Bully

When Grand Theft Auto III came out back in 2001, it was seen as a groundbreaking (albeit controversial) video game. "Open world" games had existed beforehand, but in GTA3 it truly felt like an entire city was your sandbox (hence the genre term) full of playthings, be they fast cars, rocket launchers, or even other people's lives. I was hooked immediately, and while I enjoyed the main "story" of the game, I think I spent even more time just dicking around with fire trucks and sniper rifles and prostitutes. Having said all of this, I have to admit that after Rockstar released two more GTA games in the three years that followed, I was a bit burnt out on the concept. I never even owned 2004's San Andreas version, which many cite as being the best GTA game of all time. Whatever - Vice City was long enough, and I still haven't ever felt the need to play what essentially amounts to GTA3 III. But Rockstar finally moved on from GTA3... kind of, by making games like Red Dead Redemption (GTA in the Old West!) and L.A. Noire (GTA in 1930s Hollywood with a mystery twist!) in addition to, well, GTA4. Bully, to the best of my knowledge, was the first of Rockstar's non-GTA sandbox games. Released in 2006, at the tail end of the PS2's lifespan, it takes place in a boarding school. It's exactly what you'd expect it to be: GTA in a schoolyard. I finished playing Bully last night, and I'll now weigh in briefly with some thoughts. First of all, the completeness of the game was impressive. You go to class. You can pick fights with classmates. You get detention if you get caught making trouble enough times. The student body is divided into several typical cliques, including the nerds, the jocks, the greasers, and the preppies. You make friends and enemies. The game is divided into five chapters that collectively encompass a school year. Halloween takes place near the end of the first chapter, for example, and Christmas occurs during Chapter 3. The missions all seem to come straight from high school tropes. Defend the nerd from hecklers while he makes his student government speech! Plant a stink bomb in the fat girl's locker! Fight a greaser in a junkyard for the love of his girlfriend! The characters rarely amount to more than enormous stereotypes - a major jock can't read, a social outcast has bladder control problems, and the English teacher is a hopeless alcoholic who gets drunk behind the library - but in a game called Bully where you can throw eggs at girls and get into fist fights with tough guys, you can't really expect a deep ensemble cast of three-dimensional characters. No, the entire world in Bully revolves around high school politics and nothing more. Even when the game ventures into absurdly over-the-top territory - someone has lit the gym on fire, and now you're being framed for it! - it never seems to forget its light-hearted undertone. At the end of the day, Jimmy (that's your name) hasn't united the student body or brought an end to clique warfare; the jocks are still meatheads, the nerds are still pissing themselves, and the only real triumph isn't one of good over evil, but instead of Jimmy over the rest of the student body and faculty. I guess that lines up pretty well to most GTA games where you're a morally corrupt lawbreaker and cop-killer, but you're fighting for your own survival and success in the world. That's kind of the thing though; as much as I enjoyed Bully for being something different than GTA, and as much as I praise it for feeling as complete as any GTA game, the flip side of that dual coin is that it also grew as long and tedious as many GTA games without actually feeling as high-stakes or openly epic as a GTA game. No matter how well they nailed "GTA: High School," the game suffers exactly because it is a watered down GTA game. For this reason, its biggest strengths were also its weaknesses when it came to its overall legacy. Bully was a fine and enjoyable enough game, but it already feels aged and dated thanks to those PS2 graphics (not to mention the recent nationwide focus on anti-bullying campaigns). My biggest regret with this game may be not buying the Xbox 360 port, which looks much better, especially on an HD TV. Oh well. Huge fans of the sandbox genre would do well to give this game a try, but of course, those that want to have probably already done so.