MODERN GAMING
Bully: Scholarship Edition
Developer:  Rockstar Vancouver/Mad Doc Software
Publisher:  Rockstar Games
Year:  2008
Genre:  Action/Adventure
System:  Wii/Xbox 360 (played on Xbox 360)


In a world where GTA sandbox cloning is all the rage and has been adapted by many from the SImpsons to even movies (like the Godfather), Rockstar are easily in the midst of a faceless once-original concept now made repetitive by many.  You can only make so many sandboxes before everyone gets sick of the beach.  But now and again it gets mixed up a bit for the sake of those who like me are absolutely fucking sick of gang culture and being a criminal.  Why can't I be a normal good guy for once?  Oh Rockstar, you answered with this game 2 years back, which has recently come back a bit shinier, like a newly polished trophy that while is impressive, is in a subject no one gives that much a shit about.  Like Association Football or "Soccer" in a US high school.

Story - Bully takes place in the small town of Bullworth, known for its mixed town areas of a wide class of people and the great Bullworth Academy, a home for the unruly, rich and/or "lucky" students.  You play as Jimmy Hopkins, who has become a burden to his mother and new stepfather, who's a douche.  He is inducted into a year of Bullworth Academy to be set straight among the various cliques where he must start from lowly new kid, to king of the school.
Accompanying him are two non-clique characters.  Gary Smith, a sociopathic intelligent lad with a severe Objectivist complex, and Petey Kowalski, a submissive dorky kid who's the lamest kid of the school but also the nicest.
The entire game is basically clawing your way up both socially and academically from nobody to the main guy, but while Grand Theft Auto focused on gang culture, Bully takes a step back the other way into not only being NOT a criminal, but by being a school kid who has only one purpose in life.
Beat the everloving shit out of any bully he sees.


Gameplay - While the setting and purpose of Bully is different from anything in Liberty City, that doesn't make it any less fun.  Firstly let's go over the inventory and social interaction.
Jimmy can have a wide range of weapons in the game comprising of stink bombs, eggs, firecrackers, itching powder, right up to the seriously cool bottle rocket and slingshot.  Of course with all these at your disposal you're gonna stir up some shit, and that is where the Trouble Meter comes in.
The Trouble Meter works exactly like the Star System of Grand Theft Auto, but more finite.  While in GTA most crimes had you start at one star and with each crime your stars rose higher and higher, Bully's Trouble Meter is a lot more severe with three levels of yellow, orange and red.  Like the US Warning System but easier to understand and not as picky or paranoid.  Small crimes such as truancy, verbal abuse, lockpicking or stealing will net you yellow, while physical violence towards authority figures, girls or little kids make an immediate red.  If you get caught by authorities while in the yellow or orange, you can escape from them, but if they get you while red, they will immediately bust your tight boy ass for a trip to the principal, which at first will be a telling off, but if it happens again and again, you're given a punishment like shovelling snow or raking leaves.
Another thing of gameplay is time.  You wake up at 8am everyday dilligently with your bed being available for sleep from 7pm and onwards, but if it reaches 2am, you get so tired you will pass out no matter where you are.  Time is important in this game, a lot more than in Grand Theft Auto.  For a start the classes run on a schedule of two per day, with truancy not being liked in the school, as well as certain missions only being available at certain times.

As for social interaction you have three basic things to do.  Liking, abusing, and fighting.  Liking someone is just giving them a thumbs up and being a nice kid.  Abusing is verbal taunting or shoving them.  And lastly fighting.  The fighting system is taken from Rockstar's game adaptation of The Warriors.  You have basic moves of your fists or weaponry, with a ring of health around opponents that easily let you know how much they have before they go down.  if you manage to get their health real low, you can get to bully them with a range of techniques randomly chosen from the knee in the balls to bitchslapping to chinese burns, just for that little bit of extra public ownage.  It's really simple to handle and you'll have little trouble handling it unless you get cocky and try to take on the tougher cliques of the game from the start.
There are 5 different cliques in the game you will have to deal with throughout the story.
The Nerds are the weakest but sneakiest unhealthy looking green-sweater guys that usually frequent around the library.  At first they're extremely easy to handle but not entirely cowardly, and they gain weapons later in the game to give them a long-range advantage such as bottle rockets.
Bullies, as they should be in real life we all wish, are the second weakest group, and thankfully so because they love to beat you up in the first chapter.
Preps are the rich snobby fuckers in blue "aquaberry" clothes around Harrington House, their OWN dormitory to be separated from the rest of the common students that basically haven't fucked their cousins and have less than three toes on their feet.  They are however quite tough battlers, being practitioners of boxing, and as such are masters of the duck and weave.
Greasers are the leather-jacket dudes that hang by the autoshop who you just keep feeling wanna dance on a cadillac every second of their lives, then hump it up the tailpipe.  They're from the more rougher areas of town and as such are more sturdy than the other cliques.
Jocks are, true to their nature, big and dumb.  To use a sporting analogy, they're making long passes towards their own goal, and think Thurman Thomas is Jesus Christ, if he had been a jock.  Naturally they are the toughest characters of the school for being very athletic, as well as being big fans of the takedown maneuver.
Lastly, you have the Townies, who are technically not of the school's cliques, but you will meet them all the same.  This lot are the outcasts, the dropouts, the punks who for whatever reason be it teacher's corruption or just plain being expelled, are really angry and really tough, as well as being older than the kids of the school, practically young adult.  They also fight real fucking dirty, these guys are REAL fighters.
Not only that but all of the cliques have a "boss" among them, who is considerably more stronger, and has more health to take down.  One example being Russell, the leader of the bullies, who is huge, strong and has lots of health, it's real hard to win a fight against him in the school grounds, believe me.  He's the fucking teenage Hulk, let's just be glad he doesn't know how to have sex or your boxers would be bleeding red after he'd be done with you.


