Good news for and those who enjoy a good beat 'em up, Dead or Alive 4 is still on course to be an launch title, at the Japanese debut anyway. boss Tomonobu Itagaki made the fresh commitment in an interview with Japan's leading gaming weekly, Famitsu, but we are still in the dark over a PAL release date. The veteran designer also revealed he has personally designed eight new characters for the game, and that there will be twenty in total, with a plotline surrounding evil opera singer Helena. I kid you not, good reader.

Itagaki told Famitsu that Team Ninja are also committed to completely overhauling the fighting styles in the game, acknowledging that this posed a serious risk to the game's balance. "Up until now, we were chained to the series' existing framework. But time had passed, and by the period that we were working on Beach Volleyball, we felt that didn't matter any more," he commented.

Citing the power of the 360, the big boss also mooted a new effect which blurs the motion during high-speed fighting, adding realism. He stated that such effects were simply not possible on the current generation of hardware. "By blurring the characters, we can express movements that can't be shown at a frame rate of 60 frames per second," a camera option will allow snapshots of this effect in action.

More soon.

By Luke Guttridge