They assured Simon that everything was a bad business.” Until you get out of school. Like the pig, “their half-shut eyes were dim with the infinite cynicism of adult life. For they are like the pig’s head in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. They can rule the roost right now in Bully. The nerds won’t have to wait until they graduate into adult life to succeed among their peers. For those current high school folks who consider themselves nerds and geeks (even though they aren’t), Bully will probably be a triumphant experience in which they live vicariously through young Hopkins. For those of us who left school years ago, Bully is a hard-edged, often-touching reminder of how school can be about survival of the fittest.
While Bully is not perfect, it’s one of the last great games for the PlayStation 2, which will be considered old school by mid-November when the PS3 is launched. It all makes you wonder how anyone, especially the weaker kids, survived those school years. There’s the nice kid who’s called a ‘girl’ simply because he’s kind. But there’s the overwrought, overweight girl who has lost her chocolates and can’t stop crying. Sure, there are bullying giants with negative IQs. What I love most about Bully, however, are the weird and troubled students that you meet along the way. Yet, it’s large enough, surprise-filled, and graphically rich. Having said that, the world of Bullworth Academy is not as big as the universe within Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. There are lots of missions to finish and many bullies and prefects to thwart you from completing them. That’s not easy, even if you play the Will Shortz puzzle game on NPR every weekend.
In English class, you’ll be given a bunch of letters and you’ll have to make about 10 words in your allotted time. And you get to exercise your brain muscles, too. While part of the game is about bullying others when they pester you, there’s humor and social satire here that’s about as good as any game gets. Once you play the game, you’ll see why there’s a grand fuss about it. Though it isn’t badly written, it made me wonder why Bully had received all the hype it had from the game critic crowd. As the parents go on a lengthy cruise for their honeymoon, young Jimmy Hopkins is introduced to the torment-filled, oppressive ways of private school.
When I watched the opening movie of Bully, the scenes tried hard to make me feel sorry for a runty delinquent who is being dropped off at a private school by his evil stepfather and uncaring mother. It was too darn traumatic, even if a lot of those former toughs are drunks or criminals now. I didn’t want to relive my life as a bullied high school student.
So it was with some trepidation that I cracked open Bully, the controversial new PlayStation 2 game from Rockstar, the makers of the even more controversial Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. I realized they really couldn’t hit me: there was no pride in that since I was knockin’ on heaven’s door. The bully limped so badly for days later that no one bothered me much after that. I put on some pointy boots one morning and when the biggest of the bullies spat down on my pale forehead from the stairwell above, I casually walked up the stairs, aimed directly under his kneecap and kicked as hard as I could. But at some point, after being spat on from above constantly, I figured enough was enough. So, I was a favorite mutt of the local bullies.
As a kid on high doses of steroids, I never was sure if I was coming or going. Reading, writing, and learning were the only things I cared about-aside from dying from being chronically sick, which terrified me daily. Bully: Survival of the Fittest Courtesy of Take 2īack in junior high and high school, I was a constantly sickly, little odious smartie who lived in mortal fear of getting less than an “A” on anything.