Lost In Translation
Nick has a trio of games to pick apart this month, including Dead Or Alive 2
FORMAT Dreamcast ■ DEVELOPER Tecmo ■
YEAR 2000 ■
ORIGIN Japan ■ LOCALISED FOR Rest Of World ■
REASONS Commercial, Sex/gender ■
■ Tecmo’s terrific 3D fighter had a very strange life on the Dreamcast, with every version given a different feature set. The oddness starts with the fact that this game, developed in Japan, was first released in North America in February 2000. This was a fairly straightforward conversion of the original arcade game, with no unlockable content save for an intro scene that was disabled by default. If you wanted to see a nude Kasumi encased in some weird cloning blob, you had to achieve a high score in Survival mode, enter your name as REALDEMO and have your age set to at least 21.
Five months later in July 2000, the European version arrived. While this version lacked a couple of the bonus images included in the CD-ROM portion of the disc, the extra development time had given Tecmo the chance to add a set of extra unlockable costumes, with at least one for every character. These included some based on the developer’s Deception series, as well as a Shadowman-themed costume for Zack made possible by Tecmo’s publishing deal with Acclaim. Japan finally got its own version in September
2000, and it was very clearly the definitive release.
The bonus images on the disc were completely new and a gallery mode was added to the game itself. Another new batch of costumes was added spanning every fighter, this time with more attention paid to characters with fewer options to help balance things out. And perhaps as compensation for having to wait so long, the Japanese audience also got extra gameplay features. New tag-team moves were added, as were two stages based on those from the original Dead Or Alive. Most importantly, final boss Tengu and throwback Bayman were added as playable characters. Oh, and that scene from the intro no longer needed unlocking.