Atavistic regression to a blood soaked Lord of the Flies dystopia is one thing, but boys kissing boys is the straw that broke the media’s back.
Bully! No longer a word used largely by overly effusive Victorian gentlemen expressing heartfelt approval for the latest innovations in top-hat design: ‘What’s that old fellow? Make them tall and black instead of squat and electric pink?’ Bully is also a computer game made by Rockstar, a company better known to the nation’s worried parents as ‘the people who made that sex simulator game’, whose evil tendrils have now extended to chillingly indoctrinating your brood into persecuting and killing other children and sodomising their corpses. It seems no force on Earth is capable of stemming the relentless tide of corruption pouring forth from these depraved an-
Not surprising, really, given the blustering furore that springs up over depictions of heterosexual, above age of consent sex: cf. that flash of naked buttock in Mass Effect or that Warm Mocha farce. Jack Thompson’s initial remonstration with Bully was the fear that its content would fuel inter-infant violence: the fear that he would be compelled to take on lucrative lawsuits and get some extra publicity no doubt lost him a great deal of sleep. But once the news came out that little Timmy could take little Jimmy, hold the left trigger and press A and go kiss little Freddy...boy, did the focus of the controversy ever shift fast. ‘Teaching kids to bully the crap out of each other I could take, but boys kissing boys? Mother Teresa will be selling McFlurries in hell before I let that slide!’ That’s an actual quote, I swear.
So it’s a paedophile-pleasing gay-porn sex and blood fest with a hint of training manual for bullies thrown in? Okay, I’ll stop being silly: Bully doesn’t encourage bullying in the least. It encourages violence, hell yes, but only towards people who deserve it. The player is frequently prompted not to bully other characters, and the game offers no incentive to go around whaling on little kids and smacking girls with fire extinguishers aside from the player finding it funny, and since only an already maladjusted specimen would find it funny it exculpates the game somewhat. The title under which the game was originally released in Britain, Canis Canem Edit (or, for those rusty on their Latin, Dog Eat Dog and Suck On This BBFC) may at first glance appear a rudimentary way of making the game seem more palatable to concerned parents: ‘Buy this game for me mum. Look, the title’s Latin- nothing bad ever had a Latin title!’ But ‘dog eat dog’ gives a more accurate view of the school, a setting painted in broadly Darwinian strokes- it’s less about bullying than surviving the bullies. And then you whale on them with a fire extinguisher, which is precisely what secondary school’s all about.
So it’s a paedophile-pleasing gay-porn sex and blood fest with a hint of training manual for bullies thrown in? Okay, I’ll stop being silly: Bully doesn’t encourage bullying in the least. It encourages violence, hell yes, but only towards people who deserve it. The player is frequently prompted not to bully other characters, and the game offers no incentive to go around whaling on little kids and smacking girls with fire extinguishers aside from the player finding it funny, and since only an already maladjusted specimen would find it funny it exculpates the game somewhat. The title under which the game was originally released in Britain, Canis Canem Edit (or, for those rusty on their Latin, Dog Eat Dog and Suck On This BBFC) may at first glance appear a rudimentary way of making the game seem more palatable to concerned parents: ‘Buy this game for me mum. Look, the title’s Latin- nothing bad ever had a Latin title!’ But ‘dog eat dog’ gives a more accurate view of the school, a setting painted in broadly Darwinian strokes- it’s less about bullying than surviving the bullies. And then you whale on them with a fire extinguisher, which is precisely what secondary school’s all about.
Bully controls tightly enough, certainly handling a lot better than any GTA we’ve seen thus far, even if that is another of those ‘not a lot of competition in the field’ dicta. The controls are rather too sprawled out across the pad for my liking and the camera is as much use as a GTA camera ever is: we make the best of them, though, and seem to take them as a necessary evil, which is odd given how long they’ve had to get the hang of it. Perhaps Bully is easier to forgive because the stakes are lower than in a GTA game- combat is satisfying but omits the gory viscera, and the game as a whole is easier than its (dare I say) parent series. Instead of taking an assault rifle round to the face if the controls let you down you’ll probably get a wedgie or some itching powder in your less than bulletproof school-vest. Such is the variegation of activities you get tangled up in that it seems churlish to bitch and moan just because you sometimes run into walls or get stuck with the camera fixated on Jimmy’s bald spot. It's not unlike a beautiful mosaic made out of dead painted cockroaches, this heady mix of proficiency with occasional staggering ineptitude carrying over to the game's presentation.
