6. Bully/Canis Canem Edit - Bullying
Rockstars Grand Theft Auto franchise is a brilliant thing; an endlessly-explorable, fully-realised interactive world that lets you live out whatever twisted escapist fantasies you may have. Anything from high-jacking a truck and ploughing it through rush-hour traffic, to slapping a loudmouth teenager into the sea is fair game, but what when you take that freewheeling structure and apply it to the schoolyard? Bully caused one hell of a din due to the fact that the extremist news media couldnt get their heads around actually looking at what Bully was, instead of imagining that all the destructive trimmings of Grand Theft Auto would be applied to a load of schoolkids. Wont someone think of the children?! they roundly screamed. Well Rockstar already did, creating one of the best games of the generation, telling the story of one Jimmy Hopkins, a parent-ignored rapscallion who was just as much a being torn apart by your average schools hierarchy as anyone else. The beauty of the game was not only in its exquisite Harry Potter-esque soundtrack that perked up and delivered explorative sounds wherever you were inside Bullworth Academy or the accompanying town, but also in the first in-game realisation of what going to school in the modern era is like. Rockstar left the options for bullying up to you, if you wanted to grab one of the younger kids and flush their heads down the toilet or leave them in a locker, you could do, but be aware that any of the older students would also do it to you, not to mention the all-seeing eye of the prefects who were roaming the halls. Punishments were doled out swiftly, as it was extremely hard to do anything close to attacking a member of authority without all hell breaking loose. The story told here was one of empowerment and a relation to real life by way of school-based power fantasy. Did you want to stand up to bullies yourself? Was the idea of siding with the underdogs and having a giant snowball fight one of the warmest memories of an otherwise gray time in education? Bully let you do all this and more, as well as creating a gameplay system that was a perfect blend of GTAs character-action (sans replacing guns with a slingshot), and early PS2 title Prisoner of Wars timekeeping and curfew-avoidance.