Please hire me Vol. 2 - Thoughts on Rockstar Vancouver’s Bully for the Playstation 2

Let’s talk for a moment here about Rockstar Vancouver’s Playastation 2 title Bully. I’m not going to be presumptuous, but I have the feeling someone over at that fine Vancouver establishment has played a few dating simulations in their time. Now, let me try and explain why I think that is.

It’s not because of the go-on-missions-and-smooch-girls thing, that really doesn’t factor in here. If anything the girlfriend system is a byproduct of the school setting and a precursor to GTAIV’s system of relationships. I think dating sims are involved because Bully has a clock.

The protagonists in the Grand Theft Auto games were, from what I can tell, insomniac speed freaks. You could stay up day in and day out, and complete missions from your equally-insomniac heroin-shooting mob bosses until the player got bored or needed to save their game. It sort of works in a GTA game, where we expect the criminals to never sleep and that nefarious deeds can happen at any point in the day. Without having played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and only four awkward car-crashing minutes of Grand Theft Auto IV I will say this: The clock in Grand Theft Auto games doesn’t mean anything. It’s a dial that takes up a modest amount of HUD space in exchange for letting you know when things are going to get dark.

Bully attempts to re-contextualize Grand Theft Auto’s features in a different setting. Machine guns and RPG launchers are turned into non-lethal spud cannons and bottle rocket launchers, though for the most part you’ll just be using a slingshot and prank items like stink bombs and Home Alone-style marbles. Mob bosses become clique leaders, corrupt cops become corrupt teachers and so on and so forth. The game doesn’t try to hide the implications of future criminal activity because of the social environment imposed on the students at Bullworth Academy. It’s actually a rather sympathetic view of delinquent activity: When you put together a bunch ofunmedicatedociopaths and hive-minded students with inept teachers you might get a few bad eggs out of the bunch.

But the clock. See, the clock makes a difference in Bully because your protagonist is only fifteen years old (at least that’s what the final chapter of the game’s main story told me, I had no idea prior). Teenagers are, apparently, not speed-freak mobsters and are incapable of staying up past 2:00 AM without passing out. Passing out means you lose some cash and wake up again in the morning wherever you were that night (or at least that’s how I remembered it, the experience was so harrowing I shan’t ever allow myself to stay up late again). So the game creates an internal schedule. You wake up in the morning, and all of your business has to be done by 2:00 AM, where at which point you should probably return to a bed (conveniently located next to a save point and the character’s wardrobe). Everyone else runs on a schedule too. Teachers and students won’t request missions during their school hours, and nobody will offer missions in the wee hours of the morning. This is where the dating sim thing kicks in.

That’s because Bully is a game that runs primarily on a schedule. You wake up and you have options: take a mission, go to class, earn some money, or explore. Class is a good idea, the bonuses will certainly be useful in taking up your other options. In between classes, you might have just enough time to start a food fight or take up a small money-earning errand, then it’s back to class again or play hooky. Taking on missions takes up time as well, fail once or twice and you’ve likely ran out of time for the entire day. In a way this makes a lot more sense than it ever did in the Grand Theft Auto games. Why would a mob boss allow a failing criminal to come back hour after hour and retry the same task in a single day? There are still holes in the logic (why don’t any of the mission-givers get tired of your ineptitude?) but at the very least giving them a day to breath gives it some internal consistency.

It’s not like failure is going to be a huge issue in Bully anyway, as the entire game is pretty easy. I retried missions all of about ten times, and most of those failures arose from accidentally running over a cop with my bicycle and getting promptly arrested (there are no “accidents” in Bully’s moral code, again with the criminal genesis thing).

So, everything you do in the game is on a schedule. Periodically check back into your room, sleep and return. The pattern is pretty familiar to anybody who has played a pre-Final Fantasy RPG or post-Final Fantasy dating simulation. The gist of it is that you only have a limited set of actions that you can perform in a single day before you’ve used up all of those actions. In RPGs this usually revolved around your health and magic, and at the end of a long grind session you had to return to an inn or whathaveyou and rest. Dating sims applied the same logic, but simplified the actions themselves. One “day” might consist of just one event with a person before the “day” ends and you have to start the process anew. This gameplay hook is in itself pretty gratifying. It creates a rhythm of action-reward-do action a little better-bigger reward-etc. that is inherently addictive. The key to making it good is to make each of those “actions” you take in a “day” substantial. RPGs fail and succeed to whatever extent it feels like your characters grew in stats that day or if the rewards (money, equipment, fancy-pants items) lived up to the work. Persona 3 manages to pull it off pretty effectively, using a transparent take on the dating-sim daily routine while adding in a competent dungeon-crawling element that is intimately linked to whatever you do in the more dating sim-y parts. At night you slay evil hellspawn, and in the day you perform little actions that make your hellspawn beat up the evil hellspawn a bit better (not too much, not too little) each time.

