Dead or Alive Xtreme 2
Just in case the feminist movement needed setting back a few more years.
Bum deal
Two essentially identical activities in terms of gameplay are the hilariously pointless Tug-of-War and Butt Battles. In both cases it's a case of trying to make your opponent fall into the water, with both games largely decided on who can feint first. In Tug-of-War, you can time it so that you let go just as they pull, so they fly backwards, and Butt Battle can often be won with a well-timed dodge or sidestep. Usually just attempting the strong attack in both cases is a bit of a flawed tactic, but, again, the gameplay is so wafer thin that any novelty value you get from playing a new mode evaporates when you realise how little there is to it.
Just as vacuous are the two on-one racing activities. The Pool Hopping event tasks you with getting from one side of the pool to the other by hopping between the colour-coded floats. When the floats are close together you tap the button, and hold it down slightly to do a longer stride, with bonus cash awarded if you match the button press with the colour of the float. Beach Flags, meanwhile, is essentially one button Track & Field, although sometimes against opponents that are impossible to beat no matter how well you react. Again, both are mildly amusing for a couple of goes, and both are a great demonstration of Team Ninja's graphical achievements, but in the context of a full-priced game, they're beyond laughable. If either were Flash games or were on your mobile phone for free you'd have a hard time motivating yourself to play them, so why does Team Ninja, Tecmo or Microsoft assume anyone with any sense will be motivated to buy this? It's basically an insult to the audience on so many levels that I'm not even going to waste my breath arguing against it.
Looking at it purely as a piece of gaming entertainment, it's little more than an obsessive object collection quest. Indeed, almost all of the game's 'achievement' points seem directly related to how sad you are as a human being, and how relentlessly you want to play the game. After the two weeks are up you get the chance to try the whole thing again with a different character, but there's little or nothing new to experience that you didn't play numerous times on your first holiday. You might get better at earning money, you might resist blowing all your cash in the casino, you might win at events more often, and you might gain more friends, but there's literally zero sense of satisfaction derived from playing any of it.
A cure for mammary loss
Alternatively, you might just take some kind of demented pleasure out of buying one of the in-game cameras and snapping away during those all-important 'pictorial scenes' (such as relaxing by the pool). Pressing the right bumper during these moments allows you to save those 'special mammaries' (I mean memories), but really, what's the point? If the DoA girls really do turn you on in some kind of deeply disturbing way, can't you just look at screenshots or visit one of the fan sites or something? Do you really have to spend actual money to experience the most pointless game ever. After all, you're not here for the game. That's pretty obvious, and if it was, then Team Ninja would put some actual gameplay in there.
Hilariously, there's even an Xbox Live mode so you can enjoy some laggy Marine Races for up to four players, or one-on-one Volleyball. Clearly having a four-player Volleyball match online wasn't worth the effort. Getting an online match going isn't exactly easy, but nor is it worth wasting any time on. Surely all that does is take away vital ogling time anyway?
Now, clearly if we were just trying to make some sort of statement about the futility of releasing a game like Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 we'd slap our first ever Zero at the end and welcome the accompanying (mass) debate. As it happens, though, the casino potion of the game is surprisingly compelling, and probably gains it an extra two marks on its own. Poker, Blackjack, Roulette, Slot Machines... you can't really mess those up. In fact, Team Ninja actually does these rather well in terms of presenting them nicely and, as such, it's bizarre to find yourself playing them for ages - not to be able to buy more tat, you understand, but because they're timeless fun.
But a semi-decent casino can't exactly hide the catalogue of sins that DoA X2 perpetrates with gleeful, air-headed abandon everywhere else. The activities are largely pointless, gratuitous exercises in showing off the girls in their bikinis, and any attempt to give the game some sort of justifiable kleptomaniacal purpose is beyond insulting - even to serial wankers. The fact that the first game got released in the first place was incredible, but the arrival of a broadly similar sequel defies belief. The whole of Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 is so far beyond parody, you wonder if the game is, in fact, some sort of elaborate concept joke devised by wry feminists to see if the male of the species really is as shallow and sad as they suspect.