New pics and info from Games Radar:
"Menace to society or just misunderstood?"
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GTA Jr.:
First, let's clear something up: Bully both is and isn't Grand Theft Auto in a school. It uses the GTA game engine, so anyone familiar with those games should have an easy time navigating Bullworth Academy and the surrounding town. But while it's a mission-based, free-roaming adventure, you can't jack cars in Bully. You can't mug people, and you can't use deadly weapons or kill anyone. No hookers, sex or blood, either.
So, is Bully the dangerous game everyone says it is? Only if you think Bart Simpson is a violent cancer on society.
We've already covered a lot of the basics of publisher Rockstar's high-school simulator, in which a hard-nosed young tough named Jimmy Hopkins gets sent to the only boarding school left that'll take him. But after being given free rein with a finished copy of the game, we've come away with a more complete picture of what you can expect this October.
The game begins with Jimmy getting dumped at Bullworth by his serial-marrying mother, and after some violent new-kid hazing by the school bullies, he's befriended by a twitchy, overmedicated little Svengali named Gary. Gary's obsessed with "taking over the school," and he represents what everyone seems to think Bully is about: remorseless, sociopathic hatred. So it's fairly obvious even from the start that he's destined to be the game's villain.
Until then, the first chapter ping-pongs between helping out with Gary's cruel pranks - which help familiarize you with the school - and protecting a clique of nerdy kids from the school's jocks and bullies (for a fee, of course).
Stand and deliver:
The protect-the-nerds missions were pretty straightforward; in one, Jimmy runs bodyguard duty for a fat kid who's afraid to go to his locker alone, while in another he plays sniper (with a slingshot) to keep jocks from throwing eggs at a knock-kneed school-president candidate. But our favorite missions were the ones Jimmy's forced to pull by lanky geek queen Beatrice, which involve stealing back her science notes for a cheerleader and stealthing it into the teacher's lounge to grab her confiscated diary.
In between taking on missions and dodging the school's prefects (who, unlike GTA 's cops, can't easily be taken down or avoided), we also got offered a few mini-missions from random students who approached us. Depending on who's asking, these usually range from shy "please deliver this note for me" errands to less-adorable "please push three kids into lockers for me" tasks. You're free to ignore any of these, but a quick payday is always nice.
Of course, the best things in life are free - "best things" in this case meaning the flowers you can pick outside the girls' dorm. Offer these flowers to a girl you're friendly with, and you can get a kiss. And you want to get kissed, because a girl's kiss serves the same purpose in this game that body armor does in GTA, boosting your health past 100% and letting you take some bonus damage. These start out as simple pecks, but depending on how much progress you've made in art class (don't ask), they get more and more makey-outy, as well as more protective.
Another thing that's free? Jimmy's skateboard. You'll earn it in an early mission, and you can pull it out at any time to get around campus a lot faster. It's useful, but not as much as the jackable bikes and scooters you'll find in the surrounding town. But those don't show up until chapter two.
Eat the rich:
The first of the game's five chapters comes to a close with Gary showing his true colors and Jimmy getting the leader of the bullies to agree to leave weaker kids alone. So now that the nerds are more or less safe, it's time to move on to the outlying town of Bullworth and a far more irritating clique: the preppies.
When you think "preppie" in Bully, don't think "shops at Abercrombie & Fitch." Think blue-blooded prick who brags nasally about his dad's law firm. Just like the bad guys in Animal House, these phonies are begging to be taken down a few pegs. And you'll get to, because they love to box.
If you liked Punch-Out!!, you'll find Bully 's boxing minigame easy to get used to. Unlike the game's brawling, the boxing has a simple rhythm: just block your opponent's weaker punches, wait for him to telegraph a stronger punch, duck out of the way and slam him with a flurry when his guard is down.
Master that, and you'll find it easy to win the Preppie Challenge mission, a boxing tournament that ends with Jimmy getting his own beach house. Aside from containing a fully 3D arcade game that plays like a simplified WipeOut, the house is useful for when you're in town late at night and just need a quick place to crash. And given that there are bus stops all over town - which take you to school instantly - you don't need to worry about missing classes, either.
Meet the faculty:
There's more to the second chapter than just the town and the preppies, too. This is where the game really starts to open up, and so you'll get to know the faculty a little better. Believe it or not, they're not all bad; Mr. Galloway, for example, is a dedicated English teacher. Unfortunately he's also a lush, so you'll need to hide his bottles so he doesn't get fired. And despite being a cackling old harridan, the lunch lady's OK, and the fetch mission she sends you on - for things like rancid meat to put in meals - does a lot to help you learn the town's layout.
Regardless of its missions, Bully is a game with a lot going on under the hood. The world is smaller than GTA's, but it also feels a lot more intimate, and the characters behave more like actual people than faceless targets. Hell, even the crazy hobo out behind the school is fun to hang out with. And the game's weird early-'60s vibe - which comes through in its fashions, music and anachronistic cliques - gives it an atmosphere that's somewhere between The Catcher in the Rye and Animal House.
We also liked trying out the various social interactions, which range from sneaking up and giving people wedgies (or unwelcome pats, in the case of girls) to immediately apologizing for having done so. There's a lot more to the game that we can't really talk about yet, but we aren't disappointed by what we've seen so far.
