Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball - Reception

Reception

A certain amount of controversy erupted following the announcement and subsequent release of the game. It was criticized for laying a thin veneer of respectability and legitimate gameplay over simply watching lusty, scantily-clad women with large, bouncing breasts jog, roll around in the sand, scoot across tree trunks, and other suggestive activities, pandering to the lowest common denominator. Nonetheless, many reviewers were impressed at the depth of the volleyball game, as well as with the high quality of the visuals and animation. As a result, review scores ranged from quite mediocre to very high. In its review, Edge focused on the game's unusual social, rather than adversarial, focus.

In the April 2003 edition (issue #165) of the videogame publication Electronic Gaming Monthly, the magazine revealed a "nude code" for DOAXBV, as an April Fools' Day joke. The magazine promised readers they could play the game with the girls topless, in an unlockable nude mode. Upon discovering the nude code was a hoax, many readers sent angry letters to the magazine, despite the fact that such jokes and hoaxes were an annual tradition for EGM. In 2006, GamesRadar ranked gravure scenes of DOAX to be one of the 100 greatest gaming moment in history.

Shortly after the game's launch, a community of hobbyist hackers reverse engineered Dead or Alive Extreme Volleyball texture system, allowing users to modify textures of the player character models. This quickly led to users replacing the already revealing swimsuits with high detailed nude textures include genitalia and pubic hair for all in game characters. This resulted in fully nude anatomically correct female characters that would lounge about and play volleyball with full breast and buttocks physics intact. In January 2005 ninjahacker.net was taken to court by Tecmo for breaching the Digital Millennium Copyright Act by reverse engineering aspects of the game, as well as Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive 2. The company was seeking between $1,000 and $10,000 for every skin swapped over the community website.