Bully: Scholarship Edition - A Timeless Schoolyard Adventure

Bully: Scholarship Edition takes players back to the tumultuous world of adolescence, set against the backdrop of Bullworth Academy. This article delves into the nuances of the Xbox 360 version, examining its gameplay, graphics, and overall appeal, while acknowledging its technical shortcomings.

A Familiar Yet Fresh Experience

Bully is a good game, make no mistake. For those who experienced it on the PlayStation 2, Bully: Scholarship Edition offers an excuse to relive the adventure with enhanced features. The narrative remains as captivating as before, making the journey through missions and side quests worthwhile, thanks to the added achievements and extra content.

Sandbox Gameplay at Its Finest

Where the Grand Theft Auto series can often seem bloated and overly complex, Bully encapsulates free-roaming sandbox gameplay in a modestly sized world. It's just big enough to offer an ample amount of freedom and plenty of things to do, yet you'll never feel overwhelmed. Bully's gameplay feels tight and compact. The Xbox 360-exclusive Achievements are also well-designed, and add more to the overall game than you'd expect.

A Story Worth Reliving

Bully: Scholarship Edition takes place in the fictional New England boarding school of Bullworth Academy and tells the story of 15-year-old Jimmy Hopkins as he experiences the highs and lows. He must be navigated through minefields of mini-games designed to test your patience and gaming skills. The storyline is fairly liner as you cannot advance through the chapters until certain missions and errands have been completed.

Endearing Characters and Engaging Narrative

In main character Jimmy Hopkins’ quest to turn one of the worst schools in the US around, you’ll find Bully has a lot of heart. The writing is expertly done and there are literally thousands of small and hilariously funny incidents, whether it’s a random comment from a passing student about what you’re wearing or when you kiss two girls near each other and they start fighting over Jimmy.

Gameplay and Activities

The gameplay is focued on the missions, mini-games and activities that are littered throughout the grounds of Bullworth Academy and the surrounding town. It seems as if there is always something to do, someone to see or someone that needs their butt kicked. Throughout Bullworth there are many different activities, from races and paper rounds to throwing water bombs off rooftops and visiting the fairground. All of these distractions are fun and give you cool new things to play with whether it is new clothes, attack bonuses or the unlockable scooter and go-kart from the fairground.

Soundtrack

Bully's soundtrack deserves special mention as well. It's understated and modest, and it always fully suits the action on-screen. The bassline that plays when you're running around campus is likely to stick in your head for days, and almost all other tracks are just as fun to listen to. The audio soundtrack is extremely good, and is anchored by the background music which complements the pace and activity on screen. If it kicks up to a fast pace, you know its time to run like the wind or swivel your head around to figure out where the danger is. Fortunately the radar tips you off to the closest prefect, cop or bully. Where the audio really shines is in the verbal interactions with the characters in the game. There are over 100 voiced characters located in the academy and the surrounding town, which really adds to the gaming experience.

Achievements

The Achievements in Bully: Scholarship Edition range from easy to hilarious and can be picked up primarily by letting the storyline run its course. The great thing about the grinders (such as traveling distance on bike, foot, skateboard, etc) is that they should still be accomplished during the normal course of the game. Toss in the fact that there is an extremely comprehensive stats page, so it should be easy to know exactly how close you are to getting that next achievement.

Technical Issues and Patches

My hopes of playing through an enhanced version of Bully were all but destroyed when I heard about the many problems users were reporting upon its initial release, though. Crashes and freezes were frequent, framerates were inconsistent, and glitches in everything from character models to music made the end result something that I wanted no part of. Rockstar's quick response and announcement of a patch was reassuring, however. With such a fast turnaround time, it sounded like Bully's issues were a quick fix, and I looked forward to the results with renewed enthusiasm.

Framerate Frustrations

You'll be tempted to return the game and demand a refund upon watching Bully's intro movie. What was a smooth if graphically underwhelming real-time cutscene on the PlayStation 2 is a jerky, almost unwatchable mess on the Xbox 360. Fortunately, in-game framerates fare a little better, though they're never as consistent as you'd like. Indoor environments often see a framerate that's freakishly fast, and rare, unpredictable bursts of 60 frames-per-second performance will take you off-guard and possibly nauseate you. Outdoor sequences are almost universally poor in terms of framerate, unfortunately (the carnival area is particularly awful), but after a half hour of gameplay or so, you'll scarcely notice the constant hiccups and jerkiness.

Read also: Bullworth Academy Revisited

Classroom Minigame Challenges

While much of Bully's gameplay is unaffected by these problems, the framerate issues come into sharp relief during the classroom minigames, and can result in many failed tests. Timing-based actions in the music and chemistry classes are made unfairly difficult thanks to Bully's jittery performance, but the new Biology class -- a Trauma Center-styled dissection simulation -- is the worst offender. Biology's gameplay consists of guiding a small cursor over a non-animated prerendering of the object of your dissection. Not a single polygon is involved. It's a simple matter of sliding single-frame sprites over a still background. So why does the framerate slow to a chuggy crawl during this segment? It's here that you realize that Bully's constant framerate problems are not the result of boundary-pushing graphic work or issues with data streaming.

Post-Patch Improvements

To its credit, I have not seen a single freeze or crash during the entire time I've spent playing the patched version of Bully: Scholarship Edition. Rockstar and Mad Doc need to be commended for confronting the issue head-on and getting a patch readied quickly. Once I was back on track with a patched game, I proceeded to continue down the storyline, trying to complete the classes and side missions as I worked my way through the Chapters.

New Content in Scholarship Edition

For those that played Bully on the Playstation 2, it will be hard not to notice all the new additions to the game. No less than eight new missions, four new classes and several new characters have been salted in across the board. One of the modifications that found there way into Bully: SE some basic multiplayer action. Unfortunately, it wasn’t created as a full in-depth online setup, but rather relegated to local two-player local minigames. While these are fun and take on the various newly installed classes, they really don’t add much to the game play or even the achievements.

Graphics and Audio

Bully: SE won’t win any awards for graphics of the year, but overall Mad Doc did a solid job of porting the game from the PS2. The limitations of developing originally for the older platform do show up from time to time, mainly in the cut scenes. However, the game physics are surprisingly good, as the characters and objects in the game seem to react accordingly when action and action is applied, such as being hit, kicked, bumped or knocked down.

Replayability and Endless Summer

Jimmy is king of the school and Gary has been expelled SPOILER OVER you are given an ‘Endless Summer Mode’ where you can fully explore Bullworth and complete any classes you couldn’t before, find all of the rubber bands or G+G cards scattered around the map or general find every little collectible or complete every single distraction for Jimmy.

Read also: Scholarship Edition English

A Few Drawbacks

It's disappointing really because Bully offers incredibly entertaining gameplay that's worthwhile, but the improvements that should have come with the jump to the more powerful Xbox 360 hardware just don't pan out. The game is obviously amazing, but the constant crashes and loss of progress are just annoying and ridiculous.

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