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DOA Ships Today
Gamespot reports that the much-anticipated Dead or Alive 4 ships today, after a series of delays and confusion. From the article: "During the past month or so, the game's presumptive release date kept getting pushed back by about a week at a time by online retailers, causing many to wonder whether the game would indeed ship in 2005, especially since Tecmo remained mum about a specific release date all the while. But now fighting fans can look forward to an action-packed weekend courtesy of the latest game from Ninja Gaiden developer Team Ninja."
This is the first game in the 360 line-up that I care about. Now, if only two more games that are also good come out for the system my three game min req. will be fullfilled and I might actually pick up the system. By then, the system might be available also. I guess I am waiting on an official Gaiden 360 release date. Tecmo seems like they are one of the few companies that produced awesome X-Box only titles. When titles are cross platform, I tend to buy them for my PC or Gamecube.
The thing about fighting games is that it is hard to gauge how good they are until you let the fighter community try as hard as they can to break every aspect of the game engine. For a lot of gamers I know, balance is of utmost importance and there's no QA team in existence that can match the ability of thousands of hard-core Japanese gamers in arcades to find that one quirk that makes a few characters undefeatable most of the cast (if such a flaw exists--and in many fighting games it does). Eh, this is just my opinion as a hard-core fighting gamer though... for most people, who aren't going to spend hours every week practicing their combos, good balance probably doesn't matter as much.
Lack of DOA4 kept me out of the X-Box 360 lines during the Christmas rush. ... well, that and lack of compatability with DOAX.
Now they are about half way to getting me to want one.
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Given that DOA3 displaced the Soul Calibur series as my favorite gaming franchise, and that I thought DOAX was a brilliant work of art, I fully expect that DOA4 will not suck, based on Team Ninja's track record thus far.
I also prefer good games over good graphics, but the DOA series have been very, very good games which also happen to have good graphics.
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