Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2 for XBox 360: Final Review

(Pancake art honoring Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2 and my friend, Alex, Ben's DoA college gaming compadre, and also the one who introduced me to pancake art through Jim of Jim's Pancakes.)

Dear Diary,

What is wrong with this game and what is wrong with me for liking it?

I imagine the moment Ben decided to make me play Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2. (dream sequence sound) He sits slumped at a computer, stroking his beard (extra thick at the moment thanks to the looming Madden deadline). Suddenly he bolts upright in his $800 super-extra-ergo-dynamic computer chair and with an I've-got-it! pointer finger thrust into the air shouts out loud, “Flower didn't seal the deal? Fine! I'll prove to her that she can like playing the very game she hates the most!!” A maniacal laugh is heard from deep within his dark and evil lair (otherwise known as his cubical at EA) and continues for nigh on three minutes until the guy two cubes down throws a snack-table Twinkie at him over the cubicle walls and he stops to feed.

I don't usually like to ignorantly and blatantly hate things. I find it a real turn-off when people vehemently dismiss things before they can get a chance to understand them. But there are two things I will sheepishly admit to ignorantly hating and those are World of Warcraft and Dead or Alive games. I bitched freely and at great length about both before giving either one of them a try. I admit it. Two years ago, while on bed rest, pregnant with our son, I thought it would be sort of funny to get a World of Warcraft account. Ben was into the game at the time and there was some deal those marketing wizards over at WOW headquarters had concocted to get him to open more accounts by giving him a special cape or boots or something and faster leveling...something dorky like that. In any case, I thought it would be funny to utilize this forced downtime to experience World of Warcraft. I made a character (definitely, by far the best part of the game and also the best part of DoA), a hunter dwarf I appropriately named Bedrest who quickly befriended a boar I named Slippers and a white bear I named Pillow. This experience is for another post entirely, but what I'm getting at is that I tried it. I still didn't like it too much, but I tried it and I can speak badly of the game without as much guilt now and I can speak well of certain things about the game when my pride will allow me to.

Now I have been forced to play two hours of Dead or Alive: Xtreme 2, the sequel to the game I used to find Ben and his college friends playing while we were still dating. Boys, I will tell you from experience that playing this game in front of your girlfriends is not the best way to woo her. The problem isn't that we women actually feel that jealous of these animated breast-women. We are smart enough to know that any girl who is 5 feet 9 inches and 117 pounds with size G boobs would look like a blow up doll that hasn't been inflated yet. The problem is that you are playing it and maybe you aren't smart enough to know that. Maybe you find these animated boobs with legs more sexually attractive than you find us. Does the game prove that girls with melon chests and shapely butts are really what guys desire? It must, right? Or it wouldn't have been made and it wouldn't sell copies. I mean, who exactly is the audience for this game, anyway? The audience could be teeny-bopper girls who want to listen to the cheerful pop music and shop for cute bathing suits. If so, why the bouncing boobs and gratuitous butt shots? Are there really men who can stand all the gift-wrapping, shopping, and friendship political maneuvers for any significant length of time?

When I first played this game, I was just as disgusted as I remember being when I watched my then-boyfriend and his friends play this game for hours in college. The game makes women look like catty, superficial, selfish sex-pots who want nothing more from life than presents and a pool. Watching my boyfriend playing this feminist nightmare of a game, I got angry at him in a huffy, boys-are-so-gross sort of way and wrote the game off. Now, eight or so years later, I have played it for a decent amount of time and realized that I was playing for the boobs, too! And for the shopping and the gift-wrapping and the friendship buying and the pool games...all of the game's excessive and addictive and ridiculous and sexually over-the-top qualities.

Maybe I played it for the same reasons that I watch the Housewives of Orange County and listen to Justin Timberlake. Maybe I played it because there's a shred of sad truth behind the depiction of women in this game. I mean, Girls Gone Wild exists because a guy wanted to make it, but also because the girls were more than happy to bare it all for the camera. Whatever the reason, I played this game last night for an hour and forty minutes straight when I didn't want to play Flower for longer than 45 minutes at a time. Unlike God of War where each ten minutes felt like ten days, this game flew by. When I decided to stop playing DoA, it was only because it was nearly 1am and because I was tired of losing at volleyball. Playing this game and enjoying it came at a price. I hated myself in the morning. I felt cheap, like I had had a one night stand with a slutty girl. Worse than that, if the slutty girl happened to be “turned on” in my living room someday I'd probably play her again. What had I become? What was wrong with me?

