Hands-On with Bully for Wii and Xbox 360

Rockstar let us come and have a go - have they tried hard enough? We find out if Bully plays nice on Wii and 360.

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The next class we tried was Math, which is a Brain Training style test of your basic arithmetic. You have a multi-part sum and point the Remote to a multiple choice answer and press A. You don't just get the same few maths over and over; there are hundreds that pop out randomly.

Next up was Music, which is basically a rhythm action affair involving shaking left and right 'maracas' to the music. The music, true to a real school brass band, sounds awful (think 'Band Camp'), but it's a good laugh trying to better your opponent with as many perfect beats as possible (making it sound less awful, incidentally).

The next game is Photography - basically like Where's Wally, you're told to spot something in a room full of many varied objects scattered around, and the first player to spot where it is, point and then 'snap the photo' gets the points. Again, it's pretty addictive multiplayer stuff. The camera angle also changes in the room to mix things up, and there are also deliberately planted 'decoy' objects to trick you and add to the challenge.

Other mini-games included a wrestling thing, which is a bit too much hassle to explain to be honest, and a great Geography class where you have to stick the right flags onto the right states and countries on a map, across various continents - all against the clock, obviously.

With the Xbox 360 version, there's not much to discuss with regards to the hands-on experience that we didn't cover last time to be honest. We did check out a couple of missions to get the feel of things, and there are no real complains with the controls at all. We checked out a couple of missions, the first called Character Sheets, which sees Jimmy helping out Melvin, a nerd who's really into card-based role playing games. The bullies have stolen his character sheets for the game, and Jimmy has to run around the map and find the bullies with the sheets. It was a good opportunity for us to run around, use Jimmy's skateboard and use his slingshot on the bullies.

The other mission we tried featured Rudy the Red-Nosed Santa, the rather charismatic drunk Santa who we encountered in our last demo. This time, Rudy needs Jimmy to collect some decorations scattered around the campus to help tart up his makeshift grotto, otherwise nobody will be coming to visit him and to have their photo taken. Dialogue with the awesomely drunk Rudy is always amusing to listen to. Of course, we come up against rival Santa opposition on our quest to pick up decorations. Similarly to the mission in our last preview, it becomes an ironic Christmas themed battle between Jimmy and the other little elves - even the Christmas dogs get a punch or two - all to the melody of O Come Let Us Adore Him. Brilliant. The second part of the mission involves taking photos of kids visiting Rudy (sat on his glamorous toilet seat in the dodgy grotto) and you have to snap pictures just at the right moment as the kids turn and smile into the camera. The little brats.

Bully: Scholarship Edition is set to offer great value. The core game was already very substantial on PS2, and now offers new content. Meanwhile, a variety of addictive and fun multiplayer games (the likes of which frequently ship as a standalone product on Wii) should really make this an important release for anyone who missed out on the PS2 version. For our verdict, watch out for our review coming soon.

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