FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

The Fashion Issue 2008

Bully: Scholarship Edition

Wow. Rockstar finally created a game I enjoy.

BULLY: SCHOLARSHIP EDITION

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: Take Two Interactive

Wow. Rockstar finally created a game I enjoy.

Bully: Scholarship Edition

is the re-release of 2006’s

Bully

for the PS2. It’s almost not worth mentioning that

Bully

was controversial upon first release—it is a Rockstar game, after all. For once though, none of the controversy was really warranted.

The game is set in and around Bullworth Academy, an American boarding school in the same sort of world as the

Advertisement

Grand Theft Auto

games—everyone is a jerk, and authority figures admit outright the sort of thing we all suspect or fear they think (the PE teacher hits on female students, the principal thinks unpopular kids all deserve everything the popular kids heap on them, the lunch lady insists on serving meat that’s weeks past its due date and believes that coughing into the food adds flavor, etc.).

Bully

is a bit less like

GTA

and a bit more like a slightly meaner version of

The Simpsons

, as most characters have actual depth and redeeming qualities. Somewhat weirdly, the game’s protagonist isn’t much of a bully—he dislikes the school and most of the people in it, but he dislikes the outright jerks most of all, and over the course of the game very few of his accomplishments spring from trying screw over everyone around him.

The gameplay is yet another excuse for me to make a comparison to

GTA

. This is Grand Theft Boarding School, really, an open world that starts out limited and gets progressively more open. Missions scattered everywhere. Failed missions can be restarted with little to no penalty. Side-quests galore. Even the control scheme is similar, although that’s not saying much—

GTA

and

Bully

both use nearly the same interface as every other third-person adventure game on the market.

Why do I like this then, when I only ever

wanted

to like the

GTA

games? First, and most superficially, the graphics aren’t ass-ugly. Partially this is the better hardware, but I think mostly it’s a closer horizon, smaller world, and better-developed style.

Advertisement

GTA

games of the past never really seemed to make up their mind as to whether they wanted to look realistic or stylized.

Bully

is stylistically consistent.

Second, the controls are less clumsy. Again, they’re basically GTA controls but polished a bit and with far less emphasis on shooting things, which I thought always sucked.

Third, the game is more careful in how it introduces the environment. At first, the scope is very limited—only what will later be the central hub is accessible, and the game adheres to a rigid schedule. Jimmy wakes up every morning at 8 AM and has to either attend classes or dodge cop-equivalents while playing truant. Evenings and nights are free, but Jimmy has to go to bed eventually, and passes out if he doesn’t. Then the clock resets to 8. The classes themselves are minigames. After winning each minigame five times, attendance in that class ceases to be mandatory, and you finish more missions, more geography opens up. The game’s transition from regimented school simulator to more traditional sandbox ensures that by the time I had access to the whole world, I had motivation to keep engaging with it rather than feeling overwhelmed and apathetic.

I recommend

Bully: Scholarship Edition

on the grounds that it made me want to go back and try playing the

Grand Theft Auto

games again to see if maybe I could appreciate them now. It left me looking forward to

GTA IV

Advertisement

.

THE CLUB

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: Sega

The premise of the game is you’re a participant in an elite underground bloodsport run by the world’s richest and most jaded power-brokers. It’s not relevant to the gameplay, though, so I won’t elaborate further. Said gameplay is essentially a sports game by way of a third-person shooter—you’ve got a guy with a variety of guns and there are other guys around you who also have guns and are trying to shoot you, so you shoot them first. Stringing kills together creates combos, combos lead to more points per kill, the higher your combo multiplier the less time you have to kill the next guy, if your combo time runs out your multiplier starts to fall until you kill someone else or it reaches zero. You get extra points for headshots and a variety of other trick shots like killing a guy with a ricochet. Enemies always spawn in the same places, so the whole point of the game is to memorize enemy spawn points and learn the optimal path through each level so as to grab the highest combo multiplier by the end, maximizing your score.

Overall, the controls are reasonably tight, and there’s no ridiculously abrupt difficulty spikes. Bizarre Creations did as well with their starting premise as could be expected. At no point did I think “This game could be so much cooler than it is.” I admire its focus, minimalism, and polish, and am glad they didn’t waste time with a more involved storyline I couldn’t care less about. That said, I’d just as soon be playing something else. But eight or nine years ago, when I still had a taste for memorizing level layouts and enemy spawn points (that is, when I was playing the training mode on the PS1’s

Advertisement

Ghost in the Shell

way too much), I’d have loved this game to death, so I can’t say anything really bad about it.

Now will somebody get this 50 Cent song out of my head?

CONFLICT: DENIED OPS

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: Eidos Interactive

Early on in

Conflict: Denied Op

s, one of the protagonists calls the other a limp-dick motherfucker, and if this game were a person, and I inclined to such language, I might call it the same. If you wish to listen to stilted delivery of more such sterling wit, together with clumsy controls, questionably balanced level design, and graphics that would have been impressive on the original Xbox, by all means give this guy a whirl.

