Bully: Scholarship Edition Columbine Training My Ass...

I played “Bully” the first time around on PS2, but by then I had already moved to nextgen and I could tell that it wasn’t going to last. I gave up probably only about 10% of the way through the game (which in “Bully” is a pretty long time). There are certain games that I don’t mind playing on an old machine, I still throw in “Shadow of the Colossus” once a year, but “Bully” was not one of them. It lacked the polish I had come to expect and I was never a big fan of the San Andreas engine to begin with. Scholarship Edition is a different story, however. Here was a version of the game that controlled and looked the way I wanted so this time I made it all the way through. That’s not to say it didn’t have its problems. It was obviously a port. But for $30 the game is well worth it. The most impressive thing about “Bully”, I think, is how it squeezes all the missions into a school day. You can just go to class and then do your missions afterwards, or you can just play hooky, but my favourite thing to do was wake up, get a mission done before morning class ends, go to class, get another mission done at lunch before afternoon class ends, go back to class, and then complete however many missions I can before bed. See, so long as you make it to class before it ENDS you can still do your classroom activity as if you were there when it started. This device of cramming all the missions you can in before you pass out at 2AM is very entertaining, much more so than the 24 hour, 7 day a week romp that we are capable of performing in other sandbox titles like GTA4. Another very impressive aspect of “Bully” that needs to be mentioned is the music. This game absolutely mastered the art of placing music alongside gameplay AND cinematic sequences. It really complimented all the action. Huge kudos go out to whoever made up the music for the game. I don’t know if it was just Scholarship Edition, but the game is just too long. If it was 75% of the length I experienced it would have been ideal, but there was just too much random, stupid stuff to do. None of it is very challenging either. On the bike races you pretty much have to come to a complete stop before the AI will pass you, and will stick right on your tail if you’re doing 10 mph or 100 mph. Too many of the missions in the game had that feel, where it seemed as if I would have to expend effort to fail. There must be something about game engines I just do not understand, either, because why should a game that looks like (and is) a PS2 developed engine with a bunch of high res textures have any fill in at all? The game looked fantastic until I went into town and saw building coming in out of a mystery fog. I’ve seen this machine push some insane pixels, so I can’t figure out why just because “Bully” was a port they can’t have infinite draw distance. It seems that in many of my PC games I can adjust the draw distance, so why is it that whenever you get a HD port of a game the draw distance is still about 100 yards in front of you?

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