Bully

It's funny, despite Grand Theft Auto being one of the biggest series in video games, we've had a scant two posts from the entire series- Stan and I both posted Chinatown Wars within a few hours of eachother back in January 2010. Rockstar games has popped up a many times since then with two Red Dead Redemption loggings, two more for L.A. Noire, one for May Payne 3, and now a second instance of Bully. Isn't it odd how much we've avoided their flagship series and instead played lots of one-offs?

Anyway, Bully. I led off this post with a paragraph on the Grand Theft Auto series because it's impossible to talk about this game without comparing Bully to those. The gameplay is very similar, but it's the setting that's the biggest change- dropping the grit of the big city for a charming little boarding school. Teenage protagonist Jimmy Hopkins is dumped off by his mother at the start of the schoolyear and it becomes obvious that he'll be stuck here for the next nine months. Jimmy quickly learns that the school is ruled by cliques who are constantly bullying eachother and generally making life horrible for everyone enrolled at Bullworth Academy, so he sets out to take over each clique in order to bring some peace and ends up ruling the school in the process. Over the course of the schoolyear Jimmy completes missions for the nerds, greasers, townies and more, but of course they're mostly inspired by classic high-school mischief rather than the brutality of GTA. Spray graffiti on town hall! Shove a nerd in a locker! Steal a teacher's supply of alcohol! Sure, now and then you need to resort to real physical violence but no one ever gets shot or dies or anything. As such it's hard for Bully to really rise above being anything but a watered down albeit funnier GTA clone. It's a fun game to play throughout its medium length, but I'm not clamoring for a sequel or anything.