Bully: Scholarship Edition

Very few of you may have noticed that this post is just a wee bit late. The rest of you wont give a toss. I'd like to apologise for that, I've been busy setting up my new TV, loosing control of it to my brother and his girfriend and having no internet access. There's also the eating of chocolate between shifts at work. Trust me, it has absolutely nothing to do with the length of Bully: Scholarship Edition keeping me away from daylight, or the warm glow of a PC monitor.

Enough of my F1 driver excuses, let's get down to the business of Rockstar's latest attempt at stalling the gaming community from burning down their offices in anticipation for Grand Theft Auto IV (or "Grand Theft Auto Eye-Vee" as half the bastards who come into my shop call it, immediately before asking if they can preorder it for the Playstation 2). Speaking of which, if you ever wanted me to give a decent reason for not liking the PS3, it would be the fact that it's the only reason the best looking game of the year isn't fucking out yet.

Bully: Scholarship Edition is a remake of Bully / Canis Canem Edit (depending on which country you're from) which came out for PS2 in October 2006. Interestingly enough, there are some pants in my room I've not worn between the initial Bully and the remake, but hell, there are plenty of people out there with too much money or too much respect for their Gamerscore. I ask those of you confused about the name if I can join you for a picnic of cup of tea some time, because for a quite obvious reason, the BBFC or some gang of protesting mothers decided "Bully" was a really bad name for a game set in a school by the people who make the fantastic role model that is the Grand Theft Auto. I'd personally have to agree with the move, as it's the dumbest way imaginable to condemn the theory that violent video games are made for children and they're the reason people die. Why they were able to release it as "Bully" two years later just by using the word "scholarship" in the title is an insult to logic in the same manner that insult to fine cuisine is a 3 year old can of Irn Bru being used in a pasta recipie.

Admitting that it's a remake of a PS2 game on the Xbox 360, Rockstar decided that the best way for this to not matter was to whitewash the back of the case with the word "enhanced" in a similar manner one would find in their inbox regarding herbal viagra. There are also some extra minigames, but I personally have never decided that a good reason to part with £35 was because I wanted two minute intervals of entertainment. There are plenty of people suffering from that condition, and they don't have to pay £35 for it - unless they happen to be driving around slowly in the middle of the night. I can't help but think the game was just the original game revised for the Wii and awkwardly shoved onto a 360 disc in the process, because when I finally decided to try the "enhanced gameplay" (ahem, the minigames), I found myself crippled by a lack of Wii Remote.

So, with that argument, we are left with a port of a PS2 game on the Xbox 360 (and Wii) which promises enhanced graphics and gameplay. The good news is that the frame rate is really good, which isn't that bloody suprising seeing as how the PS2 is almost a decade old now, while the 360 is somewhere around it's second year. And it fires out enough heat to ensure a Greenpeace protest, should you get carried away playing games all night long to soothe your aching social life. I can't really say much about choppy edges easily spotted on most PS2 games these days, because I've just managed to afford a new uber-penis-extension-TV by calling in a few debts.

I guess it would also would have been a good idea to have played the original game beforehand, but screw it, it looked like a bad idea when it came out in the first place. Either way I doubt the frame rate would have been that good on the PS2. Sadly, that's the only improvement I can imagine the new version has over the old, so let's ignore the fact it's actually a game that's about a year old, and start looking at it like a new game, seeing as that's what Rockstar's marketing department really want us to. OK, OK, I don't like doing what marketing pricks want, but it's the best way I can think of reviewing this game.

And so we follow the delightfuly and charming adventures of that little scamp, Jimmy Hopkins, as he begins his life at apparently the worst boarding school in the world. Before anything else I'd like to drag the question everyone else seems to have pushed into the corner of the room and slapped around a bit. If Bullworth Academy is the worst school in the world, why are there rich kids (all of which seem to be in their 20's, by the way) attending the school? Surely there's no amount of inbreeding that constitues picking the worst school in the world and paying a great deal of your expendable income to send your children to it.

As we, or rather I, because I doubt any of you will bother putting yourself through what I did after you read this, discover immediately, Jimmy is pretty much the exact kind of child that parents blame Rockstar for existing in the first place, only veiled with a layer of irony so thin, I doubt if it was rolled up and grated, it wouldn't even make enough to sprinkle on your morning coffee, should you be one of the sane people who doesn't believe it's necessary to own your own coffee chocolate sprinkler. While the irony behind the boy is bloody transparent, in stark contrast his motives are about as clear as mud stuck up the arse of a cat recently mowed down by a gritter truck.

Being the badass who's been expelled from pretty much every other school in America, you're encouraged to beat up everyone with glasses, shove them in lockers or bins, wedgie them and set fireworks off up their arses; while also having to do exactly the same to everyone else in the school because they didn't find it all that funny; and yet Jimmy doesn't want to get expelled again. There's some bollocks about taking over the school, but Rockstar's been flogging that idea of controlling everything since Vice City. We're promised something more intelligent in GTA IV, but only time will tell.

Should you be able to ignore the plot hole similar in size to the entire of Rocky Balboa (the newest Rocky film, but I wont call it the last because Rocky V was the last Rocky film as far as I'm concerned), we can move onto the gameplay itself. The game follows the tried and tested format of free roaming and starting missions as and when you please throughout the day, but somehow manages to clutter the radar up something rotten, and generally cock up a navigation system that's worked pretty well for Rockstar for about the last 8 years. I guess the simple reason is because all missions start with identical gold stars, and lead to the nearest door to the building they're found in, or the nearest exit if you're inside. It wouldn't be so bad if the map was more friendly, rather than being zoomed out to about 3000 miles in the pause menu and zoomed in so you can plot the best route between the hairs of you head should you be brave enough to press A when looking at it.

By now we don't know where we are, vaguely know what we're doing, but have no idea why we're doing it. Not exactly a good start. To top it all off, there's an attempt at realism being shoved into the game, which fits about as well as a golfer's glove being hastily forced onto a blue whale's face. You'll more than likely notice it's the glove is there, but still be able to see it's a whale you're looking at and wonder why the hell anyone bothered trying to put a golf glove on the bloody thing. You may also be wondering why there's a whale in your living room and how someone got a glove on it at all, but that's your own fault for living on the coast. The realism I speak of is of course that Jimmy is a 15 year old boy, and as such can't stay awake all night long, so you have to cart his sorry arse to bed every night. Which doesn't at all break up gameplay, what with the days being about 18 minutes long.

The missions themselves are basically the exaggerated antics of American school life, I imagine, which for me did little else that make me think I perhaps wasted my school life attending classes for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week for 13 years, rather than starting fights with everyone who liked the movie Grease perhaps a bit too much.

Just when I'd given up all hope for Bully and the poor cocky little shit that is Jimmy Hopkins, I managed to get him kicked in the bollocks by a girl he'd just annoyed, which gave me quite a giggle. Sadly, not nearly enough to save the game. Especailly considering that the game decided that it wanted me to repeat a part of a mission I'd just finished and watched the finishing cutscene. At this point I'd had enough and stopped playing.

You may think that this does not bode well for Grand Theft Auto IV, and I would agree had I never played State of Emergency. You see, I'm pretty certain the team who made the latter were the ones who made Bully, you know, the useless interns used just to keep making some quick money without being able to make a decent game, while the real talent work hard on their flagship GTA game and don't get to see the light of day until it's finished. I can support this with the fact the game starts by saying it is presented by Rockstar Games, but made by Rockstar Vancouver. Presumably their way of saying "it wasn't us".