March 17th
Today's challenge is: Biggest Letdown.
Another easy one today, which I'll try to keep short since I'm getting a little burned out. The thing is, I rarely let myself get let down by games, because I rarely get hyped for games. When other people hype up games, I tend to approach them with extreme caution, which hinders my personal enjoyment and leads me to be cautious even more. When I do get hyped up, it usually does live up to my expectations, so I guess I'm fairly lucky. The only other scenario is if a game starts up pretty good but then quickly goes down the shitter. However, I'm gonna focus on the other one.
Examples of games that fall in that scenario for me are Pokemon Stadium, Hagane and Smash Brawl. But I'm not gonna talk about any of those. Instead, I'll talk about
Dead or Alive 4, mostly because I wanna have at least one game from a Microsoft console. I don't know how many times I watched the first trailer from that game, I actually saved it to my computer when it was released. I thought it was sooooooo epic, and a great step up from Dead or Alive 3, which had been my favorite fighter ever since I got to play it for a few days straight the very week the original Xbox came out.
It took me forever to get to play it, since I was already fully into trophy hunting at the time and thus spent most of my “modern gaming” budget on the PS3. Hell, I already had over 500 hours of playtime on Dead or Alive 5 at that point. I actually accidentally bought a 360 while doing late night eBay auction sniping. How did that happen? Well, someone online was about to win a 360 with a 20$ bid. I was like “fuck that you aren't paying 20$ for a current gen console”, so I bid 40$ just to raise his bid (I can be a real asshole sometimes). However, 20$ was close to his max bid, so I ended up being the highest bidder with 30$ or something, and I won it myself for that price. Oh well, there was a handful of games I wanted on the console anyway, so that didn't really annoy me.
Dead or Alive 4 was the first game I bought on the console, and I played it as soon as the 360 arrived. And I felt let down, but why that happened is hard to put into words, but mostly, I thought it was a little stiff compared to DOA3 and DOA5, that the new cast and new costumes were lame, and it didn't have huge launching attacks like the one before (when Ayane would shitkick you across the arena). Plus, having played DOA5 a lot beforehand, I felt like this was a major downgrade. I could feel something similar when playing the first two games, but when comparing them to their contemporaries, mostly Virtua Fighter and Tekken, I felt like they were pure gold.
It's honestly a game I should revisit with a new mindset, as it's really bumming me out how that's the only game in the series that didn't blow my mind once I had actually played it. I played 3, 5 and 6 on their release day (or close to), and the only one of them I encountered any sort of issues with was the 6th one, although it still felt great. Maybe one day, I'll play it again and enjoy it like the rest.
Oh, and juuuuust in case: I know everyone knows it as the “tits fighter” with the whole boob physics engine thing, but it's so, so much more than that. You shouldn't dismiss the franchise because of this, because you'd be missing out on what is, to me, the greatest fighting game franchise of all time, no less than that. At least among those with 3D models.
Only available on the Xbox 360.