I've logged a few hours with Bully lately, the "GTA in a prep school" game from Rockstar (RS Vancouver, not RS North).  While it is certainly held back by its "PS2-ness", in the form of long load times, low resolution, and general graphical last-gen-ness, it is a very compelling experience.  The writing is actually pretty amusing, and some of the dialogue quite well written, at least by video game standards.  They are little more than caricature, but interesting caricatures nevertheless.  The voice acting for a few of the characters (like Gary) is extremely good, and adds a great deal to what's interesting about the story.

There are two things that really struck me about Bully:

First, I'm quite surprised how well the basic gameplay of GTA (sans the carjacking) carries over.  Minute-to-minute non-linearity in a lightly simulated world with emergent gameplay winds up being pretty compelling even in Bullworth Academy instead of Vice City. 

Second, there is a sense of "worldiness" that Bully captures that even a lot of other quite feature-competitive GTA-style games (Saint's Row, Godfather) really fail to capture.  I'm not sure whether this just comes from production quality, detail in the environment, or artistic style -- but Rockstar VC managed to capture it in a way that most games do not.

Bully of course is getting all sorts of attention for the political combination of GTA + schoolkids, but really there is nothing particularly violent or even worse than you see in a bad teen comedy.   There is a lot of fistfighting and generally cruel behavior, so I wouldn't exactly recommend it for a younger kid, but all the Jack Thompson style hype about this being incredibly destructive to society is pretty crazy.

I sure wish it were on the 360 though.