometimes annoying trying to figure out who wins over each other attack wise. #1 thing I hate about this game: ManDown flinching.
by the I Hate This Game Staff,
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