I picked up a copy of Rockstar’s Bully today. Basically it’s a game where you play a punk miscreant at an extremely tough boarding school, and you get to do more or less whatever the hell you want, and it’s supposed to be fun. Fortunately, so far, it is. :)
I’m a few hours in so far and I’m loving it. The controls are tight, the art is surprisingly good for a R* game, the gameplay is there, the sense of humor and general R* level of polish and style is evident in every level of the game and it’s an absolute marvel. More games should kick this much ass. I feel happier about the world of game development when I see things this good being accomplished!
I think this is the first game I’ve bought since the original Dawn of War came out and I’m really happy with it. The game’s peppered with good decisions, and so far doesn’t seem to fall victim to the same bullshit that makes all the GTA games kick ass to a point, and then becoming absolutely fucking unplayable. I’m very happy for R* and think they’re doing a great job. :)
My only two nitpicks so far are
1) The deeply, deeply flawed camera system during chases. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been running from a prefect when the camera and my controls suddenly reverse on me for two seconds, then reverse again, then keep reversing uncontrollably until I get caught. I’ve almost snapped my controller in half with my bare hands half a dozen times, wishing it was that particular programmer’s sternum. :)
2) The pisspoor explanation of the underlying rules of the Art class. I didn’t know intersecting your line-in-progress would be an instant kill until I’d already failed it four separate times on Art 2 for no readily apparent reason. I thought simply colliding with the ‘enemy’ pieces would be enough to kill you, not your line itself. If you’d explained it better, I’d have beaten it by now. But no. So, yeah, thanks.
Admittedly, point 2 really is a pretty minor nitpick in the context of Bully, but all R* games I’ve played to date inevitably introduce some absolutely fundamental failure to explain a control system or present achievable goals that ALWAYS turn into shelf moments for me. GTA 3’s first “deliver 4 billion cars undamaged in 0.2 seconds” missions, then Vice City’s later missions (oddly, I forget specifics here), and ALL the flying missions in San Andreas… all instant murder of fun, can never touch the game again moments. It’s so frustrating because the games are SO good, and I can groove along with each of them to a point, but then they introduce these unbelievably boneheaded design failures that make the game impossible to enjoy and totally ruin them for me.
So yeah, I really hope Bully doesn’t fall victim to the same fault. So far, it’s incredible, and it’d be great if that wouldn’t change. :)
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October 27th, 2006 at 7:37 am
I’m looking forward to giving Bully a shot soon. As much as I like Rockstar’s games, you’re right about the inevitable appearance of some new and ill-explained mechanic sapping enjoyment from the otherwise cohesive and consistent game. In San Andreas, the girlfriends were the most exemplary instance. In Liberty City Stories, I just had a very long evening trying to beat a level that required “stealth,” but implemented it differently than other GTA games. In Red Dead Revolver, mission completion parameters for GOOD vs. EXCELLENT results are not shown, but completion under EXCELLENT rewards players with abilities that make subsequent missions easier. This wouldn’t be so bad except that the Accuracy rating is affected by shots that hit a character after he’s expired, but critical hits and death anims are very similar (or shared), so it is impossible to tell if you should stop shooting or not. Why not just count post-mortem hits? I mean, THEY HIT, right?
It’s sad to hear Bully continues this “if only they’d spent another month on it” trend of need for tuning…
October 30th, 2006 at 10:21 pm
I need this game
http://gaygamer.net/index.php?id=1609
November 10th, 2006 at 4:59 am
The “art” minigame is basically the old arcade game Qix. I wonder if they just sort of assumed people would know the rules from that, the same sort of way you don’t generally explain the rules to Pac-Man…
I found the “shop” minigame the most annoying, because it seemed to fail me very quickly and I had a devil of a time differentiating the clockwise and counter-clockwise rotation moves.
I’m well into Chapter 3 of the game and still digging it. Heck, they are still introducing new mechanics (albeit much more infrequently now)! The way in which they change the world over time for the seasons, etc. is quite effective.
November 15th, 2006 at 4:06 pm
Brian, that Red Dead Revolver example you gave is absolutely braindead… I can’t believe they’d do that. How ridiculous.
Chris, I knew you’d link that.
Rob, yeah, I found out later from someone else that that’s what the deal there was. But it was just obscure enough that I didn’t know it. :) I never had consoles or anything as a kid, so I missed out on a *lot* of that action.
I stopped playing the game myself right after chapter two. Not sure why, just got distracted by something else in my daily life and lost interest in it. Oh well. :/
You still playing?