Bully: Scholarship Edition (Wii)

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Thou art hero, Bully says. Enjoy the adoration of scantily clad schoolgirls and the respect of incontinent nerds.

Thou art villain, Bully says. Have fun on the riding lawnmower doing penance for your many and varied crimes.

In Bully, players get to be hero and villain, savior of the school and scourge of Bullworth Academy. As Jimmy Hopkins, equal parts saint and sinner, they get to take the role of a troubled 15-year-old boy dropped off at Bullworth Academy, aka Hell on Earth.

As the wayward Hopkins, players get to perform an inordinate amount of tasks including kissing girls and boys; lumping people up in the honored tradition of the Marquess de Queensbury; smiting suckers with itching powder, snowballs or firecrackers; delivering newspapers; stealing girls' panties; committing felonious acts such as theft, defacement of property, and criminal trespass; stuffing nerds into lockers or trash cans; doling out Indian burns or wedgies; and, oh yeah, attending classes. The game presents a great amount of freedom to players, giving them an open world to run around in (and wreck) while still providing them with a suitable amount of structure; Bullworth may be hugely lawless, but its prefects will still attempt to crush Hopkins like a bug should he assault a girl or skip out on his twice-daily classes.

Here, players can shape Hopkins into either the savior of the weak and downtrodden or the oppressor of such. The game sets up a nice factions-based system where nerds are pitted against jocks, greasers set upon preppies, and so forth. Hopkins' popularity within the factions can be tracked throughout the game and it's possible to play one faction off against another. Bullies tend to look upon nerds, say, as easy pickings and will largely ignore Hopkins when more delicious prey awaits.

Scholarship Edition compiles the entirety of the original PlayStation 2 Bully. The Wii version adds eight new missions to the mix, as well as four new, mini-game-based classes: Biology, Math, Music and Geography. The game makes fine use of the Wii remote, too, allowing players to swing the motion-sensitive controller to throw punches or, say, use it as a dissection tool in the Biology-based challenges. To its credit, the Wii version of Scholarship Edition seems to suffer a bit less from the frame rate issues that tend to plague the Xbox 360 version of the game. It is also more stable than its Xbox 360 counterpart -- which Rockstar has vowed to patch in the near future. Graphically, however, the Wii version is a step down from the Xbox 360 version, with muddy textures and a general low-resolution malaise.

A sharp, smart third-person adventure, Scholarship finds its heart early on. Hopkins sets out to unite Bullworth under the gleaming banner of peace, even if he happens to do it with liberal (perhaps excessive) amounts of violence. The game is goofy enough to drop a mortified Hopkins into the school Christmas pageant, asking him to hammer out a passable version of Tchaikovsky's "Nutcracker;" it's ballsy enough to have Hopkins smash up a Christmas display while avoiding a series of hostile midgets dressed up as elves; it's suitably fine reveling in its grossness, showing the lunch lady hocking loogies into the cafeteria stew "for flavor;" and it's kindhearted enough to present Hopkins defending the gross lunch lady as she goes on a date with the chemistry teacher -- the same one she will later drug and drag off to an unknown, but probably horrifying, fate.