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.

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.

Jeff and I broke the air-hockey puck at work yesterday. It is a somber air-hockeyless time.

It was a special lightweight triangular puck that was much more exciting to play with than the heavyweight round pucks. Bank shots become unpredictable and, truthfully, randomness is the spice of games.

The puck didn’t break immediately; it was something that occurred over a few days until the final break. We first noticed there was a problem when it sounded different. The way the table we play on is constructed, the goal “buckets” don’t retain the puck very well and, more often than not, the puck flies out of the retrieval hole across the room, rattling and bouncing all the way. We play so regularly, the sound it made as it bounced was just “the sound.” When that sound got low-pitched and hollow on one of its trips across the break room and upon examination, there was a faint crack in the plastic. Not much, but this was the beginning of the end.

We’re not the only two that lpay with this puck either, so when we found the puck yesterday, the sound was worse and there was also a seam in the sticker. The sticker was practically all that was holding it together. As we played, the sound got worse still until Jeff made a shot at my goal and it split in two pieces! The smaller chunk went right in my goal and the larger piece flew off the table.

“You get an eighth of a point! I’m counting it, but that’s all you get.” Jeff tried to protest, but I immediately fetched the larger piece and served it. He scored the rest of point and sent an email to our facilities manager:

Subject: Man Down

Tom,
        I regret to inform you that on this day during an intense match of skill and power we have suffered a casualty in the heat of battle.  I am uncertain of whom is to blame, but I will blame Steve as he is not composing the email and can not currently defend himself.

Tom is a great guy so he immediately came over and gave us hell for it. Jeff and I play nearly everyday at around the same time and Tom catches us in the break room often and jokingly tells us to get back to work. Hopefully that puck will get replaced soon – playing with those ordinary pucks is bland and not really fun.

So I’ve cancelled my WoW subscription. I knew it was going to happen. Hell, I’ve cancelled it twice before now and this is number three. In the cancellation form, there is a space for additional comments, so I decided to start writing. Apparently the form won’t accept anything over a certain character limit because every time I tried to submit the form, I got some odd behavior. (Oh believe me, I tried different browsers, toggled javascript on and off – no dice).

I figured the third-best thing is to post what I was going to send to Blizzard and Activision to Pie-Hole (with the second-best somehow getting this to their customer service department). Without further ado, the letter follows after the fold. (more…)