Title	Game Info	Screenshots	Gamester Score
	Publisher: Tecmo   Developer: Team   Ninja   Genre: Sports   Release: 01/22/03   Rating: Mature		Control 3/5 Graphics 5/5 Sound 3/5 Orginality 2/5 Value 3/5 Overall 3/5

The game's story line is totally irrelevant and never comes into play during the actual game, but for completeness' sake, let's go over it briefly. The winner of the Dead or Alive 3 tournament turned out to be the flamboyant fighter Zack, who promptly took his winnings to a casino and turned it into an even larger bankroll. Zack then turned his stake into some property--the fittingly named beach paradise, Zack Island. He eventually lures the girls of Dead or Alive to his island resort by telling them that it will be the location of the next Dead or Alive fighting tournament, but the joke is on the girls, as they arrive and realize that there's nothing to do aside from lying around, gambling, shopping, and playing volleyball. So the girls make the most of their two weeks. That's where you come in.

At the start of your game, you're given the option to choose to play as any one of the DOA girls, from mild-mannered Hitomi to pro-wrestling cowgirl Tina. All the girls from the fighting game are here, and they're joined by a newcomer named Lisa. At the select screen, you can see each girl's favorite color, hobby, and food, information that actually comes in handy later on. Once you've chosen a girl, it's off to the island. Each vacation day is split up into a few segments, and you use a segment whenever you do something like talk to another girl, rest by the poolside, or play a game of volleyball. At the outset, you're given a brief tour of the game's shops and are dropped into a volleyball match. From there, how you spend the rest of your vacation is entirely up to you.

For a game that has "Volleyball" right in its title, you'd expect to see a reasonably good attempt at the sport of volleyball here, but DOA's version feels incredibly stripped down. Games in the main mode are two-on-two matches that are played to seven points, and either team can score regardless of which team is serving. Games that end up tied at six go into tennis-like deuce rules, meaning the winning team must score two in a row to win, though games will also end as soon as someone scores 10 points. When playing, you have limited control over your partner using the right analog stick, and your girl is controlled with the left stick and two buttons. One button returns a ball hit to your girl, while the other receives the ball and keeps it on your side of the net, letting you set up spikes. The Xbox controller's analog buttons are used to execute light or strong versions of both hits, but timing and good aim are what really win matches. The game does most of the hard work for you, lining up your girl for spikes and even automatically jumping when it's time to send a hard hit at the opposing side. All you need to do is point the analog stick at a hole in your opponents' defense, hit A at the right moment (or B, if you want to abort the spike and instead tap the ball around a blocking opponent), and hope for the best. Properly timed spikes, serves, and blocks will earn you a little extra spending money, making volleyball the easiest way to earn cash. Playing a winning game of volleyball also keeps your partner happy and, in some cases, can be enough to keep that teammate from leaving you, making the gift-giving system seem totally irrelevant.

While you can gain and lose fortunes quickly in the casino, its bare-bones presentation makes it a very lonely place to be. The casino isn't fully modeled in 3D--you're just given a menu that allows you to select different games. This really could have been a great place to throw in some more social interaction between the girls, or even with the elusive Zack himself. As it is, the lone casino interaction that occurs is at the roulette table, where you'll see some of the other girls' icons appear at the bottom of the screen, indicating that they're playing roulette with you, making their own bets, and so on. But all you really get out of that is the icon and some unsubtitled Japanese speech.

As mentioned, the game has a large shopping element, though the way it handles your inventory is a little clunky. You can keep items in your inventory and use them, wear them, and so on. Or, in your hotel room, you can put items into your collection, which serves as a checklist of what you've seen. Considering that your vacation ends after 14 days with no real resolution or climax, completing each girl's collection seems to be the only real goal here, as the collection and inventory stays with that girl from game to game. Weirdly enough, some items--such as a handful of DOA3 commercials and a trailer for Tecmo's upcoming Ninja Gaiden game--can't be viewed directly from your collection. Instead, you have to remove them from the collection and put them back into your inventory before you can actually watch the videos. Considering that most items have little to no actual purpose in the game, this extra step is totally unnecessary.

What is Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball? It's a volleyball game with very little volleyball. It's a poorly designed casino. It's a virtual pinup calendar that could have used some more variety. It's a shopping simulation. And, perhaps most of all, Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball is a graphical showcase that makes for a pretty uneventful game. With no real beginning or end to the festivities, you could theoretically play the game forever. But once you've mastered the volleyball, the gameplay portion becomes a nuisance that stands between you and the completion of your item collection, and the virtual peep-show portion of the game isn't done well enough to score solidly in the fan-service department. It's easy to get the impression that someone once had significantly higher hopes and dreams for the game, but the end product feels empty and utterly unfinished, making it best suited for a curious rental than anything else. Hopefully Tecmo's Team Ninja has finally gotten the "sexy polygonal models" thing out of its system and will get back to basics for its next project.