Journal of Other Forum Analysis

[benji]

So many games and genres can stand the test of time, but Bully, once lauded as a success, now looks and plays like dogshit. And I was playing a remastered version of the game!

No, you weren't, you were playing a port they threw some extra content into because they were selling it two years later.

[Boredfrom]

It wasn’t even a good port. I remember it got bad reviews.

[benji]

Looming and Inevitable

And man, I don't remember the 2000s being this overtly mean.

I’m 40, and honestly, this is exactly what I remember from that time period. All the humor had to be “edgy,” which more often than not meant overtly mean-spirited.

Exalclaw (Edited)
Yes, more going back to ol faves and realizing they suck! Like really suck!

I had a very similar experience but with a movie. My sister and I used to love The Other Guys (we were literal children when it came out, newly into double digits), but when I tried watching it again with a friend a few years ago we couldn’t make it halfway through. It is AWFUL. The scene with The Rock and Samuel L Jackson on the roof is still kinda funny though because seriously, what were they thinking?

Luke Aftermath staff
"You've never seen Sex Times At Spring Break High?"

The people in Bully are mean to you for a reason, it's not to be edgy or for humor purposes, it's to setup the change of you winning over the school. And it's not "2000s humor" because it's more satirizing the stuff from the 80s/90s like the other Rockstar titles. And that video is about shitty movies that were shitty then but you were too shitty to not realize so you loved, just like you're shitty now so you think you're "cool" for being embarrassed by something you loved as a kid that wasn't ever "popular" with adults in the first place. Also, The Other Guys came out in 2010 so you're saying you're college age now and what you liked at 10 you no longer do, amazing fascinating stuff.

I have a feeling all three of these people would lecture me about media literacy.

[Potato]

This season of TheBire has grown stale.

Too many storylines are just being recycled now. 

We need a new principal antagonist because Nep's lunatic ranting about capitalism has just played out. The only way to redeem her would be for there to be a general uprising of the downtrodden proletariat against their more equal moderators who hate doing the job but just can't seem to let it go.

Melody is played out as a character. He needs to get a job or something left-field...that would subvert our expectations somewhat. This slow burn towards being exposed as a paedo is inevitable and boring.

Even messoboughtawife is a nothing character this season. He needs to go through a very public divorce and take a "women are bitches" heel turn to keep me tuning in to his bullshit.

Someone load up the riotous account and make some noise or something...

Hear me out: Messo's parents buy him a second wife.

You've got my attention. Elaborate please

[benji]

It wasn’t even a good port. I remember it got bad reviews.

It was broken at launch like most 360 ports of that era where people forgot that PC's don't have six threaded RISC CPU's. So stuff like the physics were wrong at different framerates, etc. IIRC, Bully didn't even recognize the 360 controller at launch, they patched it for Xpad support or else this loser would have been whining about having to go into the "executable options" to assign controller buttons then whine about how it doesn't show the right icons.

[Boredfrom]

Why don't the kids at this prep school love the titular "Bully" who got expelled from his prior school, gets in fights with everyone and is of the wrong social class? God, the 2000s were so bleak, unlike 2024 where the world is literally burning and genocides are everywhere. 

And if you want to play a game set in a boarding school, where there's loads of fighting and romantic options and lessons to attend and a world to explore outside the classroom, then just...go play Persona 3 instead.

The one where you are the Main character loved by everyone.

[Potato]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/bomb-threats-reported-at-multiple-buildings-in-springfield-ohio.979227/#post-128597592

I heard my parents talking about this shit yesterday and it was fucking gross. They believe anything those bastards say.
I need to get the fuck out of this house and state, it's awful

What's stopping you?

Aside from having no job, no marketable skills, no drive or determination, no resilience, no fucking hope...

[benji]

I played an old port of an older game and it didn't meet my modern standards, how is this happening to me???

[Potato]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/game-devs-are-leaving-the-industry-and-doing-something-anything-else-but-game-dev-aftermath-luke-plunkett.979620/

Let me see the other articles… oh…

https://aftermath.site/bully-rockstar-pc-steam

I don’t like to call someone soyboy… but… Jesus.

