Cause and effect relationships can be kind of tricky to define. It can be very clear sometimes (Marylyn Manson and Quake make kids in Colorado kill their classmates), mild correlations (does having an abortion really cause the fetus to die?); to vague at best (did refusing to go to church really lead to the dinosaurs extinction?). There is, however, an undeniable effect from playing Tecmo’s Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball. You WILL want to kill yourself. You will realize that you are indeed the most pathetic creature walking the Earth. Looking for a quick way out? Buy Dead or Alive then read this fine piece of literary wackiness.

You might be used to hearing people tell you to kill yourself. I hear it a lot so I tend to phase it out. When a video game tells you to kill yourself though, just get the fucking noose out and get it over with. Last year, Tecmo (the purveyors of the godly Ninja Gaiden series), unleashed this monstrosity upon humanity. For the uninitiated, the Dead or Alive series has always been a fighting game whose primary selling point were its well-endowed females. By well endowed, I mean they have disproportionately large polygonal figures exuding from their chests. Big digital boobs. To absolutely everyone’s surprise (especially the entire porn industry), sex sells. The series made three sucessful fighting games and Dead or Alive 3 was one of the most lauded Xbox launch titles.

Having realized that perverts would rather watch the digital girls bounce on the beach in swimsuits than fight eachother, XTreme Beach Volleyball was developed. Believe it or not, there is a plot to this game. Those who got lost in the infinite plot twists of MegaMan 2 might want to back away, but others will be in for a roller coaster of emotion. To my surprise, the plot isn’t “watch women jumping up and down and sunbathing in swimsuits for your viewing pleasure you sick fuck.” I won’t spoil the intrigue for you, but just know that it involves the gripping plot of Dead or Alive 3(the War and Peace of fighting game plot lines) and a volcano. Flimsy premises aside, the humiliation with this game starts right away. Once, the Team Ninja logo fades from the screen, an overly cheerful b-rate pop song starts blaring. To make matters worse, the B-rate pop song (B-rate implies that the song is as bad as a Britney Spears song but the singer probably isn’t nearly as hot. Therefore, she isn’t popular.) Is accompanied by a disturbing CG sequence that contains skinny dipping, girl-on-girl innuendo via feeding of grapes, roller blading, and just about everything besides bukkake that the Japanese are known to enjoy (fleeing from Godzilla and Battle Royale-style-exploding-collars are notably absent). To recap, it’s a video of CG animated girls running around while a B-rate pop song is playing. In other words, instead of watching Brianna Loves Jenna and listening to the rocking sounds of Significant Other(seriously, LIMP BIZKIT rizules), you’re listening to an ugly chick sing while watching a much naughtier version of Toy Story. Don’t bother trying to explain it if someone walks in, just get a gun and aim for your temple. This is just the opening movie though. It will get worse.

Unlike the homo-erotic, yet classic, Super Spike V-Ball for the NES, Dead or Alive’s Volleyball has no tournament. Eschewing the brave fighting game tradition of gathering the world’s strongest to fight to the death, you simply play volley ball and buy gifts for other females on the island. With no particular goals, you can just watch segments of the girls biking, snorkeling, frolicking on a beach, hula dancing, and stretching. Each of the girls has their own unique tastes. The idea of the developers must have been to give them personalities (Just like girls in real life have different personalities. At least that’s what I heard). One likes surfing. So give her a surf board, not a gun. Another likes cooking. So get her a microwave, not a steering wheel. Getting another girl a great gift will result in her giving your girl a nice swimsuit or hat. Be careful though, giving a girl the ‘wrong’ gift can make her ‘dislike’ you. The whole process of buying gifts and having a ‘good’ relationship with another girl on the island is actually time consuming. You can even use the Xbox’s hard drive to make a custom soundtrack. I’m not in a position to deny that watching women play Volleyball completes the listening experience of Tortoise’s Millions now living will never die. Others might opt for sheer fun of watching a CG rendered girl skip across the beach as Slayer’s Got hates us all is blaring. Maybe you would rather set the mood just right with a little Barry White. Regardless, the rewards are......why are you still reading? Okay, if you haven’t figured it out by now, I will take the time to make the developer’s insult painfully clear.

This game forces you to do sit through boring chores in order to get money to buy gifts to gain the affection of a computer generated image of a woman. But it is a COMPUTER GENERATED woman, not a real woman. This analogy should explain things. Dating a girl is to fucking a girl, as XTreme Beach Volleyball is to a Blow-up doll. The whole situation gets worse the more you think about it. Had you not wasted the fifty dollars on this shitty game, you could have put it towards a plastic surgery fund. Or at least bought some of that ‘date rape drug’ that you have had your eye on. Or, you could have bought porn. But no, you went out and bought this game and spent ten hours playing it. Hours that you could have spent staring awkwardly at a girl until she notifies a cop. Or you could have found a really cheap hooker(the cheap ones are ALWAYS packing some ‘extra anatomy’...don’t ask). You could have beaten Contra a few times. Do you see where this is going? It’s one thing to be a horny loser who could never get laid. But it is FAR worse to be a horny loser who could never get laid that plays video games to satiate part of his libido. If you bought this game, welcome to the bottom of the ladder. There is NO ONE below you. Believe or not, at this point, a stupid Indian kid who just finished jacking off to bestiality porn (Beauty and the Beast: featuring Bea Arthur and a Jack Russel Terrier) is cooler than you. That stupid Indian kid is me. And even I have to laugh at anyone who fucking bought this game. I’ll be killing myself soon enough, but that will have more to do with the fact that God actually appeared to me and said he hated me. I’ll see you in the fifth circle of hell, which, according to Dante’s Inferno, has a place for people who commit suicide. Apparently, we get to be trees that keep have birds eating our leaves forever! Yay!

To contact the suicide hotline, click here.