Wow. Let me just start off by saying that I could not put this game down until the very end. I got home from work, took a short nap and loaded the game up and did not stop playing until I defeated the final boss.

Number one, this game is presented in blocky pixel-art reminiscent of the SNES and NeoGeo golden age of games. Paul Robertson (of Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006 and Kings of Power 4Billion% fame) as art director is what makes this game. Every character and set piece is animated fluidly.

In keeping with the nostalgia theme, all the music is like a chiptune, which, for me, is my bread and butter. I grew up on 8- and 16-bit MIDI in my games, so I feel right at home and it’s quite comforting to hear this while beating up hordes of bad guys. The sound is mastered well too; there are no instances of any waveforms from either sound samples or the music of fuzzing the speakers.

I’ve stated recently in my Shank (demo) review that it was sort of like the old-school NES River City Ransom. I stand very much corrected in that statement:  Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game is River City Ransom for the “modern” era. After choosing one of four characters to fight through the game as, you start with next to no stats or abilities and are quite weak. As you progress through the game, you earn XP by defeating enemies. At each level, you unlock new and more powerful abilities as well as minor stat bonuses. Buying food, music, and books is where the real upgrades are though. Defeating enemies spawns a shower of coins to pick up. Spend your cash at the shops to regain health as well as XP and stats.

Near the beginning of the game, I found myself getting frustrated I could not fight the way I wanted. I could only punch in one direction or perform a small set of combos. The frustration quickly broke as the abilities unlocked and I realized the game was giving me more freedom to choose my attack style. Some of the abilities are a little difficult to perform or inconsistent in their execution, but most seem to work pretty well.

As expected, enemies and bosses get tougher as you progress through the game, as well as dumping more and higher-value coins to collect. I found myself backtracking to earlier sections to earn cash for upgrades to help out in the later levels. Some of the levels (and this is not even restricted to the later ones) seem arbitrarily hard for the difficulty setting. Fortunately you have three lives to spend, but unfortunately, if you lose all of them and must use a Continue, you are started all the way back at the beginning of the stage, not the most recent checkpoint – especially frustrating if you have lost your last life on the boss.

I’m not really familiar with the Scott Pilgrim franchise, so the story and the (I’m-sure-there-are-many-but-I-really-have-no-idea) references kind of whiz on past me. The important part is it is there, but I  feel as though I’ve missed something that could have been entertaining, but because I’m a Scott Pilgrim newbie, I just don’t “get it.” Fans of the comic and movie are sure to get a lot of the jokes. On the plus side, Scott Pilgrim’s humor stems from oh-so-many video game memes, I felt pretty at home just the same.

There is a multiplayer feature, but it looks like it is local multiplayer only. I really would have appreciated an online component instead of just a leaderboard that keeps track of KOs and Cash. As such, I really won’t be able to assess how this works.

Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game is a nice package that runs about 3 hours the first time, and I imagine closer to 90 minutes if you know what you’re doing – well worth the 800 Xbox Live Points, especially if you intend to level up all your characters and play through the harder difficulty settings.

• Rating: ««««« (out of five)
• Genre: 2D Side-scrolling Beat-'em-up

It’s here! I admittedly know very little about the Scott Pilgrim franchise and I haven’t even seen the movie, but I bought this game outright because of the art. It is directed by the same guy who did ‘Pirate Baby’s Cabana Battle Street Fight 2006,’ Paul Robertson. I don’t care if the game is terrible, I want to support this guy in my small way.

Good thing the game doesn’t suck! I’ve played for about ten minutes and love it. Expect a full review soon!

Shank, for the Xbox 360 as a downloadable title, is a 2D Side-scrolling Beat-’em-up much like a cross between River City Ransom and the Devil May Cry series. To be honest I am glad I decided to try the demo instead of purchasing the full game. It weighs in at an enormous 1.98 GB and my first impression was not very good.

When I first started the game, there were only a couple of intro screens that seemed to load a bit too long for my taste and I began to wonder if there was something wrong, so I restarted the game from the dashboard. I waited again and it eventually loaded the intro movie. I was pretty psyched for a new game experience for about a second and the opening teaser movie started skipping and chopping. Again, I thought there was a problem, but I let it go for half a minute, hoping it would work itself out, but it didn’t stop stuttering.

