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First Encounter
By Mickah Wallace
Dead or Alive® Ultimate™ is a love letter to all Xbox® fighter fans from Tecmo and Team Ninja. The double-disk package includes the originalDead or Alive and its sequel Dead or Alive 2, making the entire series finally available for the Xbox®.
Rumble in the Jungle.
Not satisfied with a simple port, the designers and developers also gave each game a graphical overhaul, added more fighters, threw in new costumes, and put the whole enchilada online!
The Original
The first Dead or Aliveis recreated here with its original Saturn-style graphics intact. The same cast of tough guys and beautiful babes that made the game a hit are all back, as is the lightning-fast action. Gamers can play through the challenging Story mode or go head-to-head against their friends in Versus, Tag Team, and Survival matches. If you're an Xbox Live™ subscriber, you can even set up online multiplayer matches and tournaments in addition to comparing your ranking against other gamers worldwide. 
The one that started it all—better than ever!
The Sequel
Tecmo and Team Ninja gave Dead or Alive 2 even more love for the Xbox. First, they upped the content ante with all of the fighters from the initial release of the game (plus a surprise guest star from Dead or Alive® 3), 22 arenas culled from the entire history of the game, and a slew of new costumes. Then, they gave the graphics and the game engine a major overhaul to make the most of the Xbox hardware.
If you thought the women were beautiful and the arenas spectacular before, you really ain't seen nothing' yet. Some arenas have been polished to a mirror shine, while others were redesigned almost from scratch. Many feature destructible environments and multiple levels to fight on. Knocking someone through a wall not only does a heap o' damage now, but it can also send your opponent plummeting through a gigantic neon sign before they crash into the roof of a parked car on the street below.
Finally, they put it all online with multiplayer madness, global ranking, and other community-establishing goodies, like tracking which characters are the most popular and what their win-to-loss ratios look like. Up to eight players can enter the ring in single competition or tag matches.
Since only two can fight at a time (four in tag bouts), those that aren't playing are watching and talking trash, arcade-style. You can control your view of the action while you're waiting for your turn and shoot the breeze with the other contestants over your XboxLive headset.
Long-term fans and newcomers alike will be treated to their first glimpse of the new story and character information, including a beautiful extended cut scene at the beginning, which shows glimpses of the history between mainstays Kasumi and Ayane. All that mouth-watering beauty and intense action has always made it easy to overlook the story in the Dead or Alive series, but there are epic tales of betrayal and heroism behind just about every fighter who steps into the ring.
The rulebooks for Dead or Alive Ultimate include important plot and character details that help explain who's out to get whom and why. There's even a detailed flowchart that maps out each character's relationship to the rest. If you've ever wondered what the deal is with Ein and Hayate or why Lei Fang has a beef with Jann Lee, now you can find out for yourself. 
High-flying, high-impact action.
Dead or Alive Ultimate is many things at once: a compilation, an expansion, and a whole new game. First and foremost, however, Dead or Alive Ultimate is a sleek, gorgeous fighter that mixes blinding speed with smart strategies to create a truly compelling fighting game. It prides itself on being easy to learn, hard to master, but fun every step of the way!
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