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Watcha Listening To: Rebel FM's Bully Game Club

Posted by Bob Mackey

One of the best parts of the short-lived 1UPFM was the Backlog segment, where the crew played through and talked about games from the not-too-distant past over multiple episodes. For a press that normally centers so much on the here-and-now, it was refreshing to hear discussions of fantastic games that were only a few years old, like Shadow of the Colossus and Psychonauts--titles like these may have dropped off of our gaming radars, but that doesn't mean they still weren't worth talking about. Thankfully, this favorite segment of mine has been reborn with RebelFM's (essentially, the non-1UP affiliated sequel to 1UPFM) Game Club; and while the last featured game, the 2005 Xbox Call of Cthulhu, wasn't really up my alley, their current Game Club game certainly is.

Rockstar's Bully met with some moderate success and saw life on three different consoles, but it never really seemed to get the credit it deserved as being more than just a GTA clone. I picked it up a few months after its original PS2 release not expecting much, and was completely blown away--so much so that I bought Bully: Scholarship Edition (which really should have been a better port) for the 360 a year later. This latter playthrough of Bully was in preparation for the then-unreleased GTA4, but in retrospect, I ended up liking Bully a helluva lot more than Rockstar's supposedly world-changing sequel. Bully took the GTA forumla, pared it down to a smaller location, gave it a completely unique setting, and the end result was a 20-25 hour game that was much more managable and fun than your standard Grand Theft Auto.

But you don't have to take my word for it; check out the Bully episode of Rebel FM's Game Club. Even if you haven't played the game, you may feel the overwhelming urge to go out and pick up a copy.

Related Links:

Watcha Listening to? A Life Well Wasted
Watcha Listening To: Rebel FM
Watcha Listening To: The Final 1UP Yours

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Posted Mar 27 2009, 04:00 PM

Filed under: rockstar, Grand theft auto 4, bob mackey, watcha listening to, rebelfm, bully

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About Bob Mackey

For a brief period of time I was Bull from TV's Night Court, but some of you may know me from the humor column I wrote for Youngstown State University's The Jambar, Kent State University's The Stater, and Youngstown's alternative newspaper, The Walruss. I'm perhaps most well-known for my bi-weekly pieces on Something Awful. I've also blogged for Valley24.com and have written articles for EGM, 1UP, GameSpite and Cracked. For all of my writing over the years, I have made a total of twenty American dollars. It's also said that I draw cartoons, which people have described with words such as "legible." I kidnapped the Lindbergh Baby and am looking to do so again in the future.

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