Like GTA, you're directed to various icons on a mini-map, with stars denoting missions, and through these and Rockstar's traditional, well-written in-game cut-scenes, you're introduced to the world and the people in it, each a measured stereotype or caricature: the various cliques like the Nerds and Preps whose respect you'll be winning and losing and characters like Petey, the bashful weakling Russell the thuggish idiot Galloway the drunken English teacher Miss Danvers, the headmaster's fawning secretary Tad the inbred rich kid and Gary the manipulative bully. Playing as Jimmy Hopkins, a 15-year-old troublemaker given one last chance at Bullworth Academy, you start off racing between mini-game lessons, probing the school boundaries between classes, before heading back to the dorm every night for bed. It was, and even though not much has changed for the 360's Scholarship Edition port by Mad Doc Software (look out for a separate Wii review tomorrow) it still is. Roaming the halls and the neighbouring town of Bullworth, wise beyond the teenage years of most of the cast, it keyed in cleverly to the sense most of us have that we would like to go back to school because now we'd actually get the joke, and it would be more enjoyable. Guns and cars were expelled, compressing the play area and allowing for greater variety and more developed controls, while the school setting and routine gave it a tighter structure. Rockstar Vancouver may have been copying GTA's homework a little when Bully came out on PS2 at the end of 2006, but it still changed enough words to impress teacher.
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