Bully: Scholarship Edition

Kind of loving this game, I missed the original on the PS2 so it was great to be able to catch up with it. It feels to me like the spiritual middle ground between San Andreas expansiveness and Grand Theft Auto's focus on story and interpersonal stuff. Having tons of fun with stuff like the paper route and finding rubber bands and transitor radios but jesus are some of the classes you have to attend murdering me. The Music and Art lessons in general have me completely stumped.

Yeah I've had all of 1 problem in my 20 hours of playtime so far and it was with one of the additional missions they've added to the Scholarship Edition. But yeah the game is running fine thanks to the patch.

I'm currently on Chapter 3 and the missions are brilliance. I just finished working for a drunken santa who wanted me to destroy one of his rival's grottos. Which led to me trashing a Christmas Village and booting Christmas Elves across town.

The game is endlessly inventive (the errands have you beating up pirates, exploring ship wrecks, delivering take aways, disecting animals, naming states) and there's nothing like riding through town on a souped up BMX/Go Cart.

The only problem is that the Christmasy missions in Chapter 3 and the snow covered town are making me pine for december. It's also nice to see a modern game which is willing to be devilishly difficult at times. The arcade games and some of the classes (I'm looking at you Music Class 5) are just insanely challenging.

Zombie: If you take the time to get most of your classes done whilst you're confined to the academy you can walk around without issue. Once you've completed Level 5 of a class you don't have to ever attend it again and prefects won't stop you.

I had no problems with Gym, Biology or Chemistry at all. Art was a pain in the ass but I managed to luck out twice. English, Geography and Maths are easy enough but it’s kind of embarrassing to have your limited vocabulary tested by a god damn videogame and I had to look up a map of America for the State lesson in Geography. Music wouldn’t be a problem if the shoulder buttons were a tad more responsive and it probably doesn’t help that I’ve never played Guitar Hero or Rock Band.

Generally speaking the game is easy enough, it just has some ridiculous spikes in difficulty on its sub-games (Fuck You Con-Sumo) which mean that 100% will always be out of my reach.