Sports

Hockey is a game of speed, finesse, grit and grind. Injury is commonplace, and the ability to shirk pain is viewed as a right of passage. Yet where actual players incur very real bumps and gashes, the pain I experienced while playing ESPN NHL Hockey was strictly metaphorical—a bruised ego.

Initially, I was expecting a game like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, with free form environments and highly varied goals. Instead, I found an experience more like Jet Set Radio: a strictly timed affair where the goals are all painfully similar and figuring out how to get to the next goal is half the challenge.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Mild Violence

In this edition of Play under Review, we take a look at each of the latest soccer simulations currently available in the U.S. As noted before in other editions of Play under Review, the crucial decision for sports games must be whether to be an arcade game or a simulation game, where a simulation game is concerned mainly with attempting to replicate an existing sport, whereas arcade games do not have to bother with many concessions to reality.

If the game were truly about volleyball, or even about forming relationships, then there would not be random screens of the girls walking up and down beaches or lying down in poses that make them appear, as a friend so aptly put it, "freshly raped."

Welcome to another edition of Play Under Review. This time around, we're throwing you a, ahem, curveball, devoting most of our coverage to a sport that's mostly dormant right now.

Game Description: The girls of Dead or Alive are back and better than ever in the first fantasy sports simulation, Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball for the Xbox video game console. It's sure to have your heart racing with beautifully rendered graphics and action-packed gameplay. The extreme action is transported from the fighting ring of Dead or Alive 3 to the beach. But this time around the girls are throwing on their bikinis to go head-to-head in the most outrageous beach volleyball game you have ever seen!

Sex is something of an enigma for this country. Everyone wants it, everyone thinks about it, but almost nobody wants to deal with it in a meaningful and intelligent way. This is especially true for videogames and their delayed acceptance as culturally valid media.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Strong Language, Use of Drugs, Violence

Game Description: Deathrow pits two teams in a no-limits, no-honor, total-aggression arena battle. In Deathrow, there are no rules and full-contact aggression is not only legal, it is required! The fastest, toughest players are victorious and the slow and weak are defeated. The game combines the lightning-fast gameplay of third-person action games with the cooperative team play and gritty roughness of rugby, offering a unique combat sport experience.