Bully

po0k

http://www.rockstargames.com/bully/

Rockstar wrote:

The Rockstar tradition of groundbreaking, original gameplay and humorous
tongue-in-cheek storytelling invades an entirely new setting: the schoolyard.

As a mischievous schoolboy, you’ll stand up to bullies, get picked on by teachers, play pranks, win or lose the girl, and ultimately learn to navigate the obstacles of the worst school around, Bullworth Academy - a corrupt and crumbling prep school with an uptight facade.

The story follows Jimmy Hopkins, a teenager who’s been expelled from every school he’s ever attended. Left to fend for himself after his mother abandons him at Bullworth to go on her fifth honeymoon, Jimmy has a whole year at Bullworth ahead of him, working his way up the social ladder of this demented institution of supposed learning, standing up for what he thinks is right and taking on the liars, cheats and snobs who are the most popular members of the student body and faculty. If Jimmy can survive the school year and outsmart his rivals, he could rule the school.

Ready yourself for a hilarious return to campus living with Bully, the outrageously funny debut title from Rockstar Vancouver, available exclusively for PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system this October.

Visit www.rockstargames.com/bully to view today’s world premiere of the first Bully trailer. The official splash also features a selection of new screenshots, game news, Bully desktops, and pre-order options.

Stay tuned for the full official site launch, happening very soon.

Obligatory Jack Thompson MORAL OUTRAGE! #1
Obligatory Jack Thompson MORAL OUTRAGE! #2

This game looks like a bit of fun. Pish off Jack, you opportunistic degenerate.

tba

That looks like good fun, glad Im not in school so this bully trainer cant spill over into real life.

super_furry

Have to say I really like the look of it from the trailer.

corblimey

Oh no, after watching the trailer I spent the afternoon doling out rashers* to everyone who came within 5 feet of my cubicle.

Jack Thompson is right, run away! run away!

* (do children still do rashers?)

tba

You're Asking The Wrong Person

tman

looks like pish judging by the trailer on eurogamer.tv...

po0k

It's an interactive movie, could be a good "stress-relief" game, for when you come home from a trying day and want to paste the walls with schoolbags and elastic neckties...

Sarky

Interactive movie? Didn't anyone learn from the Congo "game"?

Zombrex

Its looks like GTA meets Porky's ... this is going to be brillant!

StarryBud

You get to kiss a girl in it. I want it NOW.

Dermo

i bet Jack Thompson gets paid by the games companies to declare he is outraged just so they can get free publicity and people will buy it

CiDeRmAn

Well, to be honest, up to now even the realistic violence portrayed in modern video games have been wrapped up in fanciful, unlikely plots, the gangsters of the GTA series, the killer in Manhunt etc. therefore its relevance to our everyday experience is muted, I mean how often does one find oneself beset by pipe carrying lunatics as in Condemned, while the violence was realistic and brutal it was divorced from our everyday experiences.
Bully, on the other hand, seems to be set within an everyday world, one all to real to a large no. of kids out there, the violent acts portrayed therein could be all to familiar to the victims and perpetrators of such acts, creating feels of dread and excitement respectively.
Now i know I haven't yet seen or played the game, but please don't allow a firebrand publicity seeker like Thompson detract from real concerns of parents out there.
The fact is that adult orientated games are sold right alongside games for kids so you have Manhunt and Mario potentially next to each other, surely this is something that could aid parents, often ignorant of the games content, enabling them to make informeed choices about what their kids are playing.
Perhaps shop staff could be more insistent in their advice to parents sucumbing to a childs demands, I watched a parent yesterday buying GTA SA for a 12 year old, regardless of how we feel about censorship thats an 18s game going home with a mother who doesn't know better, if she did she wouldn't have bought it.
You wouldn't want 18s movies on the TVs in a childs bedroom, why should the situation be any different for videogames?

Trode

CiDeRmAn wrote:

The fact is that adult orientated games are sold right alongside games for kids so you have Manhunt and Mario potentially next to each other, surely this is something that could aid parents, often ignorant of the games content, enabling them to make informeed choices about what their kids are playing.

It's an interesting idea, a game store segregated by content or genre rather than by platform, but is it really practical? I can't imagine that many people enter thinking "I'd like a shmup/strategy" or "historical/sci-fi" over people thinking "I'd like a new game for my Atari Jaguar", so the forcing the latter group to examine every shelf until they find a game they want is counter-productive. Unless you segregate by both criteria, which would result in mass confusion and headaches for both staff and customer.

