While most of the staff at GameSpot are taking the entire week off for the holidays, that hasn't kept the big dog, Greg Kasavin, from hammering on a rare retail-ready copy of Dead or Alive 4. In their final hands-on impressions, GameSpot gave props to the upgraded graphics, fluid animation, "fantastic stages", and the tweaked reversals system. The article details the acheievments the game features, including an insane "100 successive wins in survival mode" acheivment. Here's a bit on the online component:

The action's been fast and smooth online, even when playing against opponents across the globe. Sometimes there's noticeable lag when watching other players competing, but the gameplay's noticeably smoother whenever it's your turn to fight. As with any quality fighting game, matches against human opponents tend to be much more exciting than matches against the computer, though for what it's worth, even at the normal difficulty setting, DOA4's artificial intelligence puts up a pretty fierce fight.

GameSpot also spills some details on the female Halo character, Spartan-458. "By far her best-looking move has her shoving one of those blue-glowing plasma grenades into the opponent's stomach and then kicking the poor fool to the turf just before the grenade goes off."

Dead or Alive 4 is sounding like it will fulfill everyone's expectations and live up to it's hype. Let's hope that for everyone's sake that the game takes off in Japan as Sony needs to feel some heat from the Xbox 360 on their own turf in order for them to take some risks with the PlayStation 3, as competition will benefit everyone in the long run. DoA 4 is scheduled to be in stores tomorrow here in the US.

Dead or Alive 4 Final Hands-On [GameSpot]