Scott Pilgrim Versus the World

First, some cleaning notes. I had twice planned to see the Scott Pilgrim Versus the World movie over this weekend but my friend twice vanished on me. Maybe things work a little differently in her native Mississauga, but where I come from, you try not to agree to see a movie the same day as your brother’s big birthday party. I don’t know. Fortunately I was in Toronto at the time and there’s never not something interesting to do in Toronto.

Which makes for a great segway into discussing the Scott Pilgrim video game. If you want to know my favorite aspect of the Scott Pilgrim video game, it’s that the game actually takes place in Toronto. After years of having to deal with games, movies and TV shows based in either New York, Los Angeles or a mock version of New York or Los Angeles, it sure feels fresh to have my home and native land in the spotlight. Seeing spoofs of such famous locales as Lee’s Palace, Sneaky Dees and disgusting TTC buses sure put a giant smile on my face. And where I always have a hard time believing other movies or games where the streets are riddled almost exclusively with young, perky women with bouncing boobs as extras, I can accept their existence here. Because, well, that’s how downtown Toronto is. You should live here.

As mentioned earlier, I haven’t seen the movie yet and can’t speak from personal experience. But I assume that the movie has really flashy and exuberant fight sequences and annoying plot and characters. So the video game excels in the regard of doing away with all that hubby-dubby Michael Cera gibberish nobody likes in favour of repeatedly wacky fisticuffs. The plot is kept to the bare minimum; Scott must beat up 7 of Ramona’s evil exes to win her love, and story sequences are limited to occasional stills of the kiddie-looking sprites making out. You know, in case you didn’t already feel like a pedophile beforehand.

This is a beat-em-up, one that really wants to be River City Ransom. You scroll from the left side of the screen to the right, punching and kicking a lot of bouncers and emo dweebs in the face. Often doing so with weapons, or the unconscious body of the last dude you punched in the face. At any given point, you can press a shoulder button to summon THE FORMER GIRLFRIEND OF SCOTT PILGRIM THAT SCOTT PILGRIM DUMPED TO PURSUE RAMONA FLOWERS TO HELP ON HIS QUEST TO WIN OVER RAMONA FLOWERS as an assist power-up. Your characters level up through experience points and learn new abilities, some of which (like the fall-rebound) would probably make the early-game experience more interesting had I learned them sooner.

This video game is all one giant love letter to assorted older video games, which lends it both a sense of charm and annoyance. The visual style both evokes NES-esque colours and aesthetic while being way too high-resolution to run on a real NES or ten combined. The music is that kind of faux-NES MIDI upbeat funk that mismatched so many great NES games of the time. I think the art style is supposed to evoke the Scott Pilgrim comics, but you’re asking the wrong person about this. I would rather play as comics Scott Pilgrim than Michael Cera anyways. And there are plenty of little references that felt kind of clever to me. The way bosses flash as you weaken their health. The giant black balls that fly off the screen for no logical reason, ala the TMNT arcade game. The ability to enter a hidden zone where the graphics fake-glitch out. The Super Mario 3-esque overworld. Probably the best Akira reference I can think of. The “Winners don’t do drugs” warning from arcade machines (that the Olympics has proven wrong time and time again.) And there are probably many more references that my naïve mind missed out on.

At the same time, there are some things that the game tries to reference, not realizing that they’ve already been referenced to death. Zombies. Ninjas. Coin blocks. The giant boss with an obvious weak spot. The evil twin. Anime robots. Too many of these nostalgic grabs have already been nostalgically grabbed in the ghoulies ad nauseam before. And then I realize that I don’t need this game to remind me about how great and dated 8-bit games are. Who needs pay homage to Super Mario Bros when Nintendo has been laboriously paying homage to Super Mario Bros for the last 20 years with almost all of its games? And lest we forget the dozens, maybe hundreds of already existing websites, Flash games and video series’ about old video games readily available. Screwattack.com has done a wonderful job of rendering this game obsolete. In summary, Scott Pilgrim versus the World is trying to fill a very flooded niche.

And then I can’t tell if some of the game’s actual flaws are either poor design or attempting to pay homage to poor design. If you don’t purchase stat-boosting items, the later enemies and worlds will throw you under a red, overcharging bus. But there’s no way to know what effect an item will have on your stats until after you purchase it; a weird way to operate businesses, I’m sure. (Though perhaps a successful business model for the denizens of River City Ransom. And drug dealers.) The pattern I found myself falling in saw me repeating some hidden bonus levels to save cash for stat-boosting items found in a hidden shop under a bridge, that wound up transforming my character into some kind of emo-meat grinder capable of easily dispatching every enemy up to the final boss.

I can also safely assume the game makes no attempt to pay homage to, say, the XBAND, because there is a decided lack of online play within the game. Now, this is a beat-em-up, and slapping around thugs by yourself has never been terribly fun. Gang violence is a social experience, you see. But if I’ve got friends over and they want to play video games, Scott Pilgrim Versus the World is sitting at the bottom of a list of games to boot up, beneath a pile of automatic weapons and plastic instruments. So my best bet for finding companionship for which to whoop arse with is the world wide web, and the lack of online play is something of an oversight.

As a cross-promotional tool, I guess the game succeeds at making me want to see the film, if just because I love my hometown that much. As a video game, it’s an experience that didn’t entirely endear itself to me. I can assume that perhaps the fan service here is strong, and the people that love this fiction will probably do well to play this game. Or maybe you really just like River City Ransom that much. Scott Pilgrim Versus the World, River City Ransom. Two niche concepts made for each other, perhaps?

3 stars