Remarkably passable: faint praise and contradictions abound in describing Bully’s looks. Character models are firmly last generation, although slightly shinier textures and lighting spice up the 360 version. As broadly competent as Bully comes across one feels it would benefit from a next-gen engine no bounds. Characters in cutscenes possess that trademark Rockstar swaggering gait which I’ve yet to see anyone in real life exhibit- maybe the people I hang out with just aren’t badass enough, I don’t know. The strength of the cutscene direction and the quality of writing is undeniably charming, but the quality of the voice acting is vividly juxtaposed with lip syncing that looks like a rubber band flopping about on a piece of string. Bottles of whiskey will aim for said lips but clip straight through people’s foreheads- a more direct route on the road to inebriation, perhaps, but aesthetically distracting. Give them another engine, I say, and let’s see what they can achieve with GTA IV. Colour me excited over that, incidentally.
You’ll have heard a lot about technical issues, chiefly with the 360 version. You’ll also have heard a lot people saying ‘pish and tosh, it’s not that bad: just another case of the intraweb blowing things out of proportion, because I’ve not had any problems.’ Well bully for them, but it pleases me no end to report that the game is absolutely riddled with problems; plagued and damn near ruined. There’s niggling problems: sometimes animations will get stuck in a loop, characters stuck on scenery. There’s also a lot of loading- between cutscenes, between areas- but gallingly there’s only about four different loading screens, each with a bit of game art on, which rotate in sequence. It sounds pedantic but it’ll start to annoy you: trust me. There’s bigger problems: many of the QTE based classes are ridiculously difficult because the game will not recognize button presses properly; sometimes the random missions needed to get a hundred percent clear rating won’t occur (although it’s something of a niche issue for those anal enough to want a hundred percent completion from a Rockstar game). The frame rate, too, oscillates between less than optimal and noticeably choppy. Then there are serious problems: during the course of my playing the game it crashed no fewer than IIIIIIIIII III times. That’s just a fun little tally I etched into the back of my hand with a cocktail stick. Thanks to Rockstar’s doggedly idiosyncratic save system each of those crashes meant I had to replay missions and classes and soon enough Damocles’ Dirty Disc Error hung constantly over my head, leaving me compulsively saving at every opportunity. In a Rockstar game this means laborious treks to save points between each and every noteworthy event which rapidly becomes indefensibly choretastic.
Bully earns itself the dubious plaudit of having the most dirty disc errors and freezes since The Witcher, which took its own crown from Morrowind on the Xbox. The great thing about this generation is that when games crash this much I'm left unsure as to who to blame: maybe the developers? My console? Hyperion, Titan of Greek mythology? Perhaps I should qualify that, because I didn’t really mean this generation- I meant, quite specifically, one console: my 360. Say what you will about our contemporary triumvirate of disc-spinning noise-making entertainment pukers, but I think we all know who was outside having a crafty fag when the Powers That Be were doling out build quality. I love my 360 in the same way I would love a kitten made out of tissue paper: as much as I’d enjoy playing with it, I’d so in the knowledge I’ll only end up breaking it and having to scrumple it up and flush it down the loo.
So much negativity for a game that, when it hits its stride, can be as engrossing and funny as any. All that faffing about with kissing boys is just one paint stroke on the canvas. Among the cast are an alcoholic English teacher who reminds me of myself in twenty years time; a sociopathic would-be dictator with dreams of grandeur who decides to stop taking his medication and start taking over the school instead; and an ever-so-unhinged Vietnam Vet hobo living behind the school bus who’ll teach you beat-down techniques in exchange for radio transistors. The geography classes, in which you deposit flags down onto a map, are a superb riposte for all those haughty twats who say ‘aren’t Americans dreadfully stupid? Look, they can’t even point out Finland!’ As a card-carrying pretentious guffawing European myself I confess to smugly strolling through the map of Europe before smacking into a wall, completely unable to place more than three state flags on the map of North America. So that shut me up.
It’s a well-worn and depressing way to end a review of a special edition version of a game, and you have my sympathy for reading it, but… the game is well worth buying if you don’t already own it and it’s probably not worth buying if you’ve played a version of it already. As a non-Xbox Live subscriber myself I find it difficult to recommend the unpatched 360 version with a straight face, not while I gather the PS3 version tends to avoid crashing every quarter of an hour, and the Wii version no doubt touts all sorts of super fun RSI inducing wiggling just to load a save-game. I can only hope that one performs a sharp upward jerking gesture of the Wiimote to simulate giving passing kiddies a wedgie, but this remains chiefly conjectural.
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