Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Bully took a long time to arrive on my computer but it was on my radar since it was first released. The original Playstation 2 version was released way back in 2006. The game was then upgraded to the Scholarship Edition for the Wii, the Xbox 360 and the PC in 2008. However, I was never able to find a retail copy of the game in Malaysia. Sometime after that it became available on Steam but was restricted for sale in North America only until I believe early this year which was when I finally bought it.

The lack of availability of the game probably has something to do with the controversial nature of a game allowing you to physically bully other students within the context of a high school. It also probably didn’t help that the ports were plagued by pretty serious bugs for a long time until they were patched. But for me the primary attraction was always the novelty value of playing the game set in a high school. After all, who doesn’t fantasize about going back to school to do the things you never dared to do.

In this game, you control the 15 year-old Jimmy Hopkins who is such a delinquent that he has been expelled from numerous schools. Your mother, just before sailing off on a honeymoon for her umpteenth marriage abandons Hopkins at Bullworth Academy, a boarding school in New England, to fend for himself. It is then up to the player to help Hopkins navigate between the various competing student cliques in the school, attend classes and keep up with the school work, and maybe earn some pocket money along the way.

Like the Grand Theft Auto games, you end up doing quite a bit of fighting but all of it is non-lethal. This means lots of fistfights with at most breakable baseball bats as weapons. Jimmy eventually does end up with a nice arsenal of weapons, but these are schoolboy stuff, such as the ever-useful slingshot, the auto-firing spud gun, marbles that you can throw behind you to give pursuers the slip etc. You are limited to only fighting other boys your own age, so no hitting girls, smaller kids or adults.

I was surprised to find that the game covers not just the school and its compound but also the surrounding town area, so some transportation is needed. Jimmy starts with a skateboard, but that’s slow and tiresome to use. The best options are the various models of bicycles available. Alternatively, when you’re in town you can go to a bus stop to instantly teleport back to school. Neat. Under no circumstances may Jimmy drive, though there are a few cars slowly cruising around the town.

There’s a very good variety of missions and I liked them more than the GTA ones simply because I found schoolboy hijinks to be more fun. Naughty stuff include sneaking into the girls’ dorm to steal their underwear, breaking a teacher out of an asylum and helping the school cook make sure that her date with a professor is uninterrupted by mocking students. Optional activities include bicycle racing events, mini-games using the arcade machines and at the fun fair and the usual item collection quests, though these are a bit less painful than usual due to the ability to unlock their locations on your map.

Of course, the biggest set of optional activities are the school classes. Jimmy has two classes scheduled for each day. Going to class is purely optional but not going means playing truant. If an authority figure spots you out and about during school hours, you’ll be chased down. Each subject is a different mini-game and it’s cool how they managed to make each game suited to the class. Successfully completing a mini-game lets you proceed to the next stage the next time you have a lesson and unlocks items and abilities for Jimmy.

The Biology lesson is probably the most well-known of these mini-games. This is a dexterity challenge in which you have to use a variety of tools to dissect an animal within the time limit, represented onscreen in gory detail. Music lesson is a simplified rhythm game. English class gives you a string of letters and you must arrange them into enough correct words within the time limit. Math is a series of mathematical puzzles and geography asks you to pin the right flags to the right countries on a map. You might actually end up learning something during these mini-games!

The main story involves Jimmy climbing up the social hierarchy, at first by helping people with various errands and then beating up each clique at school until he becomes its undisputed leader. I liked the humor and enjoyed the ride as the story progressed, even if it sort of falls apart at the end. While Jimmy is vain and rude, he is clearly a force for good and the story reflects that.

Production quality is sadly way past its sell by date. The graphics are muddy by modern standards and the map in particular is a pain to use. There are also some controller issues. It seems almost impossible to play with a mouse and keyboard, while using the Xbox 360 controller makes the Biology mini-game ridiculously difficult. Still, I think the game is fun and rich enough to look past these issues. There’s a lot of cool attention to detail in the game and some nicely animated moments. For example, if you kiss a girl while another girl who likes you is following you around, jealousy erupts, but apparently the scene plays out differently depending on the girl.

I’m sad to report however that this game has failed to satisfy my craving for a highschool environment game because it’s still too action-based. I think I’ll need a more serious life simulation game for that. Perhaps I should pick up Academagia, on sale today on Impulse?