LOST ODYSSEY

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios

Goddamnit, when I first started playing

Lost Odyssey

I was all fired up to write a review about how Hironobu Sakaguchi has lost his touch, but then, before the first disc ended, the game completely turned around and now I love it. Being proved wrong sucks, although in this case it also rocks. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Lost Odyssey

is the latest JRPG by Hironobu Sakaguchi, the guy who created the

Final Fantasy

series and directed, produced, or executive-produced all

FF

games from

I

through

X-2

, at which time he stepped down from Squaresoft (this was before they became Square-Enix) for reasons relating, as I understand it, to the box-office flop of the film

Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

Advertisement

. He then went on to found Mistwalker and is now busy creating JRPGs for the Xbox 360, the first of which was

Blue Dragon

, which I did not like.

Lost Odyssey

is a big improvement.

The game’s protagonist is Kaim, an initially dour immortal amnesiac. Already we’ve entered the Land of Clichés, and at first, he embodies the archetype established by Cloud Strife and Squall Leonhart. The major difference between a

Final Fantasy

game and

Lost Odyssey

(and I wish I could figure out how to hint at this in a way that leaves it unambiguous without sounding like a spoiler, but we can’t have everything) is that Kaim actually gets over himself early on, in a scene that makes it apparent why he is so dour. He has an arc that doesn’t just consist of angsting like a fuckhead through 90 percent of the game and then learning to treasure his friends in time for the big confrontation at the end. (Or, to put it another way, it’s a game about adults instead of postadolescents.) None of this is apparent at the beginning, and until the scene in question, which I will not spoil, I was convinced it was just going to be Cloud Strife all over again.

A great deal of the game consists of “A Thousand Years of Memories,” a series of short stories with fuzzy background images and accompanying sound effects, triggered when Kaim sees something that jogs his memory. These short stories are a pleasure to read, and although they do tend to harp on the same theme over and over again (“Everyone but Kaim can live and raise families and grow old and die and be reunited with their dead loved ones”), they do it intelligently and with variety.

Advertisement

There’s nothing new here, but I haven’t seen it done this well before. It could have been a terrible morass of everything that’s ever been mediocre about

Final Fantasy

games, but instead it somehow turned into a fairly somber, legitimately mature, and at times moving reflection on the value and fragility of life.

Now’s the part where I explain the problems, and they all spring from one: The game is agonizingly slow, especially to start. It requires an investment of time and attention to get anything out of it, and when I say investment, I mean you won’t get anything back from it immediately. Going to

Lost Odyssey

after

Devil May Cry 4

felt like slogging through molasses. This, together with Kaim’s personality at the beginning of the game, the absurd difficulty of the first boss, and the ridiculous helmets of the army Kaim is fighting alongside during the opening cinematic, initially convinced me I would hate it forever, and I only kept playing it because I had to.

I’m very, very glad I did.

I’m trying not to say too much, because it’s best if you discover it on your own. It’s got a boozing, whoring, endearing rake of a secondary character who’s a laugh riot, and a couple of early plot twists that most games would save for the final act. It’s got absolutely beautiful depth-of-field effects. It has much better Nobuo Uematsu music than

Blue Dragon

did. It also has its downs, like an inconsistent frame rate and one character in particular who looks like he’s drawn by Akira Toriyama amid a cast otherwise designed, or so it would seem, by Yoshitaka Amano. And those stupid helmets.

Advertisement

But my opinion of it overall is very high. If you’re familiar with the JRPG genre you’ll almost certainly like this one, and if you’re unaccustomed to games of this pace, try renting it and playing through the first disc. Don’t give up too early—it rewards those who stick with it.

BURNOUT PARADISE

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: Electronic Arts

This game is really easy. Not in terms of play challenge—it’s a driving game so it’s kicking my ass as usual—but in terms of interface. There are no obstacles whatsoever: no “achieve rank X to unlock neighborhood Y,” no plot to progress through, no currency, not even event-select menus. The whole map is open from the beginning, you enter events by hitting gas and brake simultaneously at intersections, you earn new cars by running them off the road, and you can start big 100-car pileups whenever you want and exit them to go back to racing just as easily. You recover from totaling your car fast enough that you can do it three times in a race and still take first place (if you’re better than me). It’s the most sandbox-y open-world sandbox game I’ve ever played—it’s like a collection of mini-games. At one point I started driving against traffic and dodging oncoming cars just for the hell of it, and after a few moments realized that the designers had anticipated players doing that, and the game was scoring me for distance traveled and number of near-misses.

Advertisement

On the one hand, having access to the whole game from the beginning is refreshing compared with the last few driving games I’ve played. Being able to plug

Burnout Paradise

into the console and do anything is great compared with hours of grinding for the best lap time or enough cash to buy the next batch of cars in, say,

Project Gotham Racing 4

. On the other hand, I’m not sure how long it’ll hold my interest, because I already feel like I’ve seen everything it has to show me, and I’ve never cared about achievement points. Winning races doesn’t unlock new content in a direct way (though it does put new cars on the road for you to run down and claim), so what’s my motivation for playing?

Apparently, my motivation is that the music is good,

SSX 3

’s DJ Atomika is on the radio between songs, and the play experience is nearly meditative—every time I turn the game on, I blink and an hour has gone by.

I’d like to see more sandbox games adhere to

Burnout Paradise

’s design philosophy. In other words, I like it a lot.

STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD