mods are quarantined play The Bouncer (2000)

I dunno if this is, like, A Thread

I know almost nothing about this game except that it's sort of famously not very good

I wasn't plugged into the early PS2 marketing but according the gaming historians at Wikipedia it had a ton of hype as the first Square game for the console, and then it wasn't very good and everyone got mad

I feel like you could have picked a different frame to dramatically freeze-frame the dude on the left but okay

TETSUYA NOMURA WHAT ARE YOU DOING

MY DUDE THESE WERE A YEAR APART

dweeb buys his clothes at a popup halloween store in a gutted circuit city

comes in a polybag that says like KEY HERO on the front

I am losing my mind

if you Like any of these tweets I demand you go look at all the cool art I posted over the last week

I know this is entirely my own fault but I cannot allow my Brand to entirely consist of PS2 screenshots

I died in the second fight and it booted me back to the attract mode video so then I had to wait for the main menu to load and then click through a dozen screens to load my last save and then skip four cutscenes and two loading screens to try the fight again

there's no tutorial or even like explanation of anything at all

it just plays nine hours of cutscenes and then suddenly you fight six dudes at once and all of them use knockdown attacks

I read the manual in order to have any idea how to play this game

did you know the PS2 face buttons are pressure-sensitive?

there were, like, four games that used this feature, because it sucked ass. this game uses it to activate Light and Heavy attacks on the same button

interestingly this also means both versions of the PS3 controller also had analog face buttons, because backward compatibility

I dunno if there were any PS3 games that used it but I hope some did just to screw with people

this game uses bloom, which AFAIK is pretty uncommon this early in the generation, but it looks like complete ass lol

It's derived from the previous frame (I'd guess probably for technical reasons), which means blending every frame with a blurred copy of the previous frame results in this weird smeary hall-of-mirrors effect that looks less like bloom and more like your TV is broken

but even when nothing's moving much between frames, it still looks weird because the blurred copy doesn't line up with the original image so it mostly looks like weird messed-up ghosting

to be clear I can't, like, dunk on this

this came out in 2000; this was wildly cutting-edge and no one had been able to really experiment with this stuff yet

but like... it definitely doesn't look *good* lol, and I don't think it did even when it came out

notably Ico was only a year after this, and it's generally credited with being the game to popularize bloom lighting, and like... its implementation is INCREDIBLY restrained and tasteful in comparison to almost every game that came after it lol

FRANK UP!

so they're trying to rescue an anime girl, and the only thing they know is she was kidnapped by Evil Corporation

they go to EvilCorp's gigantic radially-symmetrical skyscraper city, fly to the top, there's a glowing dome dead center of the whole complex, with the girl in it

ROBOTOMY

was Ehrgeiz good? bc like this was made by the Ehrgeiz devs and this isn't very good

wikipedia says it was bad but "bad" does not preclude also being good

I love this impossibly boring UI

this was the year 2000; every other game UI was just absolute unreadable chaos of photoshop grunge textures and paint splatters and drop shadows and tribal tattoos and flying text and The Bouncer is over here like "we have implemented Buttons."

this dude saw this woman's name on a computer and immediately experienced an elaborate flashback suggesting he spent his entire childhood with her

and then he meets her in literally the next room and is like WHO IS THIS MYSTERIOUS WOMAN WHO I HAVE NEVER MET

lmao the tattoo guy just spoke more than like two words for the first time and it's Steve Blum

I mean, of COURSE it is

there was zero possibility this game wouldn't have Steve Blum in it; how could I have been so blind

DRANK UP!

this game is bad I like it

you... don't really have much control over whether you win fights or not

thankfully you usually win most of the time anyway so it's not terribly frustrating lol

sometimes when games are bad they're incredibly punishing and frustrating due to design/balance issues

this one is thankfully in the better category of bad game, where it's just boring and repetitive and not particularly interesting

all the FMV cutscenes and character animation are ridiculously extravagant and expensive and then the actual gameplay is like... a proof-of-concept prototype for a game that never got made lol

like, everything is THERE and WORKS, it just has no ideas whatsoever

you push buttons to hit dudes. sometimes the dudes hit you. you can buy upgrades and new moves but there's no particular reason to use any move over any other move

some moves just plainly do more damage than the others and there's no incentive to do anything besides just push the Best Move button every time

it never really gets particularly challenging because the design has no real way to accomplish that

enemies attacks don't have tells. you can block but there's no indication of when you SHOULD block, so it's useless for damage mitigation. Better strategy is to just keep using your Best Moves and hope you can stunlock before they hit you too many times

usually you can

it's like.... congratulations, you have made a video game

there is Combat and Bosses and Upgrades and Cutscenes

you did it. you made all the parts of a videogame and put them together to form A Video Game

to be clear this is a million times better than if they had actually tried to make some ultra-complex Combat System with combos and weapon skills and devious AI or whatever, because that would have sucked AND been hard to play

this I can just push Kick until I've Kicked all of the dudes

it's chill

the GDD for this game is a single piece of paper that says "What if you could kick dudes?" in Times New Roman and somebody highlighted "dudes" and wrote "ROBOTS?" above it with a pen

CRANK UP!

THE BOSS'S SECOND FORM IS OVERALLS

okay I beat The Bouncer (2000)

it's like five hours long with cutscenes loading screens and like... maybe 20 minutes of actual gameplay lmao

I can imagine this made gamers very angry in 2000 but I'm just like "oh nice that didn't take forever"

apparently you're supposed to play it multiple times to see all the branching whatevers and the secret true ending or something but...... nah lol

it's a bad game but it's interesting in that it doesn't appear to have been rushed or stuck in dev hell. It's competently executed with no tech issues, graphics are fine for the era, the animation and FMV work is super polished

it just has... a COMPLETE lack of design ambition

Push Button -> Kick Dude is the full extent of the design. It has not the slightest interest in even TRYING to be anything more interesting

it's *dull*

which feels.... weird for this era? tons of games from this gen were awful but they *tried* stuff and failed horribly at it

that said if I'd had this when I was 12 I'd probably have played it nonstop for months lol