The sour taste in my mouth grew, but I was still willing to give the game a  fair shake, so I started the story mode and saw the all-too-familiar loading screen.

And saw it.

Watched it.

Saw it some more.

And yet more.

Nearly two minutes of loading (I timed it on a second play-through of the demo at 1:57), and I had to be shaken out of a stupor to watch the story introduction movie. The voice-acting wasn’t bad, more than passable, so good on that, but the audio was mastered way too loud, just over the edge of blowing out the waveform and causing my speakers to fuzz ever so slightly. On top of that, the audio would almost imperceptibly blip and gawk at times, usually at dialogue or camera transitions. Gross.

But okay, the game had started. I don’t want to be unfair and say there’s nothing redeeming about this game because, in truth, the gameplay is quite fun! You play as Shank, the game’s namesake, and your goal is to mow through enemies with your knife, guns, and chainsaw, spilling as much blood as possible while staying alive. It takes only a few minutes to get into the groove of how to chain your attacks together for maximum effectiveness and get a feel for the inputs. The learning curve is quite shallow, so kudos to the gameplay design team.

Art team: bravo. The game oozes style and is internally consistent and manages the weight of characters versus environment and items. I was not once confused what I was looking at and what its purpose was. At one point Shank engages a handful of enemies along a backlit bridge. The silhouettes of all the characters involved remain recognizable throughout (and light up nicely too when firing guns).

There are also little animated cutscenes that occasionally popup in the corner of the screen while you’re mangling bad guys complete with story and voice-acting. This is a design decision I’m mostly on the fence about, but in the end, I would have axed it for content during combat downtime, in between encounters, as it can be distracting. Fortunately, the action at hand is not intense while the scene plays out, like a conscious compromise.

All in all, I think this game could have been a “buy” for me had it a little more packaging polish to it. The game itself is excellent enough on its own, but the combination of ridiculous load times and bad audio mastering insult my impatience and my ears. I may visit it again later if I find these issues have been addressed in a patch, but for now, I’m glad I saved my 1200 Xbox Live points.

• Genre: 2D Side-scrolling Beat-'em-up
• Rating: «« ½ (out of five)

Today is allocated to paying bills, sending out paperwork, changing addresses and fulfilling all those administrative tasks that go into pretending to be an adult.

I’ve been waiting to get this particular paycheck for about 4 weeks now, and, while I have gotten another one in the interim anyway, this is the one that starts to turn around my negative cashflow. If my budget is right, this whole paycheck walks out the door and I might still be behind, but maybe only by a few dollars. Then the next one I will start to pick up steam.

This is for me more than anyone, but I don’t feel bad about publicly disclosing what bills I’ve got to take care of, just the amounts

• My share of the pro-rated rent for the old apartment
• My share of last month’s electricity bill for the old apartment
• Full month’s rent for the new apartment plus pet deposit
• Electric bill for the new apartment
• Wireless phone bill
• FiOS Internet Bill
• Car Insurance
• Plane Ticket

Then I also have to consider:

• Changing my address
  • Driver’s license
  • Banking information
  • At work
• Picking up little things I might’ve forgotten from the old apartment
• Patch the walls where I had mounted a couple things at the old apartment
• Tell the electricity company to stop billing

So much to do…

Who the hell is this guy? This might help (wikipedia).  Don’t worry, I’ll wait until you get up to speed.

I had never heard of him until today when I read an entry over at geekinheels. The author there posted a quick little article about how she found a neat little web app that analyzes a sample of text and tells you what famous author you most write like. When she did it with her blog entries, it spat out Stephen King most often. This is what I got more than 50% of the time:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I got a smattering of others, but apparently this David Foster Wallace character was quite influential. I feel like reading his stuff, but it might be kind of like masturbation at this point. Like discovering you’re actually a clone, finding your seed person, and making out with them or something.

Wait, what?

Homer Simpson Clone A: I love you Homer.
Homer Simpson Clone B: No, I love you, Homer.