1) The cars handle really crazily now; I guess they are more realistic? The shitty cars I got to use had a hard time handling at high speeds, and really couldn’t drive on grass at all.

The character seems to have the same sort of rules. You have momentum and can no longer turn on a dime. Jumping still kinda sucks, though, and it was hard to tell what fences you could grab onto and get over, and it was easy to accidentally not make a jump over a short object.

b- There’s a lot of neat procedural animation, even if the whole game isn’t procedurally generated. The game tries to adjust the character so if you are standing with your feet on uneven surfaces, the animations compensate, and you don’t clip through or hover over one. It looks neat.

iii. The multiplayer works exactly like Burnout Paradise.

4. The new wanted system works exceptionally well. Instead of a flat star rating, the first cop that sees you and gives you that one-star wanted level has a radius around him, and if you can escape it then you get off. Any other cop that spots you before you escape also has the radius, and as you get more stars, the size of all the radii increases. The size of a helicopter’s was too big for me to even see on the minimap.

Oh, Axl, you’re such a poet.

Burnout Paradise has proven me wrong and is totally fantastic. Almost all the misgivings I had about the demo are still valid, but the core design and philosophy behind the final product is so focused and perfect that they don’t matter. You can’t pick events from a menu, but that’s okay because the city is small enough that it’s not too difficult to get around, and interesting enough that you want to explore it between events. This also helps you learn your way around the city.

It’s also a new standard for online integration, as well as the perfect system for online in an open world title. I’m going to be disappoint when GTA IV doesn’t work like this. You can invite a friend or be invited from an easy-to-use D-pad menu, and then the world you are in becomes the online world seamlessly. The host can then decide to make a race event and can set the start and end points anywhere on the map. There’s also challenges, which are just little goals like “boost 400 yards on this street” or “do three barrel rolls on that jump” but when four or five people are all trying to do that, hilarious things occur. This also forces you to learn the nooks and crannies of the city. The design is all-encompassing in its scope, and it’s far more than the sum of its parts. It actually feels astonishingly new – the series has totally reinvented itself for the second time. That said, it’s not perfect. The crash mode replacement sucks really bad and the soundtrack thankfully allows you to toggle off individual tracks. Still, it’s great.

Other than that, I got alien laid in Mass Effect. It’s starting to wear thin; I’m glad I’m near the endgame. I also played Pokemon Pearl a bit on a car trip.

Outside of North America, “Bully,” Rockstar’s latest free-roaming opus, is instead known as “Canis Canem Edit,” or “dog eat dog.” This is a far more appropriate title than the North American one, which was embroiled in controversy from the moment of its announcement almost two years ago.

Fortunately, “Bully” is not the Columbine simulator it is lauded as being by its critics, all of whom began calling it that immediately after its announcement, before anyone had even seen screenshots of the game. “Bully,” however, is far from that. It’s easily the best riff on the “Grand Theft Auto” formula to date, and definitely Rockstar’s most innocent game, other than the 360’s “Table Tennis.”

“Bully” stars Jimmy Hopkins, a 15-year-old with disdain for his mother and disillusionment with the world. He is dropped off at the Bullworth Academy, a boarding school in what feels like New England. After dumping him at the gates to the school, his gold digging mother speeds off with her new geriatric husband for a year-long honeymoon, leaving Jimmy to get acquainted with his new school.

“Bully” is much more structured than the “Grand Theft Auto” games it draws inspiration from. You have to go to two classes each day, and have to be in bed at 2 a.m. every night. (Well, you don’t have to go class. It’s just encouraged.) Of course, there are also the missions, here referred to as tasks. These will be familiar to any “GTA” veteran.

“Bully’s” missions are generally far more varied and fun than any of the recent “Grand Theft Auto” games. The variety of actions you’ll have to perform is at least as varied as in “San Andreas,” and the controls are generally tighter and smoother to use. I can’t recall being truly frustrated at any mission in “Bully,” unlike “San Andreas.”

One of the things that sets the game apart from recent “GTA” games is the setting: It’s much smaller, allowing for more loving detail to be packed into each area. Bullworth–the school and the small town–feel much more alive and real than San Andreas’s cities and countryside did, though they are much smaller.

Of course, “Bully” would be nothing without a variety of weapons and other instruments of chaos. Aside from the obvious slingshot, which soon becomes ludicrously augmented with a scope, you get marbles for tripping people, stink bombs, eggs, and firecrackers. My one gripe is that the weapons you get later in the game become a little absurd. I can understand having to up the ante and feel like the player is advancing, but a portable potato gun with a eight-potato clip is reaching.

“Bully’s” hand-to-hand combat is a vast improvement over “San Andreas.” It feels much smoother, and new moves you learn are naturally integrated into your fighting style. It also feels very much like schoolyard bullying – you can grab someone by the collar, throw them on the ground and knee them in the unmentionables. The finishing moves are a nice touch. You can grab a character and do classic schoolyard moves like “Why are you hitting yourself?” or an Indian burn. If the setting is right, you can also give would-be bullies a swirlie or shove them into a trashcan.

You might be wondering, particularly after that paragraph, how “Bully” can be at all innocent? Without giving away too much, the Bullworth Academy is not a nice place. It is inhabited with some not-so-nice people and not-so-nice cliques. Jimmy is at first just trying to survive, and later trying to improve the overall situation of the school. Bullying the bullies, as it were.

Of course, one of the great things about “Bully’s” design is that you can be a total bullying curmudgeon. You can choose to accept optional missions like egging the girls dorm and giving people wedgies, or you can ignore them and beat up a bully you see picking on a nerd. The capacity for the player to do good is much larger than in “Grand Theft Auto.”

On the technical side of things, “Bully” looks impressive for a PlayStation 2 game, particularly one built on the aging “GTA3” engine. It has its own style, and there’s never any slowdown. Just don’t expect “Metal Gear Solid 3” or even “Resident Evil 4.”

The sound fares much better. “Bully” has one of the best original scores in recent memory, conveying danger and whimsy equally well, and changing dynamically based on the current situation. I’m still not tired of the bicycle music. The voice acting is similarly exemplary, featuring a cast of unknowns but using them extraordinarily well.

Of note is “Bully’s” careful efforts to seem timeless. There’s no licensed music, no advertisement – nothing to date the game as being set in the present day. It echoes the sentiment of the excellent TV series “Freaks and Geeks:” High schools sucks, no matter what decade you attend in.

“Bully” is a rare find–an original concept, executed almost flawlessly. It’s not perfect (there are some camera issues), but it’s excellent all the way around, and one of the PlayStation 2’s swan songs this fall. Play it.