At the heart of it, there’s comparatively just not a lot to do in a game-day of Bully. The classes, in fact, might be the meatiest parts. The minigames involved in each one are just short enough and just challenging enough that the reward feels just right, and unlike the missions your classes aren’t confined to the restrictions of the clock (for the most part), so no matter how long you take in a game of dodgeball it will only be one and a half game-world hours. The missions themselves, by contrast, earn you a little bit of money, some entertaining character interaction/dialogue, and “respect points” that amount to nothing more than “now the assholes that I took the mission from won’t pester me as I walk around town.” Now this wouldn’t really be that big of an issue if the in-game money had any in-game value. I’m racking my brain here and in the nooks and crannies of this game I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but here’s just about everything you can do with cash:

1) Buy clothes
2) Buy haircuts
3) Play carnival games
4) Play arcade games
5) Buy supplies
6) Bribe the occasional kid in a mission

Let’s go in reverse order here. Six is hardly ever an issue, and even if you can’t cough up the tiny amount of money it takes to bribe a kid you could always beat them up in Bully’s delightful The Warriors-style combat engine (which is in all likelihood the highlight of the game). Five is hardly ever an issue, as after completing some of the Chemistry classes you can get every item you could possibly want for free from your dorm room (even the overpowered bottle rocket launchers and potato cannons). Three and four sort of solve themselves: They’re not very fun. The carnival games yield some rewards - more clothes and funny hats - but by their own merit they aren’t very fun.

So that leaves us with character customization. At one point in the third chapter of Bully’s five-act show I had over $500 of game-cash running around from doing missions and the occasional odd-job (lawn-mowing is just as boring in a videogame as it is in real life, it would seem). With nothing to do, I cleaned out the in-game clothing stores of anything that seemed interesting. There were some gems, shirts and hoodies and pants that could make my character look like a thug or a jock or a hipster asshole, even some jackets and shirts that were lifted from the GTAIII and Vice City protagonists. Other than finding ironic and silly ways to dress my lil’ thug with a heart of gold there wasn’t much to do with all that in-game money that the protagonist seems to care about. This blows a hole in the entire game-day structure and makes it infinitely less rewarding to continue your daily tasks. Its not like Bully needed to have customizable player stats or a double-jump move that you could “buy” from a local gym or multiple combat styles that you could train in at a local dojo, just something to make the in-game money mean something. Hell, just copy Final Fantasy 8’s Triple Triad card game or something equally addictive and unrelated to the main plot and you’re set.

Bully fails as a videogame for only being as fun as your conscience will allow it to be. Nothing in Bully is more fun than it sounds (or sometimes as fun). There is no shortage of things to do: starting food fights, riding roller coasters, playing carnival games, shooting assholes with your slingshot, going on a paper route, racing bicycles, playing dodgebgall, whatever. But the amount of fun you’ll have with these activities is likely determined by how cool you thought they were when I listed them right there. There’s not a whole lot of snap or crunch in any of the gameplay of these portions in of themselves. Playing the shooting gallery game at the carnival is less satisfying than the training mode of just about any console FPS, playing dodgeball requires infinitely less thought and skill than a game of Kunio-style Dodgeball on the Neo-Geo, and bike racing is… well that’s actually about as good as any bike racing game will get actually. Your mileage will vary entirely on how cool you think it is to be a teenager rebelliously doing all of these things in a “living, breathing” game world that you actively run around in all the time. In that regard, Bully is more of an RPG than anything that I’ve listed here so far. The more you role-play the protagonist, the more fun you’ll likely be having (because I certainly didn’t have my opinion of food fights change after seeing them in Bully).

