It had been a long time since I had sat down and played DOA4. I had really lost interest in the game. So I fire it up over the weekend and started playing a few games. That's when I noticed my achievement total/score for the game and decided to work on it. I looked at what I had accomplished, what I needed to accomplish and what would be the easiest to pull off. I set my eyes on unlocking all the costumes. What a mistake!

I like Mr. Itagaki. I do. I really enjoyed DOA3, Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden Black on my XB. Having played through those games and viewing some of the pics from DOAXBV, I should have known how twisted Mr Itagaki's mind was. His fascination with the female form it's proportions and clothing them should have been a window on how laborious this task would be.

Most of the people in the game had two to three costumes available to them. I unlocked a couple of more costumes but knew I was going to need help when I played through the game again with Ryu and didn't get a new uniform. I didn't want to blindly play through the game again without knowing how many costumes I had to unlock. I checked GS's page on the game and it wasn't as helpful as I would have liked, so I checked Gamefaqs. That's the first indicator I had that this was going to be more involved than I originally planned on.

I had three costumes for Kasumi. Her total is seven. I had three for Hitomi and Kokoro. They have eight and seven respectively. On average, I had at least ten more fighters with at least two costumes to unlock. You take an average of two costumes per fighter times the number of rounds it takes to unlock the uniform and you're talking about a minimum of one hundred sixty rounds of fighting madness! Let me repeat that; ONE HUNDRED SIXTY ROUNDS! Did this number stop me? No. Should it have? Maybe. I may like the game but I wouldn't consider myself a true fighting guru or aficionado like my buddy Pat. I'm one of those people that when they get something stuck in their head, it's hard to let it go.

I'm steadily chipping away at this task. Notice my gamercard and the percentage of DOA I've completed so far. I plan on getting through this by next weekend. Keep your fingers crossed and keep a look out for that percentage going up.