Joe Dynamite

When I was planning on launching this website, I thought it would be funny if I went back and republished some stuff I wrote many years ago. I found some video game and tech reviews, some guides and walkthroughs, and some exhaustive E3 and WWDC rundowns. I’ve published more of them in the archive section.

The oldest review I was able to find was this 18-year-old one I wrote for SquareSoft’s The Bouncer on Sony PlayStation 2. I assume I wrote it in 2002 as I didn’t seem to include a publish date, unfortunately. My only clues are that it references Final Fantasy X, which came out at the end of 2001. And the About Me page of the site it was on included my age at the time. Since I don’t know when it was published, I’m just posting it here instead of the archives.

The Review

The Bouncer is a sort of Fighting/Action game. Like the old school Streets of Rage. You play through a single story with 3 different points of view (Sion, Volt and Kou). They are all bouncers at a bar called Fate and they all have their own reasons for chasing down the Mikado group after they abducted a young girl who was a regular at the bar, named Dominique. The game is fun at first even though the fights are somewhat slow. It only takes a few hours to beat this game, but if you like it there is plenty extra to do, like powering up the characters and getting secret characters. The graphics are outstanding, they are as good as Final Fantasy X’s even though it came out almost a year earlier. The voice acting is alright. It’s kind of difficult until you get your characters powered up, and you learn to use their moves (which could take a while). All in all it was a fun game and worth at least a rental or two.

7 out of 10