I think I need to do some deep psychoanalysis to try and figure out the answers to these questions. I will silently psychoanalyze as I describe some details about the game and how it's played. First off, the intro says everything you need to know about what the game is superficially about. It's about soft-porn set to sugary pop music. It's camera angles down girl's bikini tops or up girl's tiny skirts. It's girls striking sexy poses in the sand and writhing around on lounge chairs by the pool. It's two girls sharing one ice cream cone. Besides that, the game is sort of like soft-core porn meets The Sims meets WarioWare. OK, that might not really be an accurate description - I don't know much about soft core porn, The Sims or Wario Ware...but you get the idea. You spend about a third of the time on each aspect of the game - the sexies, the character customizing, and the mini games.

First, you pick a girl out of the eight international stereotypes available to you. I chose Kokoro, the Japanese stereotype, because she plays the piano and likes the color orange (unlike one of the girls who liked “milky pink.” Gross. No one could ever like that color). Then Kokoro and I were paired up with Lisa, her new best friend. Lisa shows you around the island the first day. After that, each day is pretty similar to the next and you can fill it with whatever activities you'd like. For example, when you wake up in the morning you can choose to relax by the pool or go shopping in one of the many shops where you can purchase items for yourself or for your friends. The rest of the time you can enjoy a number of sporting activities, namely volleyball matches (which, I assume is supposed to be the main thrust of the game, although I did not play the friendship politics well and ended up with no friends for a long segment of my two and a half hours of game play, so I didn't end up playing much volleyball). You can see a video of Kokoro and her friend, Tina, playing below. Make sure to sit through until the end. It's worth it to see the crazy undulating water balloon boob action Kokoro mentioned in her diary entry.



The other games didn't rely on having a best friend, so that worked in my favor, although I played all the mini games so badly that this also grew tiresome. I was especially terrible at the jetski racing. Ben watched me play and said he was going to make me play a game called Wave Race at some point but that he didn't think that was a good idea after what he had just seen. Even Kokoro knew she sucked. She hunched over on her jetski, shook her head, and said, “I'm no good at this.” I knew how she felt.

I was only marginally better at the pool hopping game. I was able to make it two thirds of the way across the pool once. The pool-hopping mini-game consists of multiple colored floating blocks that form a bridge across the pool. You have to push the corresponding colored button at just the right time so your girl can hop across the blocks to the other end of the pool. I had to pay a little extra for the best mini-game. When I saw the ticket for sale at the Zack of All Trades I couldn't resist. It was a ticket to the Butt Battle. After I had purchased my ticket (for a whopping 150,000 Zack dollars!) the game said, “You can now enjoy butt battle.” I enjoyed the game saying that to me even more than I enjoyed the butt battle itself. The game was not disappointing, but my actual butt-battling skills were. You can see a butt battle for yourself here as Kokoro battles Kasumi.



I spent the rest of my evening in the casino playing Roulette, Poker, Slot Machines, and Blackjack (the best one). I also enjoyed picking out and receiving gifts from Zack each night. Speaking of gift giving, it took a lot of gift giving to get anyone to like me. I made a mistake of dumping my ultra-slutty initial friend, Lisa, in favor of a cool Russian or German chick named Helena. Then I accidentally re-gifted one of Zack's gifts to her and she sent it back to me! The next day I woke up and Helena had left the island! After that it was like I was a leper. All the girls blackballed me. No matter how many gifts I gave these girls they wouldn't be my friend. I courted Christie for awhile simply because I'd already sent her a bunch of gifts and didn't want the expense to go to waste, but she was a ferocious bitch and I had to quit trying. I took an instant liking to the southern girl, Tina, because she liked iced coffee and had a cute southern accent. I overlooked her American flag bathing suit and questionable helmet hair cut. First I tried to give her an iced coffee, but I didn't see her until the evening and by then my iced coffee was warm! It was tragic. After that I made sure to give her all the things she liked as promptly as possible. An RC car. A yellow airplane toy. An orange watering can. Finally, on the fourth day I presented her with a perfect box wrapped in blue (her favorite color) and tied with matching blue ribbon for which I paid many Zack dollars. Inside the box was some fried chicken and apparently it was tasty because after that, she said she would be my friend! I finally had myself a volleyball teammate. Although we never actually won a single volleyball match, the controls were intuitive and I managed to hit the ball many more times than I expected to. And Tina ended up being a pretty good volleyball player!

