The first stop after slurping down a quick meal of hot ramen noodles was the Tecmo booth. The
key attraction at Tecmo was Dead or Alive 4 (by TeamNINJA) for the Xbox 360. The game will be playable on Xbox
Live and so on. You can get the release date details and price from some other data-entry monkey, because we're
here to talk about pillows. And the game.
Pictured here is a very squeezable pillow featuring the character Rio from Tecmo's never-to-be-released-in-the-US pachinko slots game. They're on sale here at the show. There's really not much more we can say on this point but this makes us think of napping.
The Dead or Alive 4 demo was fun. One element of the fighting that the demo took pains to showcase was the multi-level nature of the environments. One moment a pair of fighters is standing on a bridge, the next, one of them is knocked over the railing and the fight has been taken to the stream below the bridge. (The water effects were not all that impressive.)
In another example of the same concept, a pair of fighters are at an old Japanese temple in a hilly mountainside. One of the players executes a special move and bobsleds down a long flight of stone steps using his victim as the sled on the way down. It looked painful, but fun.
Some of the special attacks took several seconds to finish animating. We can imagine that this will be a real pain in the ass on Xbox Live. The wrastlin? woman in particular has a move that had her using her foe as a pommel horse for several seconds. It seemed endless and gratuitous, and if someone were to do it over and over, it?d border on griefing. Gratuitous is a hallmark of the series. Love it or no, it?s here to stay.
Between fighting scenes we were treated to plenty of rendered cut-scenes that will likely require hours of play to unlock.
After the demo, we were given a handsome poster featuring one of the DOA girls. We?ll be giving it away in a contest here on the site within the next day or so, so keep refreshing for details.
