Ever since E3 last May you've heard all about Dead or Alive 4. You've read article after article on DOA4 and seen countless screen shots as well. Now, on the eve of the game's release date it's time to provide the info you've all been waiting for. You may have heard a light sprinkling of details on the online aspects of Dead or Alive 4 (mainly geared toward the new lobby system), but for those of you that played online with DOA Ultimate on a regular basis, there are a few changes that you probably aren't aware of. Some of these changes are good, while others caught us by surprise and honestly disappointed us (although just a bit).

Dead or Alive 4 has been built from the start with online play as a primary focus. The team over at Tecmo has fine-tuned the game to perfection to ensure a fair fight when you take the game online. Playing online the past few days there have only been Japanese players to battle against. Under most circumstances you would think a match in an online fighting game would be filled with lag considering the distance from California to Japan. However, a vast majority of the matches played over the past two days have been virtually lag-free. It amazed us to say the least.

One feature that is sure to please DOA fans across the globe is the ability to save your fights to the Xbox 360 hard drive or memory unit. After a match has concluded, you can save online and offline fights by pressing the Y button. Once you've saved a match you can upload it to the leader boards. A symbol of a video camera will appear next to your name on the leader board and any player can download the file to their hard drive or memory unit. You can only have one file uploaded at a time, but this is an outstanding feature to have. The hard drive can store up to 100 matches per profile, so it will be awhile before you fill that up.

While many online ranking systems are based almost entirely on the number of games played instead of actual skill, the ranking system featured in Dead or Alive Ultimate offered a small taste of skill. The letter-based (F - SS) ranking system could be worked around so that an average player had a high letter grade ranking, but at the very least you knew that a player with a ranking of an A or B probably wasn't going to be a challenge for a player ranked SS (under most circumstances).

In DOA4, the ranking system is the same in terms of the letter grades, but how many points you need to achieve each letter grade has significantly changed. In DOAU players started as a C rank with 10,000 points, working their way up to an S rank at 30,500 points, and finally an SS rank at 40,500 points. In DOA4 players will start off the same, with a C rank and 10,000 points. However, a rank of A- is not achieved until you gain 27,000 points (nearly an S rank in DOAU). While we don't have details on the exact points needed for the higher ranks, at the time of this posting, there was a player with an A+ ranking at over 57,000 points, and a player with an S ranking at over 118,000 points. There's no telling how many points you'll need to achieve an SS ranking.

Clearly the points needed to move up in rank have been moved up considerably. However, one thing that needs to be looked at is how Tecmo will handle glitches in the leader board. The game has been available in Japan for only a couple of days and already the top five players have scores received from a glitch in the system. The top player has over 5 million points, a feat that would take roughly 25,000 wins or more. If this can happen with only 3,500 Asian players taking their game online, what will happen when thousands of US gamers go Live over the weekend? Hopefully Tecmo can solve this issue quickly.

As you can see, Tecmo has done a lot of good with the online mode in DOA4, but there are a few things that make us long for DOAU. The new 3D lobby system, complete with customizable 3D avatars for the players to use while spectating a match, is a nice little bonus feature. However, the functionality of the lobby has to be questioned a bit. A popular feature in DOAU was the ability to check your stats against another player. This was easily done by access the pause menu while waiting in line for your match. In DOA4 the feature has been retained, but it can only be accessed from the new 3D lobby, which means that you can't be actively waiting for a game while checking out the stats of the other players.

In addition, for many players the new 3D lobby system is more of a minor hassle than anything else. The 3D lobby is basically for watching a match without waiting in line. You can have up to 16 players in a single room, but sometimes people don't want to fight, they simply want to watch. This doesn't happen very often though, and when you join a match you are automatically taken to the new lobby. We found ourselves immediately pressing start to enter the old lobby and wait in line for our turn every time we entered a game. It would have been nice to have a feature that allowed players to head straight to the old lobby instead of going through the new lobby. Or perhaps something that allows players to wait in the new lobby while still being in line to play.

Overall, DOA4 is the best fighting game available (or soon to be available). The online aspect of the game is something that all fighting games will be compared to from now on. Clan support had to be dropped from the title, and we had a few minor gripes, but everything else greatly overshadows our small complaints. In fact, our minor issues with the game are based solely on the fact that Team Ninja set the standards so high with DOA Ultimate. Even the achievements are challenging, and sometimes brutally honest (such as the achievement for five straight losses in DOA Online). Tune in Saturday for our complete review of Dead or Alive 4, the next great Xbox 360 title.