Preview: Bully: Scholarship Edition

Rockstar shows us its latest Vancouver production, the new-and-improved Bully for Xbox 360 and Wii. Get all the details in our detailed impressions.

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By Adam Doree

It seems barely a week goes by without Rockstar summoning us to see its latest wares. This latest visit was to see Bully: Scholarship Edition, an enhanced version of the superb PS2 game, now for Wii and Xbox 360. Bully came out over a year ago, and delighted us with its high quality script, unique boarding school setting, charismatic musical score and fun, varied gameplay. We also loved the brilliant, over the top, stereotypical characters you'd expect from a high school environment

But a lot of the hype surrounding the game before its release was owed not to the rational yet enthusiastic preview pieces of Bully like the one on this fine site, but rather the baseless, alarmist and sensational reporting of the wider media and the whining of politicians, all claiming that the game would encourage bullying before they'd even seen anything of it. When the game turned out to be not just morally sound, but also artistically notable and rather good in general, it was a vindication for Rockstar and surely an embarrassment for an imaginative anti-games camp with too much time on its hands. In short, it's about standing up to the bully on behalf of all those who fear him, not actively bullying yourself.

Check out the extra detail in this Xbox 360 screenshot

We'd like to think it was off the back of positive reviews, rather than the media storm in a tea cup, that the PS2 game then went on to sell pretty well. But either way, the fact is that the game arrived just as new consoles were starting to emerge, taking a lot of the attention away from releases on PS2. Rockstar reckons there's an "untapped audience" who haven't played the game at all, and based on this new version we checked out, 360 and Wii gamers will be in for a treat with this ultimate version of Bully.

Set over the course of a school year, Bully is the affable story of hard-done-by problem kid Jimmy. Coming from a broken family, and with his mum heading off on her umpteenth honeymoon, Jimmy has been expelled from every other school in the area, and Bullworth Academy is the only place that will take him. Somehow, he has to find his position in this hard school's way of life, integrate with the other students and cliques, and try and make it through unscathed - perhaps with some friends left at the end of it.

The Wii version makes excellent use of the controller

Scholarship Edition is an enhanced version that steers clear of messing with the superb existing story and instead adds new missions, new classes, new music, improved visuals and ambient sound effects. The overall content is the same on both consoles, but as you might expect, there are benefits to each version: the 360 version obviously looks a lot crisper, but the game seems to genuinely fit the Wii control set-up - and let's be honest, not many Wii games offer the depth of story and characters that Bully does.

Let's take a look at the Wii version first. The Wii version still holds up graphically even on the Rockstar's relentless 65" HDTV. All those memories of the game's opening act came back as Jimmy is summoned to the Principal's office, before meeting Gary who offers his friendship, then checking out the common room, and soon enough, the first encounters from bullies and getting into a fight.

Stand up to the bully without becoming one yourself!

This introductory fight is kind of a tutorial on how to use the Wii remote and nunchuck; you have to jab with your left and right fists as prompted by the on-screen indicator to defeat the bully, with combinations of each arm in quick succession. Once you've kicked his ass, you finish with a humiliation attack - in this case a good old Chinese burn - by spinning the remote around.

Since it's school, you have to go to your lessons. But in Bully they're actually fun, and in Scholarship Edition there are four new classes - maths, music, biology and geography - and you can play against your friend who plays as Gary. These two-player sections work particularly well on the Wii: we're taken to biology class, where it's about how fast and how accurately you do the dissection of a rat using the Wii remote as the scalpel to carefully make incisions, the magnifying glass to examine parts of the rat's insides more closely, forceps to remove its liver, intestines and so on. This head-to-head process against the clock involves extreme concentration and should be great fun that often results in some photo finishes. In biology you'll also be dissecting bats, frogs, pigs, fish and even aliens, which has got to be worth a look.

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