One of the great things about being a guy is there are whole industries devoted almost exclusively to pandering to you.

Hence we get games like Dead or Alive Xtreme 2.

Another great thing about being a guy is not having to feel shame when you buy a game like Dead or Alive Xtreme 2, and one of the great things about having a very tolerant wife is that when the game was released last year, she rolled her eyes and said “we’re getting a 360 now, aren’t we?”

On the other hand, it’s a difficult game to define “beaten” – and lately I’ve been all about finishing games to some level of satisfaction.

Most of the time I consider a game beaten once I get the ending credits and animation, etc. In DOAX2, you could do that by playing through the first day with your initial partner and then sitting next to the pool for 13 days. Not really a challenge.

For stuff like Mahjong games – see above reference to having no shame – I consider them beaten once I’ve unlocked everything, if they have unlockable stuff, or once I’ve played through the story with every character I care about if there’s nothing to unlock. The only Mahjong games I’ve managed to “beat” by the first metric are Super Real Mahjong Premium Collection for the Neo Geo Pocket Color and Super Real Mahjong Dousoukai for the Game Boy Advance. Mahjong is pretty well suited for portable game systems, as an aside.

DOAX2 has unlockable stuff, and to some people the unlocking of it all is “completing” the game, and that is a fair and valid point. The problem is that, if you use an exploit in the original, unpatched version of the game that allows you to get lots of money very quickly, “completing” the game takes a mere 300-400 hours.

If you don’t use the exploit, estimates are in the 1K hour range to complete.

That’s, uh, half a year of a full time job.

I set my sights a little lower.

In the end I decided that I would unlock the achievements for collecting all of Kasumi’s and all of Hitomi’s swimsuits, and call that good. This took 20 hours combined, though after I managed it with Kasumi and realized it was a lot quicker not to mess around with trying to make friends with anyone, I completed Hitomi’s in the last 7 hours of that.

There are 9 playable characters, so math tells me that if I decided to finish the collections for all the other characters (this would give me 180 gamerscore out of a possible 1000, by the way), that would probably take right around another 50 hours and the game’s soundtrack is not worth listening to for another 50 hours – after only 20 hours of it I am about ready to snap. Most of the songs were catchy and upbeat and likeable the first 5 or so times I heard them… I think I heard the same Hillary Duff song at least 50 times, and I can’t take any more of it.

So – DOAX2: Completed (enough)

Now to finish Buffy.