Another interesting note of interaction is romance.  Throughout the game Jimmy will be able to kiss girls and in some cases will have to for missions, but only if he is dressed nicely and has a gift for them, usually flowers.  The main benefit of kissing someone is being able to recover health instantly, because who doesn't feel good after a good bit of face sucking from a girl or a dude?
Wait, did I say dude?  Yes, yes I did.  You can kiss guys in the game too.  There are five gay guys among the school's students who if you are liked enough by the clique they belong to, about 75% of the group, you get to have some boylove, who recover your health as well.
Now of course not EVERYONE is willing to have some man gropeage, so you will be happy to know that kissing guys is COMPLETELY OPTIONAL.  No missions in the game require you to swing for the pink, it's your choice, or not really, I dunno how it works for gays.
But on another point, it IS one of the achievements in the Xbox 360 list to have a lil rainbow osculatory spree, so go on faggots.  I dare you to get pink.
There are three main things to do.  First are the missions, generally helping out fellow students, teachers, or the local townsfolk with odd jobs ranging from obtaining items to hunting down a bully.  If you get knocked out or busted during a mission, it will fail.  The remake also has included 8 extra missions as well which for Bullworth seniors like me, have so far been very entertaining.  Second are the classes.  As well as the six original classes of Chemistry, English, Art, Gym, Photography and Shop, four new ones have been added for a wider experience.  Biology, Maths, Geography and Music, all of which there are five lessons to complete in each.
The classes each are like minigames which you can either go to, or just skip at your leisure, which admittedly is a little easier and less punishing to do in this game than real life.  At least Jimmy can't be threatened of having his parents told, just being expelled, which never happens as a true game over.


There are two classes most days, one in the morning and one in the afternoon.  Each of the classes work a different way, utilising your different talents, as well as when finishing the lessons, you will gain new talents to use in Bullworth.
Chemistry is a simple button input game, with more buttons being added as you progress.  As you complete each lesson, you will be able to refill your chemical inventory of weapons in your dorm better.
English is a more clever puzzle of anagrams, finding words from 3 letters to 7 letters, with the passing grade made higher for each lesson.  Achieving these will allow you to taunt and apologise to people better.
Art is a rip-off from an old game called Qix.  You move a paintbrush across a blank canvas and create squares to be full of part of the painting, while avoiding scissors that follow the lines and try to destroy your paintbrush, or the erasers that destroy by touching any lines you're making and are unfinished.  Passing these lessons give you more passion and able to recover more health from kissing right up to actually getting double the health.
Gym has two parts to it.  Wrestling training to unlock new moves for fighting, and a dodgeball tournament where if you win, your accuracy will increase.
Shop is a slightly trickier button input game where you have to either rotate one of the control sticks one way or the other, then tap a button repeatedly, then rotate the other way etc.  You get to have a new bike at your disposal in the school garages when you achieve this.
Lastly of the old classes is Photography, which you only can get after a certain mission obtains you the camera.  The lesson is very simply taking pictures of a subject across the land and returning to the class in the allotted time, which upgrades your photography abilities from a photo album to getting a colour camera.

Now of the NEW lessons there are four, which are well adapted into the new consoles.
Biology is a watered-down Trauma Center game, whereby you pin down, open up, and dissect an animal which is thankfully dead already when you get it, the anatomy turning more and more trickier with each animal.
Music is very obviously a rhythm game, working on percussion to beat out a rhythm following DDR-like signals, with the passing grade and rhythm getting higher more later.
Maths is....well, I'm gonna be honest, I hated it in high school, and I fucking hate it in this game half of which is due to the teacher himself.  I barely scraped this in the game where you are giving Brain-Training style questions ranging from 11+?=27 to whether a bike, a human or a train is the fastest (which I am sure is not even maths but more general science, asshats).  Of course perhaps this class was made the more hardest and annoying on purpose on account of the teacher being one of the bullies of the game.  Adult bully, yeah the ones that like to abuse their power.  You'll see later on.
Geography is very simply moving a flag to its correctly matching country, state or province.  Naturally as a European I was fucked when it asked me about American geography.  I only realised when I was 18 that Seattle was on the WEST coast of the USA and that Massachusetts was on the EAST coast.
The rewards for the new classes are only new clothes, but they're worth it for the challenge.