Where Bully doesn’t fail is in the dialogue and character interactions themselves. Your classmates and teachers are all ridiculous caricatures with flashes of truth amongst all of the PG-13 character development. Hearing the protagonist’s rival blame his problems on “western civilization” as a whole is relateable, ridiculous, hilarious, and depressing. The way the game skirts around and addresses teenage sexuality with its feminine characters is equal parts Saved By the Bell and “wait did they just imply…” Some of the best dialogue actually comes in the form of conversation snippets that can be heard as you wander around campus. Jocks and preps say dumb and obnoxious ha-ha sorts of things, and your nerds will talk about.. . their moms, I guess, but amidst it all you might hear something about one of the teachers or another character in the game. This is the closest the game comes to doing something really interesting with the videogame medium, by allowing the player to pick up on clues within the environment and through game-player interaction actually develop their own concept of characters and places without being told what to think by any of the other narrative outlets.

These little narrative flourishes (along with that delightful reimagining of 16-bit brawler combat) are probably the high points of the Bully experience. Everything else in the game is a competent (but never excellent) facsimile of activities that sound daring and exciting within the context of the game’s setting but never really deliver on the fun. What this amounts to is a game that features both a panty raid and a sweaty perverted gym teacher, and interacting with the latter is way more interesting than playing the former. How that came to be is sort of incredible in its own right, but a bit of a travesty too.

Things your animated mascot can do to appear more human in a commercial

-Attempt to drink from a water fountain, the water recedes as he gets closer in what can only be described as tragedy of Greek proportions, only to be squirted by a jet of liquid as the mascot gets his eye near the nozzle.

-Mascot leaves his keys in the car, and unfortunately realizes just after leaving the vehicle. Rather than freak out, mascot continues shopping at Crate and Barrel, determined a solution will reveal itself while shopping.

-Mascot orders an Arnold Palmer at a local restaurant, receives an iced tea instead, then pretty much just lives with it.

-After an understandable misconception, mascot attempts to return regular washing machine soap for a brand that is suitable for front-loading low-energy models. After a forced and awkward conversation with the underpaid teenage help, the mascot is able to get a refund.

-Mascot runs into an old acquaintance at a local garage sale. Mascot is unable to remember exactly how they know this person. School friend? Church member? College party?

Fashion marketing in postapocalyptic Australia

All right, I know we were all hit pretty hard by the cataclysm. With the landscape being the beige swath that it is cotton was the first thing to go, other thin and breathable fabrics were quick to follow. And with the sun at midday seemingly all the time there’s been no need for evening wear. We’ve all had to adjust to this people. There’s good news at the end of all this though: cows can survive on anything. Terrible weather, poor food supply, doesn’t matter. Cows live on anything. Now, I know this may not sound appealing to everyone in the constant 90+ degree weather, but I think we can figure out a way to market this: Leather 24-7. People are riding around on their motorcycles and in their muscle cars more than ever these days and I think its time we use what resources we have and synergize that with what people want. Combine that with our tip-top advertising crew and I can guarantee you by the end of this fiscal quarter people will be wearing skin-tight black leather pants inside at any point in the day.

People need clothing that can match their rough and tumble lifestyle in these appropriate times. No longer will the average working man be content with a simple leather jacket. That’s why I’m proposing we include spikes, chains, spurs, and hides as additions to all of our leather items. We live in a world now where any given day can include a motorcycle chase, a near-rape, a gas siphoning, and a near-fatal explosion. We need leather that can accentuate the striking and unusual bone structures of our post-apocalyptic female demographic. People not only don’t want normal leather anymore, normal leather is not sufficient. Frankly I think we need to tap in to the rebel punk vaguely-homoerotic biker gang market and offer cheap, intimidating leather at a low low cost right now. The post-apocalyptic future waits for no one, and if we don’t capture this demographic than one of the three remaining clothing manufacturers on this island will.

I know what you’re thinking, my last schemes for clothing didn’t work out so well. While pre-ripped pre-greased pre-dirtied jeans did manage to capture sales in our target demos, my decision to increase production in cold-weather wear was misguided. I predicted a chilly nuclear winter future, not a gasless global warming future. And for that I apologize from the bottom of my heart. And I think we can all admit that my line shiny spandex tops for neon-lit strip bars turned out better than expected, so all I’m asking is to have a little faith.

Alright, I think that concludes my proposal. If you’ll excuse me I have to go make sure my children don’t get mutilated on the way home from the last elementary school in Australia.

