Publisher Rockstar “Bully’s” the Competition

High school can be a harrowing experience in any person’s life. The cliques, the homework, the bad lunch, the football games and all the other things that went into making high school either a time you wish you could go back to or a time you wish you could forget.

But for Jimmy Hopkins, life at Bullworth Academy is anything but normal. Whether you’re tasked with killing a rare Venus fly trap-like plant for the biology teacher or picking up expired meat for the lunch lady, you’ll be guiding Jimmy on his quest to survive in his new home.

As “Bully” opens up, we soon discover that Jimmy has a less than stellar relationship with his mother and step father. We quickly learn that Jimmy has been expelled from every school he’s been sent to and his loving parents are dumping him at Bullworth so they can go on a year long honeymoon. From here on, you will lead Jimmy on a path that can be different for every player.

Contrary to the title of the name, your purpose and goals are not merely bullying students. You can steer Jimmy down the path of a bully, but only if you choose to. Almost every decision about Jimmy is free for each player to decide. Don’t feel like going to class? Skip it – Just be on the look out for prefects, (older students who patrol school grounds looking for mischief makers and rule breakers) because they won’t hesitate to send you to the head master’s office for truancy. Or go to class and, through playing a mini game, earn character upgrades and unlock new items. In “Bully” the choice of being the apple of the faculty’s eye or the bane of their existence is up to you.

The world of “Bully” is surprisingly large. Gamers can not only fully explore Bullworth Academy, but the surrounding town as well. Much like publisher “Rockstar’s” hit series, Grand Theft Auto, the town of Bullworth is opened up to players in a systematic pattern – meaning that more of the town will be available to you the further you advance in the game. Once different areas of Bullworth are unlocked, Jimmy can buy new clothes, new bikes, try different hairstyles, find a job and make some money, or pay a visit to the carnival. Though it is all very reminiscent of the GTA series, “Bully” has a style and artistic sense of its own which lends to its younger, more innocent nature. Rather than picking up prostitutes and trafficking illegal drugs, as is come to be expected from GTA, “Bully” has you running errands for fellow students or building various bicycles in shop class.

What really makes “Bully” shine though, are the characters you’ll be meeting throughout the game. Each clique can be identified by their own unique attire and where they tend to congregate on campus. Greasers can be found working on cars and bikes in the auto shop and are identified by their leather jackets. The Preps can be found around Harrington House and are recognized by their expensive Aquaberry blazers. The nerds hang out, of course, at the library making character sheets for “Grottos and Gremlins”(“Bully’s” take on Dungeons and Dragons) and wearing green Bullworth Academy vests. The jocks wear their letterman jackets and Bullworth hoodies with pride and hang out around the gym and football field, naturally. The last class of students, the bullies, roams all about the school looking for anyone they can harass.

Jimmy can befriend any of these students, but “Bully” also has a respect system similar to that found in “Grand Theft Auto 2”. Almost every action Jimmy makes at Bullworth has a positive effect on one clique and a negative effect on another. For example, one mission might take you to Old Bullworth Vale Gardens (the rich area of Bullworth) to egg an especially annoying Prep’s house. Once you have completed your task, your Prep respect will go down and respect from other cliques may go up. When your respect from a certain group drops low enough, they will be more likely to attack and harass you whenever you wander onto their turf. This can add an extra challenge to a mission if it involves traveling through a part of campus where you are not wanted.

With such a huge population of characters inhabiting Bullworth, it would have been easy for “Rockstar” to have created only a few students with original personalities. This, however, is not the case at all. According to www.IGN.com, Bullworth contains more than 100 unique non-playable characters (NPCs), each with their own personalities and will react accordingly when Jimmy interacts with them. It is these relationships Jimmy forges with the other students that creates the off-beat humor gamers have come to know and love from “Rockstar”.

All of the impressive features of the artificial intelligence (A.I.) wouldn’t mean a thing if the game weren’t fun to play. Fortunately for gamers, “Bully” is extremely fun and simple to play. The controls are, not surprisingly, quite similar to the GTA series which means most people will be already be familiar with the set up. The combat appears simple at first, but is surprisingly deep for a game with such simple controls.

Occasionally though, the controls are not as tight as one would expect from “Rockstar” and you feel you are fighting with the controls instead of playing with them. “Bully” also suffers from a little slow down in game play when the action picks up and the aiming system just isn’t as clean as would be expected in a third person action game. The camera also has its share of problems. Too often the camera will get stuck on a building or object and is especially finicky in narrower areas. But these gripes are only a few rough spots in an otherwise spotless game.

In this day and age of pointless sequels and unoriginal game concepts, it’s reassuring to see that “Rockstar” can breath new life into a worn out, over done game genre. “Bully” is definitely worth a rental or a purchase because too rarely are games released that are so simple yet so incredibly fun to play.