Bully on the Wii is a very interesting sandbox game complete with tacked-on motion controls and wasted opportunities.

User Rating: 7.5 | Bully: Scholarship Edition WII
School is right up there with long lines and office cubicles; it's one of the last places you'd want to be in a video game. After all, games are supposed to entertain, right? Bully: Scholarship Edition is set at a boarding school called Bullworth Academy, and could have very well been a complete snoozefest. But instead, it's an intriguing open-world game that just goes to show how much a few fistfights, stink bombs, and wedgies can spice things up.

As the game booted up, I found myself in control of Jimmy Hopkins, a 15 year old kid with a talent for getting into trouble. His mom and new stepdad decided to dump him at a boarding school while they went off on their honeymoon, and he's not too pleased. After becoming acquainted with the principal and several places on campus, I was free to wreak havoc on my fellow classmates, the school's staff, and the citizens of Bullworth Town.

Those I could torment were quite a crew. I encountered nerds, jocks, bullies, greasers, and preppies in the student body. With the staff, I had to deal with a perverted gym teacher, a nasty lunch lady, an alcoholic English teacher, and many others. In a similar fashion to other Grand Theft Auto-style games, much of the game involved taking on certain jobs. These often had an impact on how much the social factions of the school liked me; protecting a nerd from bullies upped my status with the nerds, egging some preppy kids' houses made it my status with them go down, etc. Other jobs would just give rewards: saving a kid from greasers let me get my mitts on a skateboard and breaking in to the girls' dorm to steal panties got me money from the gym teacher.

But also like most open-=world games, I didn't have to follow the jobs religiously. I was free to take a time-out and just goof off. Starting fights, smashing cars, nailing people with the slingshot, and participating in bike races were only a few activities I took part in. Bullworth Academy and the surrounding town were pretty big places, so there was always quite a bit to do.

Bully isn't without problems, however. Since the game's world wasn't exactly small, I spent a lot of time on the skateboard or on a bike. The controls for both were too imprecise for me to be able to navigate well (especially with the skateboard), so making sharp turns or going into smlal spaces usually planted Jimmy's face in a wall. Motion controls weren't always very good, particularly with aiming the slingshot. More often than not I found myself admiring the dust on Jimmy's shoes, and had a hard time to moving from this position. Occasionally the controls would cut out altogether, and the buttons would refuse to work correctly. I couldn't acquaint faces with my fist for certain periods of time and would let go of an enemy the instant I grabbed him for some reason.

Motion controls in Bully are otherwise functional, but they seem to be there just because they can be. They don't bring any significant improvements to the game at all, except for re-living the childhood fantasy of taking a swing at the teacher. The only time they're put to good use is in the minigames that serve as classes, and even then only in biology's dissection game and music's rhythm challenges.

Combat works pretty well, but it's insultingly easy. Fighting was controlled, for the most part, by swinging the Wii remote and nunchuk to throw punches. If a fight couldn't be won by flailing my arms like a drunk taking on a bartender who refused to give him another round, I simply had to grab my opponent and flail my arms while holding the grab button. Once I learned some more advanced attacks the whole system provided almost no challenge whatsoever unless I decided to take on large groups.

The whole concept of navigating the social hierarchy in school by taking jobs to make a group's disposition toward you better or worse was a good idea, but it really wasn't used well enough. Bully, despite being an open-world game, never gives you much freedom when it comes to this. I had to take jobs in a linear order, with the only differences being that I could choose which one to take on first, knowing I would have to do all of them eventually. There was no way to skillfully avoid or take on jobs to change the dispositions of fellow students any way I saw fit, which felt like a wasted opportunity. At the end of every chapter the particular group I was up against ended up having a completely positive attitude toward Jimmy anyway, so I came off feeling that there was really no point to the whole system.

"Scholarship Edition" definitely makes this sound like it's the best overall version of Bully. While that may be true, it's not by much. This version of Bully feels more like a port than anything else, with a few extras not seen in the original version thrown in to justify charging full price for it. Those who already played the original probably won't find much reason to buy this version of Bully; there's not enough new here for a full price to be a good price.

But for all its fault, the one thing tying Bully's loose ends together was the story, characters, and the humor of the whole package. With a mixture of poking fun at the usual stereotypes for schools, slapstick, one-liners, and great voice-acting it all came to a satisfying package. Each of the goofy characters was perfectly cast, and the script the actors read from was a very funny one. Every character sounded as I expected them to, and spoke dialogue that felt natural.

School is one place few video games dare to go, but Bully: Scholarship Edition took me to one of the most fun settings I've been to in a game. With humor, a satirical world, and all kinds of mischief it succeeded in crafting one of the most interesting open-world games I've ever played, it did so in one of the most boring places people can imagine.