DOA4 Redux
After my gushing and likely incomprehensible “review” of DOA4 yesterday, I would like to mention a few of the things that make it “not quite perfect” or different from previous incarnations. These are niggling little things that would make me call the game a 97% as-opposed to the 100% that a 5/5 rating would suggest.
GAC and Prod and I played a fair bit of DOA4 online last night and it reinforced some impressions and brought to our attention some other details that mar the perfection of this game. One unusual glitch is that a character who loses a hat during a match is not reflected thusly to viewers watching the game. That is, a character who has lost their hat appears to be still hatted to spectators! This causes confusion when a player exclaims, “Oh no! Gen Fu’s hat!” and a spectator is left wondering, what about the hat? It has tassles? A minor detail but surely not one beyond the brilliance of Team Ninja. I expect this to be fixed in an update!
During character and arena selection in the online game, buttons have a tendency to “bounce”. A button pressed may register two presses causing you to, say, pick the first costume in a character’s list, when, in fact, you wanted that special 3rd or 4th costume for this particular fight. Sometimes, the right costume makes all the difference.
And speaking of costumes, why does Brad Wong only have 3 costumes? I know he’s a big drinker, but surely he has more in his closet than that. Same goes for Bayman. Prod was lamenting the loss of the night-strike military outfit from DOA3 and I agree that its omission is severely disappointing.
Down moves have been removed or diminished for most characters. When knocking a player down, I have in the past enjoyed cracking them in the nuts with a downward blade strike or a knee drop. These moves seem to have disappeared, although not entirely. Jann Lee still has his dragon foot move where he jumps onto a downed opponent’s chest and twists. Some footsweeps work on downed opponents and so on. Some might think that this removes some cheap attacks. I would tell them to eat a fist.
GAC mentioned a music drop-out in scenes with a lot going on. Prod corroborated this at one point. I have not noticed it.
The Spartan is a girl. Why not THE Master Chief? Having the Master Chief as my system voice would be kick ass. The inclusion of the plasma grenade stick as a special throw is fucking awesome though. The Spartan still looks cool and really shines under the dynamic lighting of the DOA engine.
As I said, these are minor details really. Some of them may be addressed. The small number of costumes will, hopefully, be augmented by a booster pack. Unlike the previous version, I would not be surprised if this were a “for money” add-on through the Xbox Live Marketplace. Not that I would mind terribly as I would pay good money for more outfits for Hitomi and Friends. Hell, I’d fill my hard-drive with them if I could…
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