Another guy that started out OK and then drank the Kotaku Kool Aid in buckets

[Boredfrom]

BTW, Persona 3 MC has little personality compared to the ones from 4 and specially 5.

And in Persona 5, while not in a boarding school, you start like a hated character and problem child, and this doesn’t change for almost all the game.

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

You get expelled in the Vanilla game, and go to prison for months at the end of the game.

And it is also the game where the Protagonist is not a totally blank state and does some important stuff outside of the player control.

Odd that he mentions Persona 3 over 4 and 5 even if is not “boarding school” experience.

[AldusMoneyPenny]

God, The Other Guys is such an awful fucking movie. Don't know why people go on and on about how great it is. 

Holy fuck have I become a college student?

[benji]

You'd think it was this all-time underground classic not something that TBS randomly shows the way people talk about it.

edit: But it only has a 6.6/10 on imdb so it's clearly not this big hit to position yourself as so dumb and out of touch for liking at 10 years old.

[benji]

If you thought California Democrats were anything but far-right fascists who fall for chud lies about things that aren't happening and are good if they are, guess again:

Don't worry though, it's not for anyone:

The new law requires prosecutors to start imposing harsher sentences again for those who damage or destroy property valued at more than $50,000 while committing a felony. A similar law expired in 2018. The new law will sunset by 2030.

“California already has some of the strictest retail and property crime laws in the nation — and we have made them even stronger with our recent legislation,” Newsom said in a statement.

Spoiler:  (click to show)(click to hide)

The decision to bring back tough penalties comes as Democratic leaders continue to work to prove that they are tough enough on crime while trying to convince voters to reject a ballot measure that would bring even harsher sentences for repeat offenders of shoplifting and drug charges.

The new law is part of a bipartisan legislative package of about a dozen bills aiming to crack down on thefts, making it easier to go after repeat shoplifters and auto thieves and increase penalties for those running professional reselling schemes.

“Violent ‘sledgehammer crimes’ and flash-mob attacks by organized gangs must stop now,” Assembly Speaker Robert Rivas, who authored the bill, said in a statement. “Our business owners and workers should not have to live in fear that these crimes will come to their doorstep.”

The measure is also supported by the California Retailers Association, which said the new penalties would serve as “a deterrent against ‘smash and grabs’ and retail crime.”

But opponents, including criminal justice advocates and public defenders, said the new law will result in more people behind bars for non-retail theft crimes. The measure increases prison time for a wide range of felony charges, they said. That means a person could receive a tougher sentence for offenses such as damaging vehicles while driving under the influence under the new law.

They also criticized the new law for modeling after a plan proposed in a tougher-on-crime ballot initiative, which Newsom and Democratic lawmakers spent months lambasting and unsuccessfully fighting to keep off the November ballot. The new law will expire in five years, while the ballot measure proposes a plan to make the harsher penalties permanent.

“If we’re opposed to it being permanent, why aren’t we opposed to it being temporary?” said Taina Vargas, executive director of Initiate Justice Action, about the new law. “This makes it apparent that, you know, certain individuals in the Legislature and the governor just want to give off the impression of doing something.”

As the issue could even affect the makeup — and control — of Congress, some Democrats broke with party leadership and said they supported Proposition 36, the tough-on-crime approach.

Newsom’s administration has spent $267 million to help dozens of local law enforcement agencies increase patrols, buy surveillance equipment and prosecute more criminals. Law enforcement across the state has arrested 6,900 people for retail theft crimes in the first six months of the operation, Newsom’s office said Thursday.

[Uncle]

after hearing bully hyped up as such an evil horrible school shooter game for so long, when I actually played it, I thought it was surprisingly...grounded?

it wasn't realistic, cutscenes had a lot of over the top personalities but a lot of the game ended up feeling like the experience of dealing with regular school shit mixed with GTA freedom to screw around in town

it was almost boring for how un-edgy it was

[benji]

Bully got way more outrage than Manhunt.

