It seems as though a week cannot go by without Dead or Alive 4 popping up in the news. This week is no exception, and unfortunately for developer Tecmo, once again the news is not good. Gamers have been screaming for the past week and a half that the game has some serious glitches, and some of the complaints have questioned if the game is even truly playable in its current state.

What exactly is going wrong? The story starts back in November 2005, when Dead or Alive 4 was originally slated to be released to the public. Initially the game was to be included in the bundled Xbox 360 package when the console went live, but development delays forced a last minute change to the package. DOA 4 was pushed back to a release date of early December, then mid December, then late December… and was finally released on December 29, after the holiday sales season but just in time to be considered a 2005 release. Although Tecmo never made an official statement as to the reason behind the development delays, industry experts strongly suspected that either Tecmo was having supply problems or that the game was filled with bugs and was not meeting minimum testing requirements. If these bugs were serious enough to inhibit game play, then Dead or Alive 4 would fail Microsoft’s certification for the Xbox 360, forcing Tecmo to take the game back to production for debugging once again.

So is there any truth to these suspicious? Perhaps so, based on recent online posts by several Xbox 360 players. A hot forum thread on gaming site Gamespot.com indicates that, in fact, Dead or Alive 4 game does have some significant glitches. The thread, titled “WARNING: DOA4 has a major glitch” has received a lot of attention since first appearing on the community board. In his post, an Xbox 360 gamer lamented that after having spent several hours playing DOA 4 on all of the game’s story modes, he had unlocked virtually all of the in-game characters. He noted that after playing a few more sessions, he booted the game back up again “only to find out that all of [his DOA 4] save data was gone.” The game had automatically wiped out every one of his unlocked characters, costumes, leader-board achievements, and his online ranking. Poof! All gone without a trace.

At first glance, you might think that this was just a case of bad luck. Very bad luck. However, several days after the original post was made, a Tecmo representative responded to a compliant noting that “We’re aware of the issue you’re referring to… “We’re working to identify and resolve the potential problem with the technical folks at Microsoft.” It’s highly unlikely for a game developer to waste their time and money on fixing a freak occurrence if it’s unlikely to happen again. Which means… this unfortunate event was likely not just a freak occurrence. Most likely is the fact that other gamers DOA 4 players are experiencing the same problems and the issue has escalated to such a degree that the developer was forced to address it.

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