Computer Game Summary XXI (Bully)

It's the story of a snot-nosed little boy.
In what's supposed to be America's worst school. Despite the fact that they have no drug problems, alcohol problems, the school is in relatively good condition and it's extremely expensive from the looks of it. It's faculty is quite large for a minimalistic amount of students. I think all together there's something between 40 to 60 kids.
Maybe it's considered the worst school in America because it's curriculum is ridiculously limiting and you can only pass or fail. There is no middle ground, no A- to D+. Only Pass or fail.
In fact it's the faculty that seems to be the worst thing about this school. They get bribes from students to let them pass their classes, they drink considerable amounts of alcohol. It's rumour that certain teachers are having romantic flings with some of the students and the cafeteria lady is a straight up date rapist.

What's the funny thing about this game, is it's T rating puts it in a strange spot. There's a mission where you're going around delivering chemicals to various people all over town. It's implied that you're a glorified drug dealer. But at the end of the mission you discover that your only shipping Hair Replacement supplements

Which is a comedic and clever way of getting around drug dealing in a teen rated game. But then there's other missions where you help the lunch lady out by drugging the chemist and having him and her go on a romantic date. As I mentioned above the lunch lady is a date rapist. It's implied that she's done this several times to this poor man and this is completely acceptable to do in the game. No problem there!

So let's talk bugs*. Bully is riddled with problems. From characters clipping through the wall to bicycles flying off into the heavens. There was even an incident where Jimmy fell through the floor of the world and proceeded to crash down into the abyss. On the bright side you only fall a few inches before the game knocks your character out. Perhaps this was done on purpose to make sure you wouldn't fall forever and would be forced to reload your game.
I'll say that about bully, just about every bug I encountered had to work around. Where the game would physically push your character out of the way or an object that was stuck back out into the middle of the road. Maybe just knock your character out thus restarting you from one of the hospitals.

It's fighting mechanic feels a bit sticky. And it's very difficult to lock onto one particular Target if you're surrounded by a group.
Now to compensate for the fighting mechanics most of your adversaries won't attack you all at once. They prefer to go at you one of the time, occasionally you can get hit by two or three different kids at once. Or if some particular student has a specialty move that can fling you around you can get stuck in an endless loop doomed forever to be a ragdoll. But luckily you have the ability to Grapple. And just about every character can easily be held onto. Once you do this you can beat them at your leisure. And if all else fails just run around a few times and tackled him to the ground. The game has plenty of ways of evening the field. If nothing else just finding transistors to give to the hobo will give you all the moves you need to make fighting any enemy one on one completely one-sided.
It's a fairly violent video game. There's no blood or Gore but it's still a bit extreme. Now the excuse is that you're supposed to be a good kid who stands up against the bullies and helps the week. And from a story point of view that might be true. But when it comes to gameplay you can do anything you want and thus render the story completely moot.

It's a kind of issue Rockstar has with most of their games. The Rockstar protagonist often acts completely different in story-driven scenarios to the way the player will use him in the general game. And it makes everything feel a little disjointed. It's the reason that Tommy Vercetti from Vice City is still my favorite protagonist in a rockstar game. He has little to no interest in portraying himself as a good person. He's a psychopath and he knows it. He's been screwed over by the world and you'll screwed over all the same. He only give respect to people that he deems deserve it.

It's not a real problem especially considering it doesn't ruin the Gameplay at all. It just kind of screws up the story. And Jimmy's a teenager anyways so you can just chop it all up to inconsistent puberty.
Jimmy's personality makes up for any inconsistency anyways. He's snarky, rude and inconsiderate to most people, they give him just enough Humanity to make you not hate him but not so much that you start to think he's a psychopath when he spends a cutscene talking to one kid and referring to them as a great person  only than precedes to beat the ever-living hell out of them the second it's over.

Then we come down to the different clicks throughout the school. The least interesting of the lot would be the jocks. They're almost completely antagonistic and have little to nothing to do with the greater story. They're just seen as the ultimate threat. Which is only half true, sure they're big and technically stronger than any other gang in the school. But they're fighting style is limited. They're only signature move being a kind of pouncing technique. Otherwise it's the preppies who are actually the most powerful group in the school. The game and the story might tell you otherwise, they like to show them as the second weakest but it's just not true. The preppy for all their Suave demeanour and talk of living it up away from the peasants.  They do have at there disposal the greatest fighting techniques. They're all adamant boxers and know how to avoid a great many of your punches and kicks. In fact up until you get several the special moves granted to you by the homeless man
The puppies will remain your biggest problem. As they'll make quick work of any of your basic attack strategies.
Then there are the Greasers. They hit heavy and they fight a bit dirty, one-on-one they're practically defenceless but they make better use of group fighting than any of the other major gangs.
They're my default favourite of all the different cliques in the school. After all who wouldn't want to hang out with the kids from Grease.