[Potato]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/game-devs-are-leaving-the-industry-and-doing-something-anything-else-but-game-dev-aftermath-luke-plunkett.979620/

This is totally normal, people have always left game dev. People in game dev have never stayed long at even the game developers, they jump jobs constantly. The people who stay at companies forever are not the norm, those are the names you hear of.

https://aftermath.site/bully-rockstar-pc-steam

But then I actually installed and tried to play the PC's Scholarship Edition of Bully, a game I remember from almost 20 years ago as being pretty good, and Jesus Christ. It's bad.

First up, while the game nominally supported 4K, actually opting for that resolution broke its display, and I had to go into the game's executable options to fix it. Not a great start. It's not the only area we’ve come a long way from since 2006. Bully's camera movement and player movement aren't tracked at the same speed, so moving the camera around behind the player while also moving the character causes you to run in weird directions, unable to move in a straight line for more than a few seconds at a time. It has text prompts that look like they were lifted from Windows 3.1, and the combat--probably the most important aspect of the game other than Jimmy's ability to cover long distances on foot--is dreary.

And man, I don't remember the 2000s being this overtly mean. The entire vibe of the game is just bleak, from the design of the school itself to the way every single character is just hugely draining to listen to and be around. I get that it's a product of its time, and a specific idea within that time, but boy, from 2024 it's a borderline repulsive place.

It's a 2008 console port dude, it "nominally supports 4K" because it doesn't have a hardcoded higher resolution. It's not like Rockstar coded this UE3 port of a PS2 RenderWare game with the future in mind but so it ran on 360/PC without much effort. (And it was even worse at launch, Rockstar had to patch it up quite a bit.)

And yeah, the characters are mean, it's supposed to be a shitty private school of people who hate you until you win them over.

What a wanker. He was at Kotaku in 2006. Shall we talk about being overtly mean?

Also, Bully was always repulsive for any sensibilities 2006 or 2024. It's meant to be because IT WAS FUCKING DESIGNED THAT WAY!!!!! Everyone thought it was repulsive in 2006 and that was always the intention.

Just another lefty that can't understand that the fictional setting and characters don't necessarily reflect the beliefs or behaviour of the creators...

[benji]

Actually I'm pretty sure all those Rockstar games got way more attention than Volition's The Punisher where you literally are rewarded for torturing people to death.

[Potato]

Universally loved for years with GTASA but Rockstar has been imo shit since then. GTA4 sucked but The Lost amd the Damned and Gay Tony was great, but they were expansions.

I was always of the impression GTA was a "kill someone and keep adding stars" type game and then you and your friends do something more fun afterwards. I still don't get the exalted treatment it gets.

It's because people like Luke took the cash and free trips to fawn over the "Oscar-worthy" script of GTAIV while playing under completely controlled conditions in RockStar's offices and only being able to access certain portions of the game while being observed by PR people.

[Potato]

As part of our Back to School week, I had planned on playing through Rockstar's Bully and comparing Jimmy's experience at a strict boarding school with my own.

I didn't attend a boarding school, but after graduating high school I worked in one for a year in the UK (if you know what a gap year is, this was mine). I mostly did odd jobs wherever my skillset could best be employed: some sports coaching here, some history and art tutoring there, alongside some general supervision of kids in the boarding house common spaces after school hours. Which all sounds very adult, but I was actually just 17 years old when I started the job. Now that I type that out, it seems kinda fucked up. Maybe I shouldn't have been allowed to do that, especially since I was sometimes legally responsible for the welfare of senior students who were 19. One Italian kid I remember had a beard.

 

I feel you will be a random adult NPC character in a Bully sequel. One that gets humiliated constantly…

Privileged enough to have his parents (Canberra, so most likely career public servants) finance a gap year trip to the UK, but carries on like Che Guevara online.

What a cancer on the gaming industry.

[benji]

Like Rockstar has always been advertising/marketing hype, that was how the entire brand came about and the company it spun out of. They tried the controversy to sell the first two GTA's and it worked only slightly because people saw the games and were like wait, we're outraged about this? Outrage about Mortal Kombat was far easier because you could actually show the game. It wasn't until III that they could sell that idea to people with carefully managed game footage but it wasn't why those games did sell. IV they switched it up and sold all the journalists desperate for gaming to be "relevant" on the idea that it was this groundbreaking story shit because they couldn't use the GTA outrage anymore. V more or less admitted that the audience didn't really buy it.