Oh wait, that’s right, vol. 1: Your local library

As it turns out, your local regional library is full of stuff that they’re willing to loan out for free. The library is like your needy friend always willing to give out a favor. And these days, in desperate attempts to remain relevant and interesting, have increasingly offered more varied CDs and DVDs for rent. I’ve got several CDs here, some of them are even good! The soundtrack to Mishima and Irresponsible Caption Tylor, I don’t know if they’re any good, but at the very least I’ve got them.

But Parliament, they had a Parliament disc. Some people ask why Parliament songs last for seven minutes or more, and I ask how long does it take for funk to come and go. As long as it pleases is an answer that happens to be correct.

Sometimes there are books at the public library. At the very least you will be well-stocked in Romance novels and 90’s-era self-help books. And Calvin and Hobbes. Most libraries have two of every Calvin and Hobbes book.

So much for updating daily

Bit of a writing slump, so that would explain the lack of posts. That and I have yet to do anything interesting.

Metal Gear Solid 1. I am just behind the times by about 11 years when I say I just beat it.  I guess I’ll agree with some of the points made by James Edwards of Select Button/Action Button fame.  As a series of well-constructed, well-designed, and interesting action/stealth moments it bounces back and forth between mildly entertaining and ground-breakingly stupid. At the time I’m sure stealth gameplay was fascinating. Actually, I don’t have to beat around the bush here: I remember people going batshit insane that Metal Gear Solid featured realistic enemy AI that could spot your footprints in the snow (then forget your footprints twenty seconds later - blame the “genome soldier cloning process”). An action game where killing everything in sight wasn’t always the best option was sort of an amazing and bizarre beast in 1996/7/whatever. Today in the age of Splinter Cells and roadie runs it falls flat on its face in a pretty train wreck. You might even be able to argue (as an apologist) that some of the clunky Zelda-in-a-skinsuit moments sort of encourage stealth in such a way that makes the player’s actions line up with the intended thematics that Kojima went for. You would be stretching thin to say that, but you could.

MGS did succeed in being a narrative and thematic mishmash that simultaneously attempts to be 4th-wall-breaking satire, twisty-turny thriller, a dissection of war mentality, and a nuclear disarmament PSA at the same time. The end product is ultimately flawed but impossible not to appreciate on one level. In freshman year of college my class debated the hell over The Wife of Bath in Geoffery Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Was she a satire of women? A critique of women? A critique of the imagined concepts of women? That we could even argue about if this portrayal was 100% misogynistic was pretty incredible given the reprehensible characterization of most women at the time. That’s kind of how I feel about Metal Gear Solid. That at the end of the day I can argue about it from multiple standpoints and not really be precisely sure what Kojima intended from it all is sort of incredible. I mean, even if the work itself doesn’t succeed entirely at any of the things it appears to set out to do, there’s something to be said for doing so many different things competently. When the Colonel tells Snake to change the controller port on the Playstation or when the DARPA chief tells you to look on the back of the CD case it’s jarring and hilarious, but the pre-credit message about nuclear warhead disposal feels (just as jarring, but) sort of heartfelt.  What anyone is supposed to make of something that campy, brilliant, and stupid (clones of clones of clones that are controlled by what? Okay yeah) baffles me, but the ride is worth it.

New band name added to Listotron:

Tony Stark’s Blue Mullet

Inner monologue of the author while channel surfing:

What is this movie… okay it’s on AMC, can’t be too crazy or intense. Oh wait, bridge scene, bridge scene with lots of cars, I think I recognize this. Dark sky, film quality looks roughly 80’s-ish, epic scale but not an epic production… Okay there’s a taxi cab cut in half. I’m pretty sure this is Escape from New York but let’s see here. Okay zoom in on the taxi passenger seats in the back, guy with long hair, could definitely be Snake Plisskin… kay he’s getting out of the car and… yep Snake Plisskin, it’s Escape from New York.

I spent the majority of today working on an art project involving the use of many bad comic books that I bought for cheap down at the Comics Keep and turning them into collages. This is a new experience for me given that I am not a sixteen year old girl or an art student. Pictures forthcoming.

