Welcome to Bullworth Academy, the worst school in America. It's your first day and already everyone's out to make your life a living hell. Your mother's ditched you for a year long honeymoon with your new sleazebag of a step father, so it's time to make the best of a bad situation and teach the students the meaning of respect. It's up to Jimmy Hopkins to restore order and wipe out bullying the only way he knows how; cracking skulls and taking names.

Canis Canem Edit, the game formerly known as Bully, is a new sandbox game from kings of controversy, Rockstar Games. Sporting a new Latin name meaning 'Dog Eat Dog', Canis Canem Edit sees you climb the ranks, gaining the trust and respect of the six key cliques that rule the school and the surrounding town of Bullworth. When power is the order of the day, you're going to face stiff competition from your enemies and betrayal by your allies before you can successfully win the town over.

A question of the ages: If nerds are so smart, why do they always desire to be kicked?

At its roots, the game takes the GTA mould and applies it to your typical American private school. Offering a free roaming city with numerous missions and side missions and a wealth of sandbox gameplay. Drugs, sex and murder aren't on your plate this time around and you will need to attend class, take up a summer job and face detention if you hope to make it through the school year. Outside of the obvious similarities, Canis Canem Edit comes into its own, with an emphasis on time structure and character interaction.

Set in a school, you will have to deal with a pretty strict time structure if you want to keep out of the principal's office. Every day you have two classes to attend, with each class challenging you with a simple mini game to pass the class. Activities range from a rendition of the classic old arcade game Qix for Art class and dodgeball matches for Gym to word jumbles for English that will really offer a challenge young or old. The actual story of the game is explored through missions delivered by students around the town, which need to be completed outside of class time. You can chose to skip class, but then will need to brush up on your stealth skills if you want to avoid the prefects patrolling the school and stay out of trouble. As a growing young boy, Jimmy needs plenty of sleep. Stay out late and you're vision will start to blur, the music slow and you proceed in slow motion. Stay out till 2am and you'll pass out where you stand, waking to find your shoes missing and you've been robbed in your sleep. It's going to take a while before you learn to keep your time management under control (or maybe that's just a reflection of my daily life).


It's easy to raise scepticism that this is another expansive, yet soulless, addition to the sandbox genre. It is necessary to first consider though, that the GTA series triumphs over each and every clone that challenge it from its throne due to its abundance of character and personality. Fortunately, this is one are where Canis Canem Edit excels. More than any GTA game has ever achieved, Canis Canem makes you feel like you are in living, breathing world. The world around you has been meticulously crafted with countless minute interactions with the world around. You can pull fire alarms, slide down banisters and give kids swirlies in the toilets. More importantly, no longer do you feel like you are floating in a sea of lifeless NPC's. The characters you see in the world around you are rarely repeated, each with their own personality, dialogue and affiliation. You are able to talk with every character you see and whilst not as complex as games like Shenmue, you are still able to bad mouth or sweet talk a character as you wish. Characters act independently to create a real abundance of personality. Students play tricks on each other, make out, rush to class when the bell rings, start fights with each other and get in trouble with prefects. As the year passes, the environment changes with the seasons. Transitioning from autumn to summer, the environmental changes simply feel just right. In autumn you are placed in a world of brown with students running around in costume on Halloween, yet come winter you can make a snowball on the fly and trigger a snowball flight as Christmas decorations litter the halls.

Ah the Nerd clique, the backbone of bullying through the ages

This continual sense of change and progression carries on into the reward system. Unlike cash rewards prevalent in GTA, the majority of missions in Canis Canem Edit will offer an instant reward and have a direct effect on the world around you. Classes are made worthwhile, offering new skills and items with each successful competition. From increasing your hatred amongst one of the school cliques, to unlocking better skills with your words and a more powerful arsenal, it truly helps to keep things fresh and is a game that screams "one more go". There's so much to unlock, that it truly makes for a rewarding game experience.

Like any sandbox game, there is a wealth of opportunities to play the game at your own pace. From bike races and lawn mowing to a fully interactive carnival, complete with go karts, sideshows and a ton of crappy prizes to trade in your tickets for. It is really the little touches that make the game a joy to play

Canis Canem Edit, sports the best graphics above all the GTA games, though that's not saying a lot. Characters are detailed enough to separate, white, brown haired jock #1 from white, brown hair jock #2. They are certainly not the best the PS2 has demonstrated in recent years, but the game would be benefiting itself in no way, by sporting next gen graphics. Graphics are clean and crisp which is all that matters.

