Bully Repack Mr Dj

[Giancarlo Stewart]

Iattended what I would consider to be a pretty typical public high school. We had a wide range of personalities and social cliques. There were occasional fights and pranks and general instances of trouble making. A few of the teachers seemed a bit strange. But for the most part, the students were reasonably well behaved and the teachers were, by and large, competent and conscientious. In short, my high school was absolutely nothing like Bulworth Academy, the setting for Rockstar's Bully: Scholarship Edition, a place where violent fights break out daily, social cliques go to war with each other, and teachers and students regularly engage in bizarre and criminal behavior. While these extreme antics can strain credulity, they provide the basis for a story that (by videogame standards) is more entertaining than most and numerous gameplay elements that through sheer variety almost make up for their lack of individual depth.

To be sure, the story doesn't compare favorably to a good book or movie, but it is still well written relative to other videogames. (I hate to use the "good for a game" qualifier, but I believe it reflects the truth of where videogames are in terms of writing.) I was actually impressed by some of the voice acting, particularly that of the narcissistic Gary and the shy and socially isolated Petey, whose plight actually managed to evoke in me a small degree of pathos. It's unfortunate then that most of the game's characters come off as overly stereotypical to the point of absurdity (e.g., preppies who repeatedly refer to their families' inbreeding and jocks that speak as though mentally retarded). It makes sense for videogames to rely more heavily on archetypes than films and novels, but Bully's extreme stereotyping feels more cheap than clever, and undermines what could have been a much smarter story.

The gameplay is basically split between attending classes and completing missions. During the day, players have the option of attending classes in subjects such as math, English, chemistry, art, and gym. These essentially take the form of short mini-games of mixed quality. Scholarship Edition incrementally raises the bar on the original with some fun new classes. The biology class, for example, involves a surprisingly realistic dissection, and the music class takes a cue from the rhythm-game genre with some enjoyable timed button pressing. Unfortunately, the original courses have not been significantly improved. Chemistry consists of nothing more than hitting buttons as they scroll across the screen, and English resembles a simplified form of Boggle. It's easy to skip class, but probably best not to. Passing shop, for instance, awards players with a better-handling bike, and passing chemistry allows players to make small bombs in the dorm. Overall, the classes are an interesting diversion that, while not particularly deep, add a nice degree of variety.

Classes aside, the bedrock of Bully's gameplay consists of a series of Grand Theft Auto-style missions. (For players familiar with Rockstar's previous titles, it may suffice to describe Bully as GTA set in a high school.) Players initiate missions by following the onscreen radar to marked locations on the map. Missions include pulling pranks, infiltrating the girls' dormitory, escorting classmates from one place to another, fetching items for people, and fighting groups of rivals. In one sequence, Jimmy must help the school's hideous lunch lady gather items (e.g., perfume, sedatives, etc.) that she needs for her date with the chemistry teacher. Later, he must protect the couple during their dinner by shooting down interfering students with a slingshot. Another mission has Jimmy penetrating the heavily-fortified school observatory in order to earn a chance to parlay with the leader of the school's nerds. While Scholarship Edition sports an even wider range of missions than the PS2 version, like the original, it's still hard to shake the awareness that the individual gameplay elements (e.g., shooting, skateboarding, boxing, etc.) have been done better in other games.

From a visual and technical perspective, Bully is nothing to write home about. Although Scholarship Edition sports slightly improved graphics over the original PS2 version, the game still has a distinctly last-generation look, with flat textures and simplistic art design. Given that, it's surprising that the game still suffers from frame rate issues. In addition, the way-too-frequent loading screens are an annoying disruption to the game's flow. The glitchiness of the Xbox 360 version (on which this review is based) has been widely reported. Even after downloading the patch that Rockstar released to fix the problems, I still experienced a couple glitches that resulted in the game freezing up and having to be reset. It wasn't enough to derail the entire experience, but it certainly left a sour taste in my mouth.

the good thing of this game can bring to the student but specially the name bully is not so pleasant to hear. Still, on the company behalf, they should need to make it attractive, especially for students.

