Bully

Rockstar felt the need to change the name of their controversial game Bully to Canis Canem Edit for the New Zealand and Australian markets. Maybe they should have been more honest and renamed it Boring.

Loosely based around the GTA game play that made them famous, Bully sounded like a winner from the day it was announced. Of course all the PC cry babies kicked up a fuss even before the game had been created, citing Rockstar’s many incarnations of GTA as proof that this would take homicidal game play to the school yard and therefore teaching otherwise good kids, to kill.

Of course as with most anti-game ranters, there was little in the way of substance to their claims, and in the case of Bully, a whole lot less than little.

Now let me say something up front. I think that Bully is a great premise for a game, and I think that Rockstar is the only company that could do the game justice. But with the delays associated with game design, they should have really jumped ship and launched Bully on the XBox 360.

You see the biggest annoyance with bully isn’t the poor graphics of the PS2, no; it’s the constant waiting around for the next part to load every time you enter a new building. Especially when entering buildings is all you ever seem to be doing.

Having the entire initial part of the campus available without load times would have gone a long way to ease my frustration. But not totally. You see what Bully doesn’t have in spades that its grown up cousin, GTA, does, is plenty to do outside of missions.

The school day exists of doing a couple of missions, attending a few classes and going to bed. Creep around too late at night, and if you manage to evade the ever-present prefects, come 11pm you’ll collapse on the spot from exhaustion.

And if you’re not good at word play, you’ll be even more frustrated when you find your self having to solve word puzzles to pass your English class.

What did make the crossover from GTA however is the humour. Walk around and listen to what the other kids are saying, and that old familiar smile will creep across your face.

And as for the bullying, sure you can go up to anyone and start a fight, but soon enough the prefects will come running and wrestle you to the ground and it will be off to the principles office.

But fighting isn’t avoidable in Bully (that’ll make the anti-game brigade happy), it’s and integral part of the game. One particular mission sees you helping a fat kid get to the toilet by walking with him and dispatching of any bullies that try and, well, beat him to a pulp.

In fact many of the missions require you to be someone’s guardian angel.

But it’s the fact that there isn’t a whole city to explore at will, and that there is next to no option what order you do missions in and the repetitive nature of the game that saw me give up in utter frustration and boredom after three hours of game play.