I have met my match

I spent the last few days downloading The Machine Girl over a slow torrent, and I have to say I couldn’t really watch it. I mean, I like ridiculous overhyped violence, but something about this one just put me off entirely. Just the way the shots were placed and how long to camera lingered on each violent act. It was like violence as a fetish, not as an action or plot device or even an event. It was just… kinda gross. Like I felt dirty for watching it.

So congratulations, from the guy who watched Dead Alive (AKA Brain Dead) with glee and abandon, I couldn’t bear to watch The Machine Girl. Maybe if I had some friends with me and I was hideously drunk, but in the sobering hour of one in the afternoon on a Thursday, not so much.

Downsides to being clean shaven pt. 2:

I no longer bear a striking resemblance to the bassist from Death Cab for Cutie, who I’m told (by skeptical and reluctant fans of the band) is their coolest member.

(picture stolen from Pitchfork)

Such sacrifices must be made for the good of the commonwealth-face.

Instead of content allow me to post what I believe is the image that I thought the future would look like when I was about six:

(Picture stolen from internet)

Snake Mistakes pt. 1: Going clean shaven

Hooo man, that was a bad idea. I had the best intentions in mind you know, cut things off and make it grow back and look better. I’m still hoping that will work. I mean, if I don’t get a better mustache by the end of the summer I will be royally peeved.

But man, I’ve got razor burn all over, I lost a pint of blood, and all I have to show for it is this goofy boyish look. I look like Eric Werheim, only not as cool. It’s really bad.

So uhh yeah. I’m gonna stay inside for a few weeks. Later.

For an uncomfortable bed, you sure know how to hold a guy in until noon

I mean, bed, you and I have got to have a chat about this. We spend a lot of time together, more than we ought to, given that I also watch TV on you (while in your automobile couch mode) and occasionally even indulge in video games on your blue quilted Ikea surface. But this relationship has gone too far. I mean, friends like you and I really shouldn’t be taking it to this level. Four hours of sleep is too little, so is five, six and seven are pretty cool and even eight. But man, nine and a half hours on a daily basis for a week straight? It’s gone too far my friend. I just have to call it off. The fact is, the world does exist before noon, when I finally escape your clutches, and I’ve gotta be a part of it.

Things have been great bed, but enough is enough is enough.

———

After watching some bad anime as a homework assignment from some friends all I can think about is creating my incredible giant robot show based around musical themes. Robots would harmonize and interlock to form new amazing creations based on new musical styles and use songs as attacks. I mean, this show practically writes itself. I mean, you could have an entire show based on the pentatonic scale where none of their coordinations ever accidentally go into dissonance! It would be pretty much brilliant (assuming this hasn’t been done before). To appeal to an American audience all the robot pilots could be inner-city second-generation ipod-toting high schoolers that go to a boarding school to train psychics and superheroes or something. It would work.

So yeah, feel free to steal that and send me the royalty checks kay?

———–

Dirty Harry is a pretty damn fine film. A lot of cop dramas and crime thrillers in the 70’s got this labeled attached to them that they were gritty and that they blurred the lines between corruption and justice and all that, but Dirty Harry is pretty much the opposite. There is no cleaner-cut, right and wrong, black and white story than Dirty Harry. You’ve got good guys that hate people and do a good job kicking ass, some badguys that are really heinous, and some city officials that get in the way with bureaucracy and navel-gazing rule-mongering. If I were to take a guess, Frank Miller watched Dirty Harry at least once a year since the age of 14. I like to think that all of his noir influences were really seen through a lens of starkly moralistic 70’s cop dramas, and then he wrote Sin City while cranking up the violence a notch. Just taking a guess here. But yeah, Dirty Harry is good stuff. I like how the older a movie gets the more emphasis seems to be placed on elaborate camera maneuvers. We get shots that pan through broken windows, that follow tiny bits of light and reflection on an otherwise pitch-black frame, or that pullback shot from the middle of the San Franciscan football field all the way to its outside. Do all the movements add to the thematics of the movie or increase suspension and drama throughout? Not quite, but there are enough hits to punctuate a few good spots and enough interesting misses to help you pay attention. Maybe I’m just saying all of this (vague, half-baked nonsense) through the perspective of a guy who has watched too many action movies that have set, pre-determined framing techniques for every gunshot, explosion, and clever line of dialogue. I guess thrillers are pulling from an entirely different book altogether (Hitchcock’s?)

Well, enough of this nonsense and back to vidcons.