This week I’ve got a blast-from-the-sort-of-but-not-really-past. 2006. That’s technically the past, right? Right?! Oh well.
A lot of you remember a brilliantly entertaining sandbox game by Rockstar (no, not Red Dead Redemption) that first came out for the PS2 several years back, and then was revamped and released onto the Xbox 360, Wii, and PC in 2008. The game Bully was unlike any game I had previously played. Though I have played through my share of sandbox games, this one was different. Bully let me live out my dreams of beating students up, learning fighting moves from hobos, and making friends with greasers.
The main protagonist and player character of the game, Jimmy Hopkins, is just about as badass as fifteen-year-olds come. The game begins with a cutscene of Jimmy in the backseat of a car with his well-to-do mother and her sixth new husband in the front seats; they are taking Jimmy to Bullworth Academy, a private school where they hope Jimmy won’t be kicked out of. Right from the beginning, you know that Jimmy is straight-up awesome. As Jimmy walks around his new school, he starts to meet some interesting characters who will either help and harm is year at Bullworth.
The game is all about dominating every single one of the generic high school cliques, from the preps to the jocks to the greasers, and becoming the king of the school. Jimmy runs around campus armed with a multitude of weapons, completing missions and basically pissing off as many school officials as he can. Jimmy goes through a load of missions during the gameplay, with rewards usually involving kisses from girls, kisses from guys (he swings that way sometimes), and general respect from the different cliques. As the chapters of the story progress, the player can go to more and more locations around the school and the surrounding town, picking up newspaper routes for money, skipping class, or spending tons of money on toys and tattoos. (Oh yeah, fifteen-year-olds can get tattoos in this game. No big deal.)
If you have somehow never heard of this hilariously entertaining game, then you’ve seriously been missing out. Here’s the trailer for Bully: Scholarship Edition in case you’re interested in seeing what the game is all about.
The game Bully was made to recreate the state of being a kid, but with tons more excitement. Jimmy Hopkins is the perfect and most badass playable character to make this excitement happen. Hopkins teaches us a valuable lesson in Bully — you can fight anyone you want, but if you hit a girl, she won’t want to kiss you anymore. Unless you give her flowers. Then you are forgiven.