CiDeRmAn wrote:

Perhaps shop staff could be more insistent in their advice to parents sucumbing to a childs demands, I watched a parent yesterday buying GTA SA for a 12 year old, regardless of how we feel about censorship thats an 18s game going home with a mother who doesn't know better, if she did she wouldn't have bought it.
You wouldn't want 18s movies on the TVs in a childs bedroom, why should the situation be any different for videogames?

Then don't put a TV in their bedroom. Or more relevantly, make sure you know what games your child has or is playing. For the record, I've seen plenty of staff in shops inform parents when a game is unsuitable for children. Sometimes they're listened to, sometimes not, but in the end it's always up to the parents. There's a weird dichotomy developing these days, on one hand parents are demanding their children be protected from the world to ludicrous degrees, on the other they're assuming that this is done by everyone else but themselves, allowing them to fly into a righteous frenzy when little Timmy sees a naked booby or decapitation, even when, with a little effort and more attention to their child, they could have prevented it.

Hands up who here never saw anything they weren't supposed to as a child, from an issue of Playboy to a Friday the 13th movie. Are you warped or damaged from this experience?

CiDeRmAn

That I was or was not damaged by the experience of seeing material beyond my age isn't the point, the point is the age system is there not to deny people access but to protect the weaker members of our society from exposure to material that may harm them.
Most people, being well balanced, are easily capable of knowing right from wong, fantasy from reality, real from the unreal but the fact is that there are some that cannot, and this is far more likely to occur to those who are underage and while we are, by all commonsense, prohibited from blocking material to those judged to be adults we do have the power to ensure that material for children is properly aimed at children, not created to take advantage of them, certainly ask any developer of mature software, Resi 4, GTA, they will be very clear where they stand and that the software shouldn't be played by children.
Certainly exposure to moments of unsuitable material is inevitable and with the guidance of parents or similarly responsible adult can be safely dealt with, the problem arises with constant exposure to mature themes.
It worries me that you don't think that a childs exposure to decapitation is a problem, I can only hope that your attitude to exposure to, say the beheading of capitives in Iraq would be a little different. But the point there is a 10 year old may not be able to make the distinction.
I am a commintted gamer, have been for at least 25 of my 34 years and now have a 3 year old son, while I can handle the notion of him wanting to watch Aliens with me when he's 15 or finding a copy of Playboy in his room while he's in his teens, I can handle it by engaging with him and letting him know I am there if he has any questions about anything that worries him, however what I could not easily deal with would be his exposure outside of my control of violence, sex and all the other unfortunate facts of life that we can only hope kids won't have to know about until they are old enough.
Parents place TVs in kids rooms now as a matter of routine, along with the games console and the DVD player, although in this day and age they are one and the same thing.
Yes the responsibilty rests with parents to ensure that all material being fed to their children are suitable and as long as most parents are of an age ignorant of Videogames then children will have the upper hand and use this lack of knowledge to their advantage, I mean most parents out there see videogames as little more than Sonic and Space Invaders so how damaging can that be?
The notion of separating the adult games from the rest isn't so untenable, in Japan just such a system has been introduced where 18/R titles are held behind the counter, while that is a drastic measure it is in the country with the most wide spread acceptance of Videogames as an entertainment for all, over here the simple measure of making 18s titles "top shelf" items would surely suffice, providing a handy indicator of the content there in.

rogue-entity

I actually did a project on this, ages back for the Esat Young scientist. And I did find that an overwhelmingly large percentage of parents were completly ignorant of the rating system on games. Most parents would have thought nothing about getting GTA for their young children.

stevenmu

Trode wrote:

Hands up who here never saw anything they weren't supposed to as a child, from an issue of Playboy to a Friday the 13th movie. Are you warped or damaged from this experience?

When I was young Playboy warped my fragile little mind, and now I want to have sex with every beautiful women I see :eek:



The problem I have with JT's rants is that he is trying to remove responsibility from the parents and place it on the game developers. It's not really all that hard for parents, everybody these days knows what the ratings symbols means, even if they don't know anything about games, they've been around for years on videos and DVDs.

Perhaps shop staff could be more insistent in their advice to parents sucumbing to a childs demands, I watched a parent yesterday buying GTA SA for a 12 year old, regardless of how we feel about censorship thats an 18s game going home with a mother who doesn't know better, if she did she wouldn't have bought it.

It's very posible that the mother was well informed and knew exactly what she was buying. If not she still should have had the abillity to see and ignore the 18's sign on it (and iirc the one on the SA box was proudly displayed). It's not the shopkeepers job to talk an adult out of purchasing something that they want to buy.

The seperation idea could be a good one though, even if it was just a case of putting the 18s games on the top shelf.

