A while ago I bought a used PS2 to play a bunch of games that I had missed so far and that I thought I would enjoy playing. One of them was Rockstar s Bully (named Canis Canem Edit in Europe). It got a lot of positive reviews in the gaming press and playing a troublesome schoolboy sounded like an interesting game idea which got me very excited to play it.
The actual experience of playing Bully makes me feel like being in the office doing overtime on a sunday working on a PC that crashes every 10 minutes. The number of good ideas and intentions in this game equals the number of moments of pure frustration. I consider the mission system one of the biggest flaws of the game. Like in GTA you progress through the game by completing missions if you fail a mission you are forced to do it over and over again.
A typical mission looks like this: Escort a school kid that is threatened by some bullies to his locker so he can return his borrowed books to the library. Ok, this could be a challenging, interesting task inside a video game, but:
The school kid will follow you at a really slow pace, while you have to lead the way. Due to a seriously unclever positioning of the camera, you can t see where your fosterling actually is and therefore you can t protect him from getting beaten up. On the way to the locker he needs to go to the bathroom, so you need to escort him there first. The target location is indicated by a symbol on the in-game radar-like map. Once you are actually there, you realize this is the girls bathroom and your friend will not follow you in there. Of course there is also some arbitrary timer running out, and you are just wondering if a single person has actually tested this or any of the other missions before the game was released.
