Game: Strategy Guide: Price: £39.99 Players: 1 Widescreen: Yes 60Hz: No DTS Sound: No Canis Canem Edit, or Bully as it was meant to originally be called, finally arrives on the PS2 after being many months in the waiting. After having been expelled from all your previous schools, your care-free Mum has holed you, ginger-topped Jimmy Hopkins (below-right), up for the coming school year in Bullworth Academy, a boarding school full of geeks and bullies and you have to find a middle ground between the two while trying not to get in too much trouble with the teachers, otherwise you'll end up in detention a number of times. Fans of computer games from the '80s will remember the classic Skool Daze and its sequel, Back 2 Skool, but does this have what it takes to 'rule the school' 20 years on?

Canis Canem Edit is linear at first as you get used to the set-up, but after that there are options to go on a number of standard and side missions (the latter of which include Halloween pranks in the first section), some of which need to be completed in order but after you've been playing it for a while, particularly after you get past the first 'chapter', several stars will appear at once around the campus and that tells you where you need to go for your next task. That said, there's still only a number of things you can do in one day before night falls and you must return to your dorm at night for sleep (where you can also save your game, initially). Trying to continue will see you collapsing at 2am and waking where you left off six hours later. There's also the ability to change into different outfits, but while this has necessary occasions such as Halloween, I soon realised it's a waste of time changing into pyjamas at night as you can just as easily sleep in your uniform. Hmm... no wonder so many of the girls are moving away from me as I try to chat them up. Apparently the violence in this game has been toned down prior to its release, as it was meant to come out in the spring of 2006, but while certain sections of the media have got on their high horse about it, it does actually have a positive anti-bullying message, despite what the woman in the pink jacket said during an interview on Breakfast recently - but more about that later. After putting a stop to their nasty behaviour inbetween tasks, you can humiliate the bullies when their health is low, which results in things like your character spitting on his hand and rubbing it in their face, or giving them a wedgie. Be careful, though, when doing this as the prefects are never far away and, similar to the cops in GTA, if you've pushed/punched someone as they'll bust you. Do this too often and you'll end up in detention, which is either moving the headmaster's lawn (which I did twice in quick succession so god knows what he's putting on it - Dimoxynil?), or taking a number of increasingly difficult classes such as 'Shop' (which is a hardware class, but despite the very English setting a lot of the written language is very American), Art - which is like a game of the old arcade classic Qix and Chemistry in which, like a lot of these classes, you must press buttons like Parappa the Rapper to complete a science experiment correctly.

There's a lot of different things you can do in this game, which will stack up the stats points. You can tell tales on people, slip on marbles and banana skins, do a mascot dance, started a food or snowball fight, drop fire crackers into the toilets (note that you can keep a chemistry set in your dorm to make more of these to throw at the bullies), pull the fire alarm, administer wedgies, stuff fellow pupils into bins, drink sodas to keep your strength up, dribble a basketball, kick a football, cause havoc with pranks such as water balloons, itching powder, stink bombs and 'Kick Me' signs. After completing missions you'll be able command additional respect from either the bullies or nerds, but it has to be said that even though there are many missions to work through, a lot of them end up in the same old fighting techniques, which gets very repetitive. While this title uses the same game engine as Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, on the plus side, it seems far less prevalent in this version that as you turn to face away from other people, do something simple and then turn back, that anything has changed. Previously, whole groups of people walking behind you would've inexplicably disappeared but it's a lot more natural this time round. Also, people can now follow you through doors. Yes, that sounds a bit odd but in the GTA games it would mean moving to a different 'scene' and all of a sudden cops would stop chasing you, etc, but here the prefects, bullies and teachers still come after you, so you'd better run... Alas, the movement as you circle round your character isn't as fluid as the GTA series. You could easily change viewpoint while running from moving forward to circling round the camera, moving the other joystick in the opposite direction, so you could now see yourself running forward and, thus, be able to view what's going on behind you. Not so here, since your character is incapable of being viewed the latter way and just ends up running in circles. There are also severe camera issues at times and this is often a cause for being caught by the prefects. You need to escape after punching a bully back, or picking the locks of lockers to nick stuff for certain tasks and you get stuck in the corner of a building trying to look for a way out but the camera flips about and then... you're done for, unless you can punch them to get away. General running about on foot, or other means of transport, outside gives an example of the jerkiness and slowdown that can occur which shows up the age of the PS2's graphics. According to what I read, Sony claim their forthcoming PS3 will last ten whole years (what - not even without some kind of graphics expansion pack?)

Play for long enough and you'll see that Jimmy, who to me looks like Dr Anspaugh from TV's ER, can not only travel on foot, but also skateboard, bike, go kart - upon which you can take part in races and a moped. Other aspects of thie release including collecting rubber bands (just bonus items like you could in the GTA series), helping a hobo get a part for his transistor radio in order to get some special fighting moves courtesy of his army training, leave the school grounds to play in the funfair, go and run errands for Edna, the school dinner lady, on her bike into town in return for money and pull fire alarms, although there's not really much comeback, if any, with that one once you've quickly escaped any prefects that were around. Other characters featured including Gary, supposedly your best mate from the start, but you always get the feeling he has a hidden agenda, Petey, a young lad who follows you around at the same time who clearly wants to be amongst the cool kids but will forever remain a dork, and Beatrice, your rather ugly girlfriend who you have to keep sweet. Normally, every year since 2001 when we've had a GTA game of some description coming out in time for the Xmas market, Rockstar have always come up trumps, and while we have GTA Vice City Stories coming out on the Sony PSP, this game, despite having the usual great voice acting, doesn't feel quite as good as I was expecting and the reason it's a disappointment overall is because there isn't enough different things to do that also grab your attention and make you want to continue plugging away at it until the sun comes up as the GTA series did. What also adds to this is the standard, and repetitive, music as you go around the school grounds, not specific tracks as in the GTA games. It's also not an especially challenging title and the loading times inbetween scenes are slightly overlong. In fact, going back to mentioning Skool Daze, at least that had you *trying* to take part in some lessons and straight-forward behaviour which made the mischief and pranks all the more fun. Here, it's largely very easy to escape from the prefects trying to get you back into class and so there's not much of a challenge. Before I sign off, I did mention about this game's positive anti-bullying message, despite what the woman in the pink jacket said and at the two links below, you can see the 'discussion' about the good and bad points in this game as ex-ELSPA chairman Roger Bennet puts the aforementioned batty woman in her place who thinks violence in computer games leads to violence in real life, and openly admits to not playing many computer games - just like those politicians who made allegations against Channel 4's Brass Eye when they hadn't actually seen it. She is clearly mental. BBC Breakfast: 27th October 2006 - Part 1 BBC Breakfast: 27th October 2006 - Part 2 BBC Breakfast: 23th October 2007: The lady in the pink jacket talks more crap.

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Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2006.