While playing this game, the craziest thing happened. Kokoro and I began to meld! I suck at playing video games so she sucked at racing her jet ski. I was indecisive and wishy-washy choosing friends which kept Kokoro from having a volleyball teammate. I was too cheap to buy lots of gifts from the outset, so Kokoro didn't have any friends for two hours of the game. I was afraid to play the pool games so she started gambling all night! Kokoro was suffering for my shortcomings! Watching her sad situation unfold reminded me of high school and a particular pool party I once attended. It was my birthday and I had a new pink plaid bathing suit, one of those with the triangle-shaped bikini cups and matching boy short bottoms that were trendy back then. Just a few months ago I saw a picture of me in this bathing suit at this pool party and felt sorry for my then-self wondering whatever possessed me to wear that suit in public. Like the girls in this game, I didn't quite fit in my bathing suit. Sadly, the effect of my too-small suit was not as flattering for me as it is for them.

I remembered playing volleyball at the high school party, too. In this case, the effect was exactly the same as it was for Kokoro in the game. I missed just about every shot until my team lost. Then I remembered that while at this party I was mostly trying to impress and get the attention of one particular guy I'd loved forever. Like his video game equivalent, Zack, he gave me a great birthday gift, a thoughtful gift, nicely wrapped. But what I secretly knew, like Kokoro must have known, is that he would have done the same for the other girls at the party had it been their birthday. Zack gave Kokoro a present every night before bed, but you know he gives all the girls presents every night. What I really wanted from that guy at the party was his undivided attention and affection and he couldn't give that to me. And finally, the one thing that saved me from my bad bathing suit, my disappointing volleyball game, and my lack of boyfriend was my best friend. In the game it was Tina, in real life it was Sara. Just like in the game, I needed a best friend to get through the pettiness, the drama, the sporting events, and the bad clothing choices of my high school days. When I was alone, I was in trouble. With her, I could laugh my way through those awkward, depressing, disappointing high school moments.

So after that trip-down-memory lane psychoanalysis I can conclude that this game is strangely about more than soft-core porn. It's about friendship and loyalty. It's about having fun and feeling sexy. It's about being stupid and ridiculous and funny and silly. It's about giving a girl a cabbage in the hopes that she'll be your friend and then her replying by saying, “no thanks, I'm busy right now” while doing a strange Egyptian-style strip tease in a thong. How can you hate that? It happens to be about boobs, which is weird and maybe unfortunate, but actually adds to the zany, excessive vapidity of this game. By the end of my two hours I wanted to go buy a new bathing suit and listen to girly pop music. I wanted to lay by the pool like Kokoro and pretend that when I apply suntan lotion (because “a geisha must protect her skin.”) red and pink hearts will emanate from my flawless skin, too.

Two nights ago I played this game with my husband of five years. I don't know if he secretly likes to see the girl's boobs bounce or if he thinks the sex stuff is ridiculous or maybe both, but it doesn't matter because we had so much fun laughing at this stupid game for two hours straight when we both should have been sleeping that I realized something. Even though I'll never look like these girls in a bathing suit and even though I stink at playing sports, I'm the only girl that gets presents from Ben. I'm the girl he picked out of all the other girls in the world and that's the gift I'd always wanted. Boys playing this game in front of your girlfriends or wives, listen up:

Every girl has a little bit of DoA:Xtreme 2 inside them, whether we like to admit it or not. We want to feel sexy and desirable. We want to have so much confidence that we can dance on the beach in a bathing suit. We want to win the games at the pool and look hot playing volleyball instead of awkward. We want to be easy to befriend and daring enough to hop on a jetski or to butt battle...well, maybe not butt battle...but you get the point. We girls might not all look like Kokoro, but just know there's a Kokoro inside each one of us. If you can manage to make a girl feel like Kokoro and make sure she knows you wouldn't secretly eye up Tina or Lisa or Christie on the beach when she's not looking, you'll get the girl. And to all you Kokoros out there, make sure you've got Tina nearby to pick you up when Zack gets you an RC car instead of the iced coffee you were hoping for.

OK, it's time to get out of the pool and head to the arcade where my sun-starved husband has no doubt been hiding while I've been lounging on a raft getting skin cancer. For my next gaming assignment I'm going back to school: a little video game history lesson in the form of Retro Game Challenge for the Nintendo DS. I'll be playing revamped video game classics....games I'm sure to play poorly, but have been told I must play for at least five hours.

I will face this Retro Game Challenge with Kokoro's confidence and pride. I will sign off with the phrase Kokoro repeats to herself every night before bed. “Good job today, Kokoro!”

Good job today, Jess.