And not to pre-order a PS3.

I went in to pre-order the collectors' edition of Bully, which drops next week. This EB exclusive comes with a limited edition comic book (who cares) and a Bulworth Academy dodge ball (awesome). I haven't actually seen the dodge ball, but I hope it is an actual playground-legal dodge ball, at least a 9-incher. Rhon suspects it will be an inflatable bait-and-switch, on the grounds that something flat would be easier to ship.

That's the kind of stuff you need to do to get me to pre-order something. Throw in something crazy like a dodge ball.

Coming from the GTA guys, Bully has been a beleaguered title right from jump street. It's been villified and broadly attacked by the usual groups of thought-free morons who apparently found themselves with empty time since we're between Harry Potter releases. The general assumption is that, in Bully, you get to play as a bully and beat up (and possibly kill) little kids. And while I would not wholesale abandon such a concept as a potential video game, it turns out that Bully is emphatically not that game. Bully will have its sordid spots (like the already verified Panty Raid level) but the game actually revolves around you smacking down bullies and their cliques in the name of schoolyard justice. And all with a T rating... although the Concerned Mothers As Represented By Career Politicians of the world will quickly point out that the ESRB rating doesn't mean much.

The smartest thing I've yet read about the game comes from Kotaku:

So what does this say about Rockstar? I posit that this was some serious ninja shit by the R* boys, and that they knew exactly what they were doing with this title, and the near complete dearth of actual marketing. I think they knew that all they had to do was whisper the sweet B word into the ether, and it would eventually reach the right ears: ears attached to empty heads and load mouths. And I'm not talking about bloggers, shockingly.

Rockstar has struck a huge blow for the cause. They gave the enemy a shovel and just watched them dig. When the game comes out it will be important to keep covering it, rubbing it in that the Jackasses were wrong.

This will be the best post-mortem interview ever, and I hope OPM is ready to go to press on it. Can't you just see one of the Rockstar guys begin his paragraph with something like "So we wanted to make a game that we knew would piss everybody off, something where they could jump to a very logical and insidious conclusion, and then have them turn out to be totally wrong. And that's how the Bully project started."

I'll let you know how it goes next week, but I'm expecting big things. Big GTA things.

Also: it occurred to me that a sizable portion of the goons slurping up the PS3 pre-orders could be bleeding edge cinemaphiles who are convinced they're getting a dirt cheap blu-ray player. These are the same asses who still have stacks of laser discs, and they're taking PS3s out of the mouths of hungry gamers.

Who probably just intend to turn them around on eBay, come to think of it.