Bully Game Guide

PC game enthusiasts know they're in trouble when a game's menus require keyboard input rather than allow you a mouse pointer. There seems to be little regard for the platform here: The game suffers from numerous bugs and glitches, the keyboard and mouse controls are awkward, and for a game that hardly pushes the capabilities of a halfway decent computer, it performs poorly. One of Bully's many brilliant aspects is the variety it throws into these tasks. The story at the heart of Bully is incredibly involving, and Jimmy is both charming and exasperatingly cocky. As you play, more and more of the academy and its surrounding community open up, giving you plenty of leeway to explore Bully's many unique nooks and crannies. If you choose to stay on campus, you can attend class in the morning or afternoon. Math takes a Brain Age approach by asking you to quickly solve simple math problems, whereas music class involves a rhythm-based minigame. Here, you can bully other kids to your heart's content or save the meeker students from their own bullies by beating up the aggressors. Alternately, you can run quick errands for townspeople, mow lawns for extra cash, participate in bike races, drop some quarters into arcade machines and gun for a high score, egg cars, take yearbook photos, or head to the local carnival and lounge with the little people. You could probably hurry through the main quest in 10 hours or so, but you could easily spend four times that number if you wanted to see everything Bully has to offer.

Just be sure to hook up an Xbox 360 controller if you want to have fun with these tasks. Not only are the keyboard and mouse controls awful, but inexplicably, Bully does not support any other gamepad. It's unsurprising that a port of a two-year-old PlayStation 2 game wouldn't live up to current-day standards from a technical point of view. As previously mentioned, the voice acting is outstanding, and everything from ambient sound effects to the eccentric minimalist soundtrack strikes just the right chord. If you skipped Bully the first time around, you should definitely catch up on what you missed--but you shouldn't do it with the PC version. The platform--and the game--deserve more respect than this.