Dead or Alive Ultimate: Latest!

Fresh details and media. These recently released DOA Ultimate screens look sensational.

Tecmo's forthcoming Dead or Alive Ultimate wasn't playable at E3, but what we did get was a brand new trailer that debuted at Microsoft's Pre-E3 conference.

The new trailer revealed brand new, awesomely impressive fighting environments, like a wildlife stage in Kenya featuring a muddy water pool, giraffes and elephants. An elephant - effectively serving as a wall - screeched on its hind legs when a fighter was thrown into it.

Accompanied by the opening music from Dead or Alive 2, the trailer also showed impressive VF3-style "undulation" on some areas like the stairs of a new castle stage. Some cool new gameplay touches were also revealed - on a snowy stage, Zack further punished Jann Lee after knocking him to the ground by pouncing on him - and then sliding down the slope with his full weight on him, using him as a snowboard! Back on the subject of the girls, and perhaps most importantly - the tiny bikinis are IN!

The new trailer (available here in hi-res) also shows Kasumi NAKED in - ahem - greater detail than before. But you still won't see any really naughty bits. Team Ninja deserves a medal for somehow pulling off that impossibility.

In Kikizo's recent interview with the game's creator Tomonobu Itagaki, the visionary games designer put our concerns at rest regarding latentcy problems. We asked, "what about the issue of ping time, you know, what with the gameplay timing unit being 1/60th second, how does that work and is it a potential problem?"

To which Mr Itagaki assured us, "The people who say such things, they are not good developers and they don't understand technology. [smiles] We had an exclusive story with someone in our office a few weeks ago to test the work in progress, and the journalist was very happy and couldn't tell the difference between the normal game or online. There's no lag at all, so he thought it was a local link, but in fact it was online."

As the first ever online 3D fighting game, we also guessed that Itagaki-san might be pretty proud about the achievement, but he points out there is another less obvious reason why Dead or Alive is the first 3D fighter to make the massive leap online. He explained, "Both Sega and Namco get a big portion of their revenue form the arcade business so perhaps they don't have the resources for other venues, if the consumer version of their games has online features, then people wouldn't have to go to the arcade any more."

Dead or Alive Ultimate is going to own you, so we suggest you stay glued here until the game's release later this year - September at the earliest.

Be sure to check 'related articles' if you missed any previous DOA Ultimate coverage, we have loads of it.

Adam Doree
Director, Kikizo.com