Bully

preparations4birth.blogspot.com is a blog run by a good friend of mine who I know as Rayfield, but whose fiance calls David. There's a reason for that, and another review will explain why (confusion in my head). Anyway, I've known Rayfield for...ooo...about 16 years during which time we've become fantastically good friends (we are even going to write a kick arse...err..story together...not sure what media yet...but I digress). Over the years we've found that we are disagreeing more about movies, though agreeing a lot more about reality television specifics, and more importantly we have almost exactly the same love of computer games. Yes, even Resident Evil, though playing all games back to back was a bit much, dude :).

Anyway, one day he came up to me and said "Bully, buy it." Yeah, he seriously said it that way. He's not keen on using excess dialogue when talking (writing, completely different story). I said "Is it that good?". He said: "Shit yeah. It's fucking great." He is keen on using swearwords, but snaps to him for that. So I bought it and have just finished it. And is it that good? Shit yeah!

There's something about school related stories that I quite love, and I'm not sure if it's just the fact that I was a teacher and am so indoctrinated into that environment, or if it's because it's like a cool little microcosm reflecting everything about the real world.

In Bully you play an ugly little shit who goes around and brings the school under his control - nerds, preppies, greasers and jocks - and you pick up girlfriends along the way. There is a lot of fighting and like most of Rockstar (did I mention Rockstar made it?)'s Grand Theft Auto games, you play the story through a series of missions, with a number of side missions to get you some money. There's mini-games as you try to complete classes at school as well as try to earn some cash through difficult things like delivering papers and cutting grass. It's actually a great game.

Contrary to all the shit that was spouted about the game, if you beat up on girls or kids you are instantly fucked, and if you beat up on adults or actually bully, your "trouble meter" gets very high very quick. In other words, you wanna punch someone in the face, make sure it's some bastard who's a lot bigger than you are, and the police and prefects aren't around when you do it. Equally you don't improve your health by fighting...no you improve that by snogging.
I finished the storyline, but I'm only 80% of the way through the game and still have stuff to do. Happily, like GTA, when you finish you can go back and complete the missions you didn't do earlier.

"A"