Dead or Alive Ultimate (Xbox)

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The girls that wear next to nothing are back. There are a few blokes too

It's sometimes hard to take Tecmo's Dead or Alive games seriously. Treading a fine line between videogame and lingerie catalogue, they run the constant risk of sliding into self-parody. It's hard to argue that a game features a balanced and elegant fighting system when you're distracted by two giant free-roaming pairs of breasts swinging around on screen. The appearance of Dead Or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball - a series spin-off that featured an awful lot of scantily-dressed young ladies and virtually no gameplay whatsoever - didn't help in the slightest.

As a result, the series has never really gained the respect it deserves. It's perhaps for this reason that Tecmo has decided the time is right to come out swinging with Dead or Alive Ultimate, a comprehensive repackaging of the first two games in the series with added Xbox Live support and a few new bits and pieces. Although the two-disc package looks like a good deal, it's not exactly a game of two halves. The original Dead or Alive makes the transition from the Sega Saturn pretty much intact, and largely unchanged. As a historical artefact, it's fun for a few minutes, but it's been comprehensively superceded by its sequels in every respect. Unless you're a real fan of the series or have fond memories of this from first time around, it's unlikely to hold your attention for very long.

you're essentially paying for a remake of a game that's only a couple of years old

It's the remake of Dead or Alive 2, then, that forms the main attraction, but it has to be said that this is not exactly a forgotten classic. This may actually mark the first time that a game has received a comprehensive remake within the same hardware generation - Dead or Alive 2 originally appeared on the Dreamcast and also formed part of the initial wave of PS2 games - and it's hard to escape the conclusion that you're essentially paying for a remake of a game that's only a couple of years old in the first place.

The onus, then, is on the developers Team Ninja to provide enough that's genuinely new here to warrant a second purchase. And, inevitably, attention has immediately focused on the graphics. Quite frankly, they're staggeringly good, a real tour de force for the Xbox and something that really throws into question Microsoft's decision to replace the machine with its next-gen equivalent as soon as the end of this year. Characters themselves remain largely unchanged from Dead or Alive 3, although clothing and hair both now act more realistically, but the backgrounds - significantly increased in number as well as quality - are simply jaw-dropping. You'll find yourself dodging hippos on the savannah and avoiding collapsing scenery in the burning opera house. You can hurl your opponents down the steep slopes of the Great Wall of China and wince as they bounce off every step, or smash them into trees and through wooden walls. Environmental effects range from swirling snow to apocalyptic thunderstorms. Each background forces you to adapt your strategy to suit the prevailing conditions, and you'll be finding new areas and new features even after weeks of play.

It's hard not to feel dirty

The game itself, however, is quite familiar. Dead or Alive has always been something of an acquired taste, treading as it does a middle ground between the crowd-pleasing acrobatics of the Soul Calibur series and the more hardcore approach of Virtua Fighter. The game's system of counters and reversals has been made slightly trickier to implement in this instalment, leading to a game that's better balanced than its predecessor, but button mashers will still find their frenzied attacks stopped in their tracks by a skilled player. This, combined with the interchangeable characters and relatively small move rosters, makes for a game that's considerably less welcoming to the newcomer than either Soul Calibur or Tekken, although it reveals more subtlety with extended play. However, it still lacks the depth of Virtua Fighter, despite innovative features like the much-lauded tag team mode, and the game only really works if both players are of vaguely comparable skill. In fact, repeated play against the same opponent can be extremely rewarding: the game system forces you to react to your opponent's play style, rather than simply launching an all-out attack, and grudge matches between old foes can become very tactical.

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