Trode

CiDeRmAn wrote:

That I was or was not damaged by the experience of seeing material beyond my age isn't the point, the point is the age system is there not to deny people access but to protect the weaker members of our society from exposure to material that may harm them.
Most people, being well balanced, are easily capable of knowing right from wong, fantasy from reality, real from the unreal but the fact is that there are some that cannot, and this is far more likely to occur to those who are underage and while we are, by all commonsense, prohibited from blocking material to those judged to be adults we do have the power to ensure that material for children is properly aimed at children, not created to take advantage of them, certainly ask any developer of mature software, Resi 4, GTA, they will be very clear where they stand and that the software shouldn't be played by children.
Certainly exposure to moments of unsuitable material is inevitable and with the guidance of parents or similarly responsible adult can be safely dealt with, the problem arises with constant exposure to mature themes.

That's what I'm saying. Children will see this stuff, their parents can't watch them 24/7, but it's not the end of the world if they do. It's a part of growing up. Obviously constant, unregulated exposure might be harmful, but any halfway concerned parent won't let it get to that stage. As long as they're aware at all times what is and isn't allowable in real life, they'll be alright.

CiDeRmAn wrote:

It worries me that you don't think that a childs exposure to decapitation is a problem, I can only hope that your attitude to exposure to, say the beheading of capitives in Iraq would be a little different. But the point there is a 10 year old may not be able to make the distinction.

Yeah, I meant fake ones. Children have been exposed to pretty dark things through the ages, from fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel and Ali Baba to Roald Dahl stories. All of these things contain violent, gruesome deaths.
I think having children able to engage in fantasy, even the darker side of it, helps them distinguish it from reality. I'd rather have a kid pretend to be Terminator and kill his friends than realise the same desire by torturing a real cat, for example. Of course, I'm not a child psychologist or anything, so YMMV.

CiDeRmAn wrote:

Parents place TVs in kids rooms now as a matter of routine, along with the games console and the DVD player, although in this day and age they are one and the same thing.
Yes the responsibilty rests with parents to ensure that all material being fed to their children are suitable and as long as most parents are of an age ignorant of Videogames then children will have the upper hand and use this lack of knowledge to their advantage, I mean most parents out there see videogames as little more than Sonic and Space Invaders so how damaging can that be?
The notion of separating the adult games from the rest isn't so untenable, in Japan just such a system has been introduced where 18/R titles are held behind the counter, while that is a drastic measure it is in the country with the most wide spread acceptance of Videogames as an entertainment for all, over here the simple measure of making 18s titles "top shelf" items would surely suffice, providing a handy indicator of the content there in.

The problem with it is, as you acknowledge, the wilful ignorance of the parents. You can't get a much better indicator than the staff actually telling the parents the game is unsuitable for kids, but they go ahead and buy it anyway, because hey, all games are Sonic or Mario anyway, right? Childrens toys. In these circumstances, I don't see top shelf or behind the counter being more than a 'Daddy, will you buy me this?' away. It works in Japan because games are such a large part of the cultural landscape that they aren't dismissed as childish playthings, and the parents know as much about what they're buying as the children.

evad_lhorg

dont like that look of this tbh

CiDeRmAn

I guess until the current gen of gamers grows up, certainly those who have played PS1 back in the mid to late 90s gets into their 30's when we can, perhaps, see some more responible purchasing on the part of parents.
I don't, however, believe the vendor can be held totally unresposible for all of this though either, its a pity there isn't an accurate breakdown of the age demographic of GTA players, perhaps a comparision of the breakdown of ages of players of the PS2 and the no.s of GTA sold would be illuminating.
Anyway, I am no stick in the mud, just a dedicated gamer, my wife would rather mediacated gamer, and now a father, I would be interested, when the time comes in the type of material being sold to my son. I can only hope more parents get the message too.
On a similar topic, I was working one Christmas in Gamestop and a gentleman came in and asked about a console for his son, I ran through the various options and packs available and then asked for the age of the child so as to ascertain what titles would be best suited, he says "3 years of age", I told him that really a console wasn't suitable for a child that age, formats too fragile and that there would be little for a child that age to get from videogames, perhaps he could buy him something else, he gave me a scowl and left the shop. Now in retrospect I could have phrased it a tad better but honestly buying a 3 year old a PS2, was he quite mad?

Crash

No, he probably had convinced the wife to buy a ps2 for the kid and had planned on playing it himself - you ruined his christmas

CiDeRmAn

Good, I hope she bought the child a Vtech doohickey, Like to see him pick up virtual hookers on that, can see it now, him trying to convince the toy to let him spell "whore", ah well, Rockstar have almost never scored an own goal so lets hope Bully is an excellent game, I know fond memories of Skool Daze are probably at the forefront of most gamers minds, at least most gamers my age anyway, thought the second one was better though, getting into the girls school and causing mischief, sweet.