Jimmy can't kill people, and there was less sex talk during the eight hours that I played than the typical 22-minute episode of "The Golden Girls." The biggest knock against Bully is the constant fistfights. There is no blood in Bully, and the most menacing weapon I could get my hands on was a baseball bat. "Have you got any liquor," the hobo asks, the first time Jimmy runs into him. Jimmy learns many of his fighting moves from a local hobo who's a Korea vet, and while the hand-to-hand combat and dark humor more than earn the game a Teen rating (the approximate equivalent of a PG-13 movie), there's an underlying morality that is pervasive throughout the game. Your roommate Gary is off his meds, and his choice of a Halloween costume - a Nazi SS officer - foreshadows psychotic behavior to come.
While most buildings are impenetrable boxes in GTA, it seems like almost every structure in Bully can be explored at some point.īully's central plot is fairly routine, but the individual missions and characters are a lot of fun. Structurally, Bully has a free-roaming vibe that plays a lot like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, with much less territory but way more detail. After a showdown with Bullworth's biggest bully, you start to roam away from the school, and townies become an additional problem. You might attend a few classes, skip a few others and get used to the social ecosystem at the school, where just about everyone bigger than you seems to have a mean streak.
The tone seems equally influenced by "The Breakfast Club," "The Outsiders" and "The Karate Kid" - with an episode or two of "South Park" thrown in to keep you laughing.įor the first three hours of game play, almost nothing critical happens.
Will Jimmy emerge as their leader and hero? Bullworth turns out to be a totalitarian state, where the jocks, bullies and teachers rule with no mercy, and the nerds live in fear. You play tough kid Jimmy Hopkins, who enters Bullworth Academy as a last resort after numerous expulsions from better places. Rockstar may be perceived as the Terrell Owens of video game makers, but from an artistic standpoint, it's one of the few companies that has consistently been part of the solution - trying to innovate when others are settling for more of the same.īully has no shortage of creative energy, offering an immersive boarding school experience that is imaginative, funny and filled with surprises. As the production cost for each game grows higher with higher-powered consoles including the Xbox 360, developers are taking fewer chances, and the result is more imagination-stifling sequels and imitations. Pundits who focus on violence in video games are missing an even bigger story: Most games in the 21st century aren't very good. And it exposes the ridiculousness in much of the hysteria surrounding video games, which keep pulling a bigger share of the entertainment dollar but are still misunderstood by a large segment of the public and the media. While it has many structural similarities to Rockstar's most notorious title, Bully is, at worst, Grand Theft Auto with misdemeanors.
#Video games bully ps2 movie#
In reality, the well-designed PlayStation 2 title from Rockstar Games is closer to a video game version of the movie "My Bodyguard," with fewer killings (none) than the typical episode of "Murder, She Wrote." That accusation would only be true if the Trench Coat Mafia's weapons of choice were itching powder and wedgies. If you believe the hype, the new video game Bully is the most corrupting thing to happen to teenagers since Elvis Presley gyrated his hips on "The Ed Sullivan Show." Critics have been crusading against the game on the talk show circuit for months, with one activist calling it a "Columbine simulator" as he filed legal arguments attempting to remove it from shelves.
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