I'm putting in two to three hours a night on this one, which explains why I haven't done much weblogging this week. This is precisely the kind of game I like: big open world, lots of little things to do, no forced linear timetable. I think it took me eight hours to open up Chapter Two (which begins with a portentous school-gates-opening-to-the-town scene), and most reviews seem to suggest it takes about three. What can I say; I like screwing around in these games.

It's GTA. But that's nothing to be ashamed of. You'll probably recognize some of the motion-capture. This is a clone, dressed to a theme, done by the guys who made the original. I would like one of these, oh, every other year. With the pattern of incremental tweaks and change-ups from GTA3 to Vice City to San Andreas to Bully, I just can't see tiring of it. I am the demo.

So far - and like I said, I just opened up the gates to the outside world - Bully is smaller in scale than GTA, but looks a lot nicer. Most characters actually have separate fingers, as compared to GTA's oven mitt standard. More importantly, every single doofus you'll see walking around the hallowed grounds of Bullworth Academy is a unique individual. The game isn't just randomly generating STUDENT MODEL #053 and TEACHER MODEL #006... these are named, differentiated people. Take that leggy redhead there; I chose her as my main squeeze. Whenever I see her, we totally make out, and my health bar goes up. And I never even learned her name until she popped up in one of the game's regular missions. (Christy.)

And then there's Trent, this blonde thug who comes after me whenever he sees me walk by. He looks like the older, untalented brother on Home Improvement. I have beaten the crap out of that kid more times than I can count, but he still seeks me out. I suppose we're archenemies or something.

What makes it intriguing is that, if I spot that jerk hanging out by one of the school buildings with his sycophantic pals, I can decide whether I want to risk his attention or not. If my health is low, maybe I go the long way to classes. If I feel like throwing some heat, maybe I charge into the lug. What I usually like to do is bait him into tossing a punch just as a prefect walks into view. Those officious bastards will take down any bully, male or female.

Tonight I broke into some kid's locker and found a Kick Me sign... so I tiptoed up behind Trent and slapped it onto his back. Almost immediately, some of his clod friends walked over and kicked him. Hilarious.

The whole going to classes thing seems to be relegated to Chapter One. As in GTA, the game runs day/night cycles, and you're expected to attend two classes a day at specific times. You have half an hour to get there, or you're declared truant and the prefects start scouting for you. The four starter classes are Chemistry (button pressing mini-game), Gym (alternates between wrestling lessons and dodgeball competitions), English (a word-making game that would likely be less difficult for me if I enjoyed Scrabble), and Art (which, astonishingly, is a ripoff of the classic arcade game Qix. Doesn't anybody own that?) You can skip classes - by simply not bothering to walk into the room - but you just rile up the prefects and it's probably better to get them out of the way, since you're rewarded with skill upgrades. I still have to do English 5, because that scrambled word thing is rough. How many words can you make out of the letters in "crayon"?

The only thing that bothers me is that you have to get back to your dorm room by 2am or so, or you pass out and wake up in bed anyway.

That, and the main character is horribly ugly. He's like a malformed monkey, short and brutish. I can see why, when I first walked through the school gates as the "new kid," the first NPC sound sample I heard was "I hate you!"

The "collector's edition" was highlighted by the dodgeball, which is actually a real dodgeball. It comes deflated, because everyone in America has ball-inflation apparatus readily available. F. Looks like it will be nine to ten inches when I finally do find an air compressor somewhere. The comic inside the package is an embarrassment to the word. You can't call an accordian-folded single sheet of long paper a comic, I'm sorry. Also, it makes no sense, and makes heavy use of repeated drawings... which, as we know, really grinds me. The special locker-shaped packaging, while admittedly nice, is still just packaging. And you get a Rockstar sticker, just like the Hot Topic staff already enjoys.