Canis Canem Edit is not the Columbine simulator the media publicised it to be. In fact the game seems to go against the trademarks of previous Rockstar efforts, you can't kill anyone in the game and absolutely no one dies. The worst weapons at your disposal are spud guns and bottle rockets, all of which have been set to stun. It is still rich with adult humour and references with an older generation, catering for gamers both young and old.

It cannot be overlooked that Canis Canem Edit is really just the latest GTA release with a new façade. Whilst many elements offer a case of déjà vu that are sure to please fans, it not only introduces a mass of new ideas as well as gameplay reminiscent of other Rockstar titles. Fans of 2005's adaptation of "The Warriors", will be pleased to see elements included in both combat and tagging. The changes to combat are a welcome addition and make it feel all the more brutally satisfying. As you extend your movelist, fights seem to flow smoother, allowing you attack with elements of both wrestling, boxing and street brawling. The tagging mechanic, whereby you trace a line with the analogue stick in the rough shape of a letter, has been made significantly easier though as the marker sticks to the line, which is sure to ease your frustration. Stealth elements from controversial title Manhunt have also been included for avoiding the prefects. Playing like a simplified version of the original Metal Gear Solid, complete with radar and vision cones, you will have to rely on trash cans and lockers to stay out of sight. Canis Canem Edit blends all these elements seamlessly, offering a diverse selection of gameplay, which represents a fantastic blend of some of Rockstar's best efforts of the last generation.

Good old voyeurism, Rockstar will never change

Unfortunately Rockstar are still yet to reach perfection, with some elements of Canis Canem Edit repeating the same mistakes of previous Rockstar games, as well as creating a selection of new issues with the school environment.

Running over people is all in the name of fun in GTA, but run over anyone in Bullworth and you will be struck with a warning level even if no one saw you. While running away from prefects seems like the perfect schoolyard equivalent of GTA's police system, once you explore the rest of the city, the police begin to replace the prefects. Accidentally turn a corner and run into a lady in town and you are instantly on full wanted level, with cops spawning in full pursuit. It's all too easy to round a corner and hit someone by accident, due to the camera slowly trailing you as you turn. Attempting to escape from an officer giving pursuit in their cruiser with only a bike or skateboard at hand feels like an impossible uphill battle. Chases either feel overly difficult or overly ridiculous, due to their slow speed.

An accelerated time pattern may have become standard for GTA, in a game based around school, where everything runs to a specific schedule, it often becomes a little overwhelming. Even when you are on the school grounds waiting for the bell to ring, with only thirty seconds to make it to class, you will often find yourself running late and with prefects keen on your scent for truancy. This could have been adressed by the simple addition of a class timetable, so you know where to be and when. With time passing so fast, it also can make it hard to judge time management for missions, leaving you to pass out mid mission and fail the entire task.

After playing GTA Vice City Stories, it is sad to see that Canis Canem Edit, lacks the option to view where you have found each collectible item on the map, a feature present in the former. This makes it a little frustrating to collect every last collectible (of which there are 4 main types). It is no more frustrating than any GTA game though and due to the numerous different types of collectibles, in much smaller numbers, it makes achieving perfection seem far more reasonable and is in fact the first game in the genre that I have completed 100%.

The targeting system has been corrected somewhat by the new fighting engine, but it is still far from perfect. Using the lock on will not always target the most dangerous threat, an ongoing problem with the GTA games, nor will it necessarily target the nearest character, which can lead to you bad mouthing a prefect or whispering sweet nothings into the ear of a school bully rather than the school's resident hottie. All the game's problems are small and manageable, with none proving to be game breaking from what is an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable game.

Canis Canem Edit might be sporting a silly name for the PAL release (what percentage of the Australian population can read Latin) but it's still a damn fun game. While it may be a case of déjà vu among other Rockstar releases, it's a shinning example to show that GTA isn't just popular for it's overt violence and adult content. It may still be a little bit too rough to bring GTA to a younger generation without a backlash of criticism, but young or old, there's plenty to enjoy. Canis Canem Edit takes the best aspects from Rockstar's previous efforts and intertwines them to create a fun new title that'll hold over gamers until GTA IV sees release on next gen consoles.