Breasts. Aren't they great? Tomonobu Itagaki of Team Ninja clearly thinks so and with his Dead or Alive series, he's certainly brought bouncing bosoms to the forefront in the fighting genre. And whilst Dead or Alive has never been able to compete with fighting big guns such as Virtua Fighter and Tekken, it's certainly a very solid contender offering a complexity not too taxing for beginners, but not so simple as to stunt the skills of more skilled fighting fans who like to be able to show off.

With the emphasis seemingly focusing more and more on the fighting rather than the bouncing in the last in the series, it was somewhat surprising to see Tecmo announce that the girls would soon be stripping away the fighting – and their clothes – in favour of some bikinied beach volleyball action. Was it a good move? Let's take a look...

From the initial opening FMV which features much bashful kicking of water, strawberry insertion and a cheery summery tune, you travel to Zack Island via a rather camp sequence featuring Zack, showing us exactly what he spent the money he won at the end of Dead or Alive 3. Zack is voiced by basketball legend Dennis Rodman, although the credits also reveal that he is also voiced by Bin Shamada, which makes you wonder exactly what it was that Rodman actually did, especially when you realise that Zack has about five lines in total. This sets the scene for the forthcoming 14 game-days which are split up into four parts – morning, afternoon, evening and night – and these parts should be managed well or else your fortnight will be over before you've accomplished anything.

Your first meeting will be with Lisa, the new Dead or Alive girl, who helps add a bit of racial equality to the ranks, whilst at the same time looking too much like she's a white girl who's blacked up for the fortnight. Our female Al Jolson will give you a tour of the island, which is simple enough to navigate via a pretty map/menu system. Certain parts of the island are inaccessible during certain parts of the day or fortnight, and during the night you can only visit the hotel. The menu system you use to navigate is solid and cheerful, helping keep the summer holiday theme at the forefront. Many players will certainly choose to visit the Radio Station immediately to apply their personal soundtrack from the hard drive, which is a real shame as the delightfully camp and cheery soundtrack is one of the best features of the game and certainly helps add to the atmosphere, featuring the likes of B*Witched, Spice Girls, Bob Marley and Christina Aguilera.

Other parts of the presentation are less agreeable. Those expecting Dead or Alive 3-quality graphics will be somewhat disappointed by the lack of visual finesse and polish on display. Characters have visibly less detail than their DoA3 counterparts. That's not to say that Xtreme isn't a good looking game - it's 100% more gorgeous than a large number of the games released on Xbox in the last year - but comparing the locales in Xtreme to those found in DoA3 shows a distinct lack of care, with the jungle stage featuring some of the most blatant use of scrappy, rotating sprites for background plants since the N64 days. Compounding these problems are the very visible jaggies, which is not something you'd expect to be seeing in a second-generation Xbox title and certainly not something you'd expect from the follow-up to possibly the most beautiful game on the system.

The tour will also take you to the stores, of which there are three distinctly different shops to choose from. The shops are important, as this is where you will be spending the Zack Dollars you earn. Items can be either kept by your character or gift wrapped and sent to a prospective partner, or sent to your current partner to keep them keen. Accessory Shop is where you will find lots of items for customising your girl with a range of hats, shades, nail varnish, sun lotions and custom volleyballs amongst other items. Each character likes different colours and has different hobbies, so picking the correct items will help you win the favour of the girl you most want on your team. Also available is the excellently named Zack of All Trades, which is a place to buy all kinds of bizarre, often expensive and mainly useless odds and sods. Here you will find items which can be of powerful use when trying to lure a partner, or worth keeping for the just for the thrill of owning. You can choose from books, snacks, cuddly toys, precious stones and even the prototype silver Xbox.

Last but not least is the Sports Shop. Whilst most of the UK's sports shops are generally filled with overpriced football shirts and shoplifting scallywags in greasy Adidas baseball caps and puffy jackets, Xtreme's plays host to nothing but racks of bikinis. As with the other two shops, the range changes every day, so hesitating to pick something up may cost you dear. You'll have cheap bikinis like the one your character comes with by default and some altogether sexier and more revealing outfits for much higher prices, and you'll be finding yourself picking out matching suits and accessories with almost frightening devotion, saving just to afford the trainers and sun visor that will complement your latest swimsuit.

All of these items can either be kept in your instant item menu or preserved for eternity in your characters collection. The collection is accessible in the hotel and is the place to put things you want to keep for after the vacation is over. If an item is not placed in the collection before you leave after 14 days, you'll lose it. Also, food and flowers go bad in the space of a day, so the only way to preserve these is by adding them to the collection. Each girl has a personalised collection where you can place swimwear, accessories and trinkets, and with several hundred items to collect, you'll be constantly revisiting the island to try and nab that elusive teddy bear or decorative cushion.

In order to be able to afford the items in the first place you'll need to be making money and the biggest earner is, somewhat inevitably, volleyball. If you find a pair of girls on the island menu, you can challenge them to a game consisting of seven sets. It's here, somewhat ironically, that the game starts to show its very worrying shortcomings. If you're expecting to be playing a challenging game of volleyball in the style of Beach Spikers you'll be disappointed. What we have instead is a game of button-press timing. Control is simple with the left stick moving your girl, the right stick positioning your partner and the A and B buttons used for attack and receive respectively. The Xbox controller's analogue buttons come into play, with two levels of input allowing a versatile range of serves, spikes, passes, feints and blocks when combined with different analogue stick inputs. Your initial attempts at positioning tactics, precision shots and double-guessing will be a frustrating affair until it suddenly dawns on you that the game isn't expecting you to do anything as taxing as that after all.

