Dead or Alive 4

Playing online will do nothing but make you agree with Tube even more. Online play has a few extremely annoying bugs that can (extremely rarely) make a fight lose sync and sometimes a whole roomful of people will leave because of a glitch that can cause you to stare at the winner in his/her victory pose until someone leaves. Pretty annoying stuff.

Fortunately, I haven't experienced the save game bug (yet). With all costumes unlocked and a bit of survival and time attack work done, I hope I don't ever experience it. Of course, I would just copy my save file to my other memory card, but it's copy protected. Genius.

EDIT: No, Nicole can't be played in story mode and therefore has no ending video.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Thanks for the tip, Newbie. I've read that somewhere before, but I'd since forgotten about it. Actually, now that I think about it, I do usually start up the game like that. That might explain why I haven't ran into the glitch yet.

I agree, you can't repicate the psychology that becomes apparent when playing the game against another human. However, as far as online play goes, because of lag, online play changes much of the gameplay in DOA4. Lag takes you out of a controlled setting, which is something any competetive game requires. Online play requires you to learn “lag tactics”, a seperate set of tactics to help you flow with the lag. Since lag is sporadic, what hits are guaranteed, what ways you can break combos, and what ways you can dodge moves change from one set of sixty frames to another. This can cause you to learn bad habits that will do you nothing but harm in offline versus, where fighting games are meant to be played.

Since DOA4 online plays differently than DOA4 offline, you must treat them as separate entities. DOA4 online brings inconsistency into competitive play, so if you are striving to be the best, DOA4 online shouldn't be taken seriously for anything beyond memorizing moves and strings. DOA4 offline versus is where the psychology in mixups and such makes the most difference because of the controlled environment.

The best thing to do is try to find a DOA4 tournament near you and meet people to play. If you can't find an offline tournament, then start one. Surely you have at least a couple of friends that play DOA4 as well. Let them know of your plans, and see if they know anyone who might be interested in a DOA4 tournament as well. If you can get the people together, you might just meet some people you really like that you can play against and get better with. Even if you don't, at least you've got the people together that are obviously interested in offline DOA4 tournaments. You or someone there could host the next one.

Just thought I'd bring up something that seems to be overlooked by so many people. (Not the lag, but the impact the lag can have. If you've played DOA4 online, you know how much people can complain about the slightest bit of lag.) Online play isn't to be taken too seriously unless that's the way you see DOA4. If you bought the game just because it's an online fighter, go ahead. Play online and have loads of fun; that's what the online mode's there for. If you bought DOA4 for a serious fighting game, don't let what online play you do partake in screw up your offline game.

There's nowhere I can't reach.