738 Ruse.

After several days of suck I am beginning to be less sick.

Let’s continue our Xpedition with a few words about my first Xbox Arcade purchase.  I got a Live card as a present and used it to get Scott Pilgrim Vs The World The Video Game.  It turned out to be a lot of fun.  It has some of my favorite kinds of violence in it: Canadian on Canadian violence and hipster on hipster violence.  The game is basically like beating up 7 years of my life.

You can play as Scott, Kim, Stills, or Ramona, and unlock Nega Scott.  With DLC you can play as Knives.  The characters aren’t significantly different except for Kim who has a lesbian healing special power.  The game is more or less the same as any side scrolling beat ’em up.  This particular one has some RPG elements in the form of purchasable power ups.  That was probably the thing that kept me playing longer than normal.  Powering up a character and then going back and stomping all over a hard boss is satisfying.

The game’s a little glitchy, but not so much as to ruin it forever.  Sometimes you will lose all your progress from the last autosave with a screen freeze, or what have you.  Annoying, but not a deal breaker.  Also, when you reach a certain amount of power throwing items almost always results in harminh yourself, because you can throw them so hard that they will rebound againsth the walls of the level back at you.  Sometimes several times in a single toss.  That’s a pretty glaring error.

Art wise the game looks really good.  It captures the aesthetic of the source material.  it does it in an 16 bit kind of way, but that’s still cool.  The soundtrack is great too.  It sounds like how you remember video games sounding.

Disappointingly there’s no online multiplayer.  That could really have extended the life of the title for me.  Going it alone loses some of it’s charm on the third go round.  By the time you unlock Nega Scott you’re pretty much done with the whole thing.  I bought Knives, but haven’t completed her story or N-Scott’s.  Of course I wouldn’t be against getting more character packs, so that once this game has cooled a bit I could go back and play as new people.  If they fixed the multiplayer thing that could really get me back in…

I’d really like to see Scott Pilgrim on a handheld.  DS preferably, but I could do PSP if that was the only option.