Rockstar Vancouver may have been copying GTA's homework a little when Bully came out on PS2 at the end of 2006, but it still changed enough words to impress teacher. Guns and cars were expelled, compressing the play area and allowing for greater variety and more developed controls, while the school setting and routine gave it a tighter structure. Roaming the halls and the neighbouring town of Bullworth, wise beyond the teenage years of most of the cast, it keyed in cleverly to the sense most of us have that we would like to go back to school because now we'd actually get the joke, and it would be more enjoyable. It was, and even though not much has changed for the 360's Scholarship Edition port by Mad Doc Software (look out for a separate Wii review tomorrow) it still is.

Playing as Jimmy Hopkins, a 15-year-old troublemaker given one last chance at Bullworth Academy, you start off racing between mini-game lessons, probing the school boundaries between classes, before heading back to the dorm every night for bed. Like GTA, you're directed to various icons on a mini-map, with stars denoting missions, and through these and Rockstar's traditional, well-written in-game cut-scenes, you're introduced to the world and the people in it, each a measured stereotype or caricature: the various cliques like the Nerds and Preps whose respect you'll be winning and losing; and characters like Petey, the bashful weakling; Russell the thuggish idiot; Galloway the drunken English teacher; Miss Danvers, the headmaster's fawning secretary; Tad the inbred rich kid; and Gary the manipulative bully.

There's a fair bit that you can do right from the off, and within a couple of hours you'll have assembled an inventory of neat gizmos - a slingshot, skateboard, stinkbombs - and abilities. Targeting other people with the left trigger, you can taunt or compliment them (the latter, if you follow it up with a gift, can lead to romance), or push them around. The combat is unavoidable, because Bullworth's a bit of a rotten place, but the controls are sound and your arsenal of attacks and grapples grows steadily and naturally as you swap radio parts with a homeless army veteran living just inside the grounds. The game itself is the best teacher in Bullworth, seldom leaving you stuck or unable to progress due to difficulty or poor education.

Jimmy's lessons are technically mandatory (prefects will escort you there if you get caught playing truant and can't evade them), and each is a mini-game. English has you racing to make words out of a jumble of letters, Art is about directing a paintbrush to annex areas of a hidden picture without getting smashed by a rubber, Gym goes through wrestling and dodgeball among other things, and Scholarship Edition-specific inclusions like Maths (quick-fire calculations) and Biology (Trauma Centre-influenced animal dissection - forget the anti-bullying lobby, has anyone told the idiots who burn down university boathouses?) are as good if not better than the rest of the curriculum. Successful completion of lessons unlocks new gadgets and skills.

But it's Jimmy's extra-curricular activities that dominate and define Bully, putting you on a path to showdown with the school's various faction leaders and chief bullies. Heavily influenced by GTA, there's lots of fighting, pushbike racing, spraypainting, covert photography, rhythm-response, and every conceivable fetch-quest. Success opens up new missions, new save locations, new toys and side missions. Jimmy can also simply mess around, tripping people with marbles, egging cars, booting footballs at thugs, and hunting down hidden rubberbands, gnomes, and G&G cards. Elsewhere there are one-off parlour games, like keepy-uppy, '80s arcade game knock-offs, and carnival target ranges.

The game is played from a third-person perspective and its open world can be navigated on foot, skateboard, motor scooter, bicycle, or go-kart. Set in the fictional town of Bullworth, the single-player story follows juvenile delinquent student James "Jimmy" Hopkins, who is involuntarily enrolled at Bullworth Academy boarding school for a year, and puts his efforts to rise through the ranks of the school system in order to put a stop to bullying. Players control Jimmy as he attempts to become more popular among the school's various "cliques", in addition to attending classes and completing various side missions. The Scholarship Edition includes a two-player competitive multiplayer mode that lets two players compete for the highest score in different classes.

Its expected violence and sexual content were initially controversial. Bully received positive reviews, with praise directed at the game's missions, narrative, character development, and soundtrack, though its presentation and glitches received criticism. The original version of Bully sold over 1.5 million copies and received multiple year-end accolades.

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