You don't have to run to intercept balls, simply because they wing their way toward you or your partner without fail, no matter where you are. You don't have to run to the net and jump to spike your team mates pass because the game does all that for you. As such, the only way to lose a point is to miss a button press. It's a relief that this is the case, because trying to play with Beach Spikers play mechanics and ideals with the camera angles presented to you would be impossible. The camera is the only real factor that makes this game particularly difficult; eschewing the sensible camera views seen in AM2's title, Xtreme settles on a rather low and distant camera that starts in the corner of the serving pair and then pans along with the ball to the opposite side and back again. The camera is constantly at a changing diagonal angle to the action, often cutting you or your partner from the screen and also making it near impossible to gauge who the ball will fall to, meaning that you'll often find yourself trying to engage balls that aren't coming to you or just completely missing them because they look to be headed to your partner.

The game features an Exhibition mode, which is just pure volleyball away from your island break. You can partake in an exhibition match with either one or two players and whilst the lack of four player support seems a surprising oversight to begin with, when you bear in mind just how much the CPU does for you in the scheme of things, it's not surprising that they force a CPU team mate on each player. More than 2 players would have been incredibly clumsy to say the least. You can choose any character and can wear any bikini you have in your girls' collections with fully customisable match lengths and CPU character attitudes.

Even though we're not experts on volleyball, we are pretty certain that we haven't seen real volleyball players touching their toes, or playing with their hair during critical moments of a match. Indeed, it's a frightening thing to see your character suddenly start doing bunny hops when on the receiving end of a vicious spike. Whilst the animations are instantly breakable and add some character to the ladies, they seem somewhat inappropriate in the flow of a game. Much more helpful would have been the girls watching the ball and preparing to receive it, which would certainly have made the poor camera less of a burden during frenzied exchanges. What is a nice touch are the little details during a match, such as the perhaps unintentionally humorous spectacle of a girl being hit in the shins, tummy or even full in the face with frightening force. Another welcome addition is the use of the girls' voices during games, calling each others names during passes and shouting a whole range of congratulatory phrases, delivered in a charming mix of Japanese and "Engrish", along with the tongue-in-cheek cut-scene exchanges you'd expect from a Dead or Alive game after each point.

If you start to under-perform in your volleyball whilst on the island, your partner will leave you, meaning you'll have to go find another one. They'll almost certainly not join you immediately, but you can win them over by sending them gifts bought from one of the three shops mentioned above. Whilst without a partner, you'll often find yourself wasting time by the pool. Here, you can take part in the most entertaining attraction of the island - The Hopping Game! Primarily designed to teach you correct usage of the analogue buttons for the main volleyball segment, your character clumsily bounds across a series of swimming floats to cross the pool. Some are close together, some are far apart and a quick, rhythmic crossing is rewarded with bonus money. You'll find your button sensitivity improving dramatically as a result, making this excellent practise for those of you having trouble with the limited travel offered by the buttons.

Once the day is done, you return to the hotel for the night where you will receive a gift from Zack, which will be a random gift from one of the stores, or a video featuring clips, commercials, tech demos and the like from other Team Ninja games, such as the forthcoming Ninja Gaiden. You also get the opportunity to send gifts to the girls you like and also to manage your items in the collection before going to bed to sleep in preparation for tomorrow. You can also spend your hard-earned monies in the casino. Here, 4 games are available; Roulette, Poker, Blackjack and Slot Machines. Don't expect to see your character walking around in an evening dress because you select the games from a list and your cursor does all the work for you. If you know how to play the games contained within, you pretty much know what to expect. The casino seems rather like a tacked-on afterthought. It's all drawn very nicely and the casino itself is gorgeous to look at, but there is no interaction with the environment and offers nothing more than the numerous free Java downloads of the same games you'll find on the Internet, other than the cards having pictures of the girls on them and the slot machines are each themed to a different character. A real shame, because it would have been excellent to have the ability to walk around and buy an unhappy partner a drink or try and impress a prospective team-mate and explore the beautiful casino setting.

But it's in the Gravure sequences that you realise why the casino seems so tacked on and the volleyball so lightweight. This is hentai. Tecmo may have dressed it up, Microsoft may have tried to tout it as a sports game with nice girls in it, but it's nothing more than an excuse to ogle girls in bikinis. Take your girl to a quiet spot during the day and watch her sunbathe, cycle, swing, exercise, play with rodents or rub her crotch up and down a branch (absurdly, we're not making those last two up). You have full control over the camera and can pan, zoom and switch views to your hearts content. It's at this point when you realise why you're buying expensive bikinis to dress your girl up in and why you've spent so long getting her those specific shoes. You're turning her into your own custom made sexual fantasy figure and in Gravure it's your chance to enjoy it. Quite how a western audience will react to this is still to be seen. To our knowledge, this is the first heavily funded hentai game to reach the west and be targeted at a mass-market, and it's sure to leave some feeling baffled as to what it is they are trying to achieve when they are being encouraged to do nothing but ogle.

Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball is a hard game to recommend. If you aren't interested in getting off over polygon breasts, you'll be bored quickly. If you're after a decent arcade sports game, you'll be seriously disappointed. For every gaming element available in this title there is at least one game that does it better. For collecting things we have Pokemon and Shenmue, for volleyball we have Beach Spikers, for maintaining relationships we have Smackdown! Shut Your Mouth and for gambling we have the countless Caesars Palace titles that have been released over the last three generations of hardware, not to mention the free versions you have already installed on a Windows PC. But maybe that is to miss the point, because as a total experience it's rather different, especially for an unsuspecting western audience. If you want a real game, this isn't the title for you, but as a coffee table talking piece for the FHM generation that Microsoft are so eager to tempt on board the Xbox bandwagon, it could find favour.

And just like the aforementioned magazine, as long as you keep looking at the pictures and pay less attention to the mundane articles, you might find it to be to your taste.