I have absolutely zero belief that the Bully hype wasn't from Rockstar themselves. You spread that shit and then you have a whole second wind where you "fight" against a controversy you stirred up in the first place. This had to be how Hot Coffee went down too.

[Potato]

Like Rockstar has always been advertising/marketing hype, that was how the entire brand came about and the company it spun out of. They tried the controversy to sell the first two GTA's and it worked only slightly because people saw the games and were like wait, we're outraged about this? Outrage about Mortal Kombat was far easier because you could actually show the game. It wasn't until III that they could sell that idea to people with carefully managed game footage but it wasn't why those games did sell. IV they switched it up and sold all the journalists on the idea that it was this groundbreaking story shit. V more or less admitted that the audience didn't really buy it.

I have absolutely zero belief that the Bully hype wasn't from Rockstar themselves. You spread that shit and then you have a whole second wind where you "fight" against a controversy you stirred up in the first place. This had to be how Hot Coffee went down too.

Absolutely.

The fact remains that even with their recent non-GTA stuff they can't design a game that doesn't control like complete arse. Unplayable garbage...and don't fucking talk to me about needing to make some sensitivity adjustments and then RDR2 will play "just fine". If you can't set the default up to work just fine then fuck you and your shit game.

[benji]

I don't really have that criticism of their games but I'm just amused at how even gamers ignore that this was a label founded where they specifically said this was going to be the goal. It's even in the name. Yet they take these "controversies" and "masterpieces" seriously.

DMA Design was very good at making games. Angel Studios was no slouch at technology. Not to mention the time and budgets they're given for these things now. Them putting out III, VC and SA back-to-back-to-back was way more impressive than IV, V and the RDR's.

Max Payne 3 is the only other game they've really done since the amalgamation (and that was 12 years ago) and now all those studios are GTA Online support studios. I wouldn't be surprised if Rockstar is now nothing but GTA and RDR each once a cycle.

[Gameboy Nostalgia]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/bomb-threats-reported-at-multiple-buildings-in-springfield-ohio.979227/#post-128597592

I heard my parents talking about this shit yesterday and it was fucking gross. They believe anything those bastards say.
I need to get the fuck out of this house and state, it's awful

What's stopping you?

Aside from having no job, no marketable skills, no drive or determination, no resilience, no fucking hope...

Would be cheaper for the paypigs to have Melds move in with them. 

[benji]

Would be cheaper for the paypigs to have Melds move in with them. 

What is really needed is for all the marginalized people on ResetERA.com to gather together and establish a commune free from capitalism, colonialism and white supremacy.

[Gameboy Nostalgia]

I agree. Maybe they should all start a ranch together.

[Boredfrom]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/beau-demayo-yes-him-reveals-the-original-plot-for-doctor-strange-multiverse-of-madness.979920/

Dude really wants a fight with Disney for some reason.

And RE attention is about Mahvel than the needy weirdo manipulating people to stay relevant.

[kaleidoscopium]

I’d love for them all to group up and film a documentary showing what life is like in the gaming commune. Mama Nep Nep will no doubt be a very fair arbiter of justice.

[Alpacx]

https://www.resetera.com/threads/game-devs-are-leaving-the-industry-and-doing-something-anything-else-but-game-dev-aftermath-luke-plunkett.979620/

Let me see the other articles… oh…

https://aftermath.site/bully-rockstar-pc-steam

I don’t like to call someone soyboy… but… Jesus.

He was a pretty good writer and podcast guest years ago (I share his taste in games) but his brain's been poisoned by Social Justice. Like all gamejournos.

[Greatness Gone]

Rockstar slander after the GOAT open world game RDR2. 

Benji might be dumb guys 

[benji]

Rockstar slander after the GOAT open world game RDR2. 

Benji might be dumb guys 

 You sure you can read usernames and see avatars?