Do you like a good, dumb action film? You know the kind: a martial-artsmovie with a shoestring plot that’s just an excuse for a few do-goodersto brawl with hordes of thugs and ninjas while trying to rescue akidnapped girl. If you answered yes, then chances are you’ll like TheBouncer, Squaresoft’s new game for the PlayStation 2.

The Bouncer is Squaresoft’s first American PS2 release, acting as aprimer for next fall’s Final Fantasy X, and a demonstration of just whatthe PS2 is capable of. The tagline on the box is “Play the actionmovie”, and that’s exactly what you do.

The setup of the game is simple. A young girl named Dominique iskidnapped from a bar by a group of black-clad ninjas while visiting herbouncer friends. One of the bouncers recognizes the men as working forthe Mikado Group, a huge international corporation. The trio of bouncersset out to get her back and discover why she was taken.

The game is divided into fighting sequences book-ended by movies andstory scenes. Before each fight begins, the player selects one of threemain characters, bouncers Sion Barzahd, Volt Krueger, or Kou Leifoh. Theplayer then controls that character through the fighting sequences.After winning a battle, there’s another story sequence, a setup scenefor the next fight, and then the fight itself. Points earned in battlecan be spent to upgrade health, power, and defense, and to learn newmoves for each character.

The visuals are amazing. Characters are detailed down to eyebrows andfingernails, with hair and clothing that bobs and sways with theirmovements and environments that are full of posters, furniture, and thelike. All lines in the game are spoken, and the characters’ mouths movein close sync with their words, showing teeth and tongues and subtlefacial expressions such as a raised eyebrow or smirk. The voice actingis good, with few lines that seem forced or awkward.

Movement and fighting animations are smooth and realistic, and there arefew graphical glitches, though in some instances pieces of clothing movethrough each other or an elbow joint looks odd. The handful ofpre-rendered movies scattered through the game up this level even more,but it’s a testament to the quality of the in-game visuals that it’ssometimes difficult to tell what’s a movie scene, and what’s beinggenerated on the fly.

The character designs, themselves, are also excellent. Though thegarden-variety security forces you’ll fight aren’t special, the heroesand villains of the game really shine. Sion is skinny and quick, withbaggy clothing and silver chains; Volt is a giant, with metal horns andfacial piercings; and Kou is long-legged, brash and wildly tattooed.

Equally varied are the villains. There’s the spiral-haired andmini-skirted capoeira fighter Echidna; the mad Mikado Special Forcesleader Mugetsu, whose eyes bulge and dilate as he loses his grip onsanity; the long-armed cyborg clone PD-4 and its “brothers”; and theyoung leader of Mikado, Dauragon, with his trenchcoat-chain-and-overallsensemble. All characters have a unique fighting style and distinctpersonality.

Despite the strong points, there are some problems with thegame, themost serious being its length. This game will probably take, at most,three hours to complete the first time through. Not counting storyscenes and movies, the game time is only about 45 minutes. This isoffset somewhat by differences in story scenes and some stages,depending on which character is used, but it would have been nice ifthere had been a bit more to do.

Another problem is that if you are defeated in battle, there is no quickway to re-start from the beginning of the fight; you have to go back tothe title screen, re-load your game data, and skip through any moviesthat are shown before the fight. It’s not a huge problem, but with somechallenging fights toward the end of the game it becomes aggravating tospend so much time getting back to the fight when a simple “continue”feature would have worked better.

Also, though the visuals are excellent, the characters look a littlefake, like the human characters in Toy Story. They move like realpeople, but their skin looks like plastic, smooth and hairless. Butthey’re so good overall, that this complaint is like whining that a $100bill from a stranger isn’t crisp enough.

Despite these problems, The Bouncer is a solid game and an excellentdemonstration of what the PS2 can accomplish. With two endings percharacter, a survival mode, and a four-player versus mode that can beplayed with extra characters unlocked by playing through the main game,The Bouncer offers a lot of entertainment.