Finally there are errands and jobs.  Errands are random tasks from people to do lil jobs for money, which I don't need to explain.  You have to do all kinds of stuff, from stuffing 3 people into garbage cans to finding crabs in the lake.  Oh yeah that's another thing, Jimmy can SWIM.  Yes, he's more badass than Tommy "Water Wings" Vercetti for not only beating the shit out of every bully that'd so ruin your life and your dad's life if he worked there, but also actually being able to fucking swim.  Beat that you 80s druggie.
The jobs are just little paper routes and lawn mowing tasks like any normal kid would do, to get more money as well, nothing particularly special to note there.  There is one problem concerning the remake.  And that the 360 version has some glitches and performance issues, and a tendency to crash apparently.  In my playtime over the past few days, it froze once and I had to restart, and it glitched once when in a fight and I fell through a building into water and became knocked out automatically.  However Rockstar have made a patch now for the game to sort them out.


Graphics - Naturally the biggest change to the game are the graphics.  The first thing you will notice is the nice detail of the buildings of Bullworth, the academy especially.  It's standard stuff of the current generation to have bricks that look like bricks, and not like wallpaper posters of bricks.  Water isn't anything changed from the old game other than looking a little sleeker, and the characters do look more human with more rosier cheeks, lips, and wrinkly hands.  But the real impressive thing about graphics that you're gonna love the most, is the lighting.
The lighting is just fantastic for such a game, every time you're inside a building, the rays from windows that slowly turn more and more orange with the passing day are gorgeous to look at slanted across furniture and faces.
It brings every cutscene and room forth with a much fresher rewarding light than in the last game which was needless to say for PS2, pretty bland looking.  The contrasts between day and night are much better too, feeling more like the hours of the days they should look like.  I mean really, you're gonna enjoy sitting on a bench watching the sunset over the lake in this game, cuddling up to that nice geek who looks like Urkel and rubbing his hands, slowly sliding down.......wait what?
Sorry I got lost there.  Point is, I love the lighting in this game and it makes the game look different to the point that you enjoy the difference.

Music/Sound - Most of the music from the original game is still in the remake, and rightfully so for the soundtrack is a great set of funky music, taking from the composer's favourite styles.  Ranging from the long main theme of when going around the town to the final mission itself, the most common instrument you'll hear is a funky bluesy guitar, which you'll probably enjoy in one piece or another.
One particularly great piece is The Big Game, which has a strangely resembling beat to Hey Mickey by Toni Basil, which you will learn really fits the mission involved.  The music overall has an oddly 60s feel for most of the time, with even individual cliques having their own themes.  Examples are the nerds having something that resembles the theme of Revenge of the Nerds, the preps with a synth fanfare fitting their snobbery and greasers with a kickass rockabilly 60s song, with their boss' theme having a particularly awesome rockin' song.

Voice acting is still as strong as it was, with each character having some great lines and voices, even the NPCs having such oddly funny lines as the prefect's "maybe I should use my power to pick on someone innocent!" or a nerd's "they say children imitate video game characters, but I have yet turned into a moustached plumber!".  Particularly favourite characters of mine are Gary Smith, Mr Galloway the English teacher and Derby Harrington.  Every cutscene is entertaining with such lines that poke fun at not only youth culture, but also adult culture, and even a teeny bit of political commentary beyond "Bush sux oily cawks lawl".  Even the new missions have kept the standard of acting that the game should be well noted for.


Despite a few irritating glitches that Rockstar thankfully took notice of quick enough to make a patch of, Bully's remake is good.  While it seems perhaps unnecessary for a game barely 2 years old, the updates ARE quite fun, such as new classes, missions and the 360 achievements as well as the Wii's surprisingly good controls.  It's not a very important game but if you missed it the first time around, go for it, it's something actually new from the GTA mould that you'll relate to a lot more than bling-bling blam-blam (that is, if there are more school students than criminals among you, but I know I can't even dare to say there are).  If anything, be glad that it's out in the PAL regions under the name BULLY and not the pretentious name of Canis Canem Edit (which is Dog Eat Dog in Latin).
If you did play the PS2 original, then unless you REALLY loved it like I did, save the money.  I didn't and now I'm addicted to kissing young boys....mmmm....leave me now, I have an achievement to get.

Fun and Innovation - 4
Replayability - 2
Gameplay - 3
Presentation - 3

Wow.

I thought this game looked stupid.

Now I want to play it.

10,000 points for Final Gamer! 

I was under the impression that this game is centralized around being a stupid little shit, and beating the crap out of everyone for no reason.

Now it sounds a lot more fun. And today is payday.....

Reading wiki about GTAIV i heard a mention about a lawsuit over this game. True?