okay I know it's broadly considered a weirdly good volleyball game but I'm not convinced a sealed copy of Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball is worth two hundred and twenty dollars
you should instead spend two hundred and twenty dollars on xenosaga episode 3 or a sound voltex controller
I wanna say it was really early kotaku but they hadn't even launched in 2003 so it was probably like Game Informer or something
whoever it was, they did an article where the headline was basically "Can you believe this?? Turns out WOMEN are playing Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball!" and then they proceeded to Speculate on how this could possibly be happening
their conclusions were "well, there's no combat (girls hate that), and the main systems outside of the volleyball stuff are Befriending Other Girls and Buying Swimsuits. As we all know, females have two primary traits: They love Relationships, and they love Shopping. QED: We've solved the mystery of why women love the big titty volleyball game"
this somehow got lodged in my brain and it's been cracking me up for years. FLAWLESS encapsulation of early 00s gamer culture. Bunch of recently-graduated frat bros with guy fieri hair getting paid a living wage to write "Women Be Shopping (?)" in a paper magazine, and not a single one of them ever thought "wait a second, are lesbians real?"