NEWSLETTER

BULLY: SCHOLARSHIP EDITION
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Take Two Interactive

Wow. Rockstar finally created a game I enjoy.

Bully: Scholarship Edition is the re-release of 2006’s Bully for the PS2. It’s almost not worth mentioning that Bully was controversial upon first release—it is a Rockstar game, after all. For once though, none of the controversy was really warranted.

The game is set in and around Bullworth Academy, an American boarding school in the same sort of world as the Grand Theft Auto games—everyone is a jerk, and authority figures admit outright the sort of thing we all suspect or fear they think (the PE teacher hits on female students, the principal thinks unpopular kids all deserve everything the popular kids heap on them, the lunch lady insists on serving meat that’s weeks past its due date and believes that coughing into the food adds flavor, etc.). Bully is a bit less like GTA and a bit more like a slightly meaner version of The Simpsons, as most characters have actual depth and redeeming qualities. Somewhat weirdly, the game’s protagonist isn’t much of a bully—he dislikes the school and most of the people in it, but he dislikes the outright jerks most of all, and over the course of the game very few of his accomplishments spring from trying screw over everyone around him.

The gameplay is yet another excuse for me to make a comparison to GTA. This is Grand Theft Boarding School, really, an open world that starts out limited and gets progressively more open. Missions scattered everywhere. Failed missions can be restarted with little to no penalty. Side-quests galore. Even the control scheme is similar, although that’s not saying much—GTA and Bully both use nearly the same interface as every other third-person adventure game on the market.

Why do I like this then, when I only ever wanted to like the GTA games? First, and most superficially, the graphics aren’t ass-ugly. Partially this is the better hardware, but I think mostly it’s a closer horizon, smaller world, and better-developed style. GTA games of the past never really seemed to make up their mind as to whether they wanted to look realistic or stylized. Bully is stylistically consistent.

Second, the controls are less clumsy. Again, they’re basically GTA controls but polished a bit and with far less emphasis on shooting things, which I thought always sucked.

Third, the game is more careful in how it introduces the environment. At first, the scope is very limited—only what will later be the central hub is accessible, and the game adheres to a rigid schedule. Jimmy wakes up every morning at 8 AM and has to either attend classes or dodge cop-equivalents while playing truant. Evenings and nights are free, but Jimmy has to go to bed eventually, and passes out if he doesn’t. Then the clock resets to 8. The classes themselves are minigames. After winning each minigame five times, attendance in that class ceases to be mandatory, and you finish more missions, more geography opens up. The game’s transition from regimented school simulator to more traditional sandbox ensures that by the time I had access to the whole world, I had motivation to keep engaging with it rather than feeling overwhelmed and apathetic.

I recommend Bully: Scholarship Edition on the grounds that it made me want to go back and try playing the Grand Theft Auto games again to see if maybe I could appreciate them now. It left me looking forward to GTA IV.




THE CLUB
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Sega

The premise of the game is you’re a participant in an elite underground bloodsport run by the world’s richest and most jaded power-brokers. It’s not relevant to the gameplay, though, so I won’t elaborate further. Said gameplay is essentially a sports game by way of a third-person shooter—you’ve got a guy with a variety of guns and there are other guys around you who also have guns and are trying to shoot you, so you shoot them first. Stringing kills together creates combos, combos lead to more points per kill, the higher your combo multiplier the less time you have to kill the next guy, if your combo time runs out your multiplier starts to fall until you kill someone else or it reaches zero. You get extra points for headshots and a variety of other trick shots like killing a guy with a ricochet. Enemies always spawn in the same places, so the whole point of the game is to memorize enemy spawn points and learn the optimal path through each level so as to grab the highest combo multiplier by the end, maximizing your score.

Overall, the controls are reasonably tight, and there’s no ridiculously abrupt difficulty spikes. Bizarre Creations did as well with their starting premise as could be expected. At no point did I think “This game could be so much cooler than it is.” I admire its focus, minimalism, and polish, and am glad they didn’t waste time with a more involved storyline I couldn’t care less about. That said, I’d just as soon be playing something else. But eight or nine years ago, when I still had a taste for memorizing level layouts and enemy spawn points (that is, when I was playing the training mode on the PS1’s Ghost in the Shell way too much), I’d have loved this game to death, so I can’t say anything really bad about it.

Now will somebody get this 50 Cent song out of my head?




CONFLICT: DENIED OPS
Platform: Xbox 360
Publisher: Eidos Interactive

Early on in Conflict: Denied Ops, one of the protagonists calls the other a limp-dick motherfucker, and if this game were a person, and I inclined to such language, I might call it the same. If you wish to listen to stilted delivery of more such sterling wit, together with clumsy controls, questionably balanced level design, and graphics that would have been impressive on the original Xbox, by all means give this guy a whirl.

STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD

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