Then there's the Nerds. They can't stand up to you in a fight even if their entire groups together you'll make easy pickings of them within a mere minute. But God help you later on in the game when they start walking around with those projectile weapons of theirs. Two or three of them can easily knock you out, and they makes up for one of the hardest missions in the entire game. Looking at him you think they didn't deserve to be picked on by the other clicks. But ultimately they end up doing more harm to people than just about anybody else. Going as far to ruin a poor girls entire school life and possibly screw her up for her future career simply because one of them is a pervert who wants nude photos of her.
They're also very quick to turn on you as a character. Everybody else needs a pretty good reason to be convinced that you're a piece of garbage, but then the nerds will turn on you at any given time. Often respond to you with a condescending attitude even worse than that of the preppies. The only exception to this is Cornelius, who always treats you with a modicum of respect. I discovered only recently that if you talk to him enough you can offer them flowers and you can actually become one of the only two boyfriends in the entire game. Looking back on it it makes a lot of sense. Cut scenes between him and Jimmy always seemed a lot more neutral and it was of any of the other nerds. Jimmy was quick to bad mouth and be Whittle anyone he couldn't be bothered with.

Then there are the townies and the bullies. Neither of them are all that interesting, the townies you have no involvement with until the Final Chapter and it's because of them that you fell as the head of the school in the first place. The missions revolving around them are kind of interesting and you do help one of them come back into school. Bullys on the other hand don't really have that much of a personality. Outside of their leader Russell was just a giant hulking figure who doesn't seem to have much care for anything. But the one thing I do like about the Bullys is once you get their respect you keep it.It makes them your most supported allies in the entire game. Well at least Room chapter 2 on words. In chapter 1 all of them will attack you on sight.

To give the townies credit they do have a pretty good mix of fighting styles. Acquiring different techniques from all the other school gangs. And their health is better than most of them too. They have the advantage of being the dominant force in the entire game after 11pm. For some weird reason they're everywhere after that point. Like some sort of vampire.

Really Bully stands out the most in their environment. The town of Bullworth it's one of the best design Maps Rock-stars ever made. It's small but sprawling. Almost all of the space is utilised quite well, and getting around is both fun and easy. It works best with the type of game Bully is. Their missions work the same as any of the early Grand Theft Auto games.  Start a mission and then make sure you complete it. If for some reason you should die during the mission you will not only fail but will be sent to a hospital where you'll have to go and retry it again. This means retreading a lot of the same ground. Bully's Maps works very well for this. As you don't get exhausted having to redo anything if you happen to fail the first time around. The atmosphere of the Town makes it really fun to explore. Everything has a nice lived in the feeling. Surprisingly large amount of secondary missions you can do for your own enjoyment.
I really wish the modern computer game industry would take note of that. As they continuously create bigger and bigger worlds with even less to see in them. Sometimes less is more and Bully is a great example of that.

Bully Scholarship Edition

It's practically the same game with some added features. And it's a little bit more buggy than its original counterpart. They also cat one or two things out of the game. Such as an opening title card where one of the students is trying to peer at a magazine held by the gym teacher. In the original game you could see a silhouette of a lady in a bikini where is in the new game they cut that out. So it's not entirely sure what that kids trying to look at.
but beyond that there's not too many differences. Sometimes a bunch of dogs will chase after you, and the graphics are a little bit more polished. I don't really think it makes the game look any better it just makes everybody look a little too shiny. And given that these are teenage kids that's certainly not helping.

There's a music class that was added in and I admit that it's probably the most boring class in the entire game. Alongside a mathematics class which I hated. As I'm not very good at math in real life and have no interest in trying to complete it with a time limit in a video game. But then we come up to my favourite edition added and all of bully. The Geography class!

Admittedly it's just a flag game, where one matches the flag with the respective country. Though it is amusing to match the flags up on the Mediterranean given that some of them are no longer existent such as the old flag of Libya.
But all the same it's an excuse to throw a little geography into a game whose main occupation seems to be how many times can you make Fatty pee.
But on the subject of schooling there is a social teacher (Mr. Wiggins) wandering around the campus somewhere occasionally making remarks about the Magna Carta or sometimes harassing you with sentences such as ''And I suppose you thought that Julius Caesar was a Chinamen!''
Unfortunately he plays no prominent role in the game itself.
There is no political science class to speak of. And as much as I would have loved to have seen something like that I do understand the reason for not putting it in. What exactly would you do?

*These are bugs that were prominent in the PlayStation 2 version of bully. The PC version of bully is a lot more broken, though that's not the fault of the software it's the fault of the people who poured at the game over. They didn't do a great job with it and only checked that it worked on the most basic levels. Still the majority of the blame goes to Windows itself. Their constant updating and reworking of their software had made bully and almost impossible game to play for some five years. It's only in the recent months that this game finally got a software patch that actually worked with it. It also doesn't help that nobody owns a dual-core processor anymore and that this game can't comprehend anything more complex. Oh the fun of computer gaming.





Beyond bugs there's the occasional odd Patchwork. I don't know how much of this was redone for the Scholarship Edition and how much of this was an originally in the game. None of its game altering, but it is noticeable if you play through it more than once. Some of it just seems blatantly strange. Like this Patchwork here with this guy's School Crest. Why do they bother to put anything over it at all? It's a simplified version of a more official crest of which they never removed from your actual clothing. So why bother removing it from other people's clothing?