If you’re playing by yourself, you can expect to have your heinie hammered until you can upgrade your stats. The World: The Game make a point of mentioning how nuts its difficulty is – single-player gameplay is especially egregious in this regard. Most reviews in 2010 of Scott Pilgrim vs. Grinding time! This is a problem that existed in the original game, and it’s silly to discover that it hasn’t changed.Īnother problem with the original game that’s stuck around is its insane difficulty. If you want friends to simply jump in and have a good time, you’ll need to level other characters so that they aren’t turned off by the frankly stiff early controls. Each character has to be levelled up individually, and the difference between them is negligible for those unaccustomed to the genre. That’s accomplished through gaining experience via combat, which is one of the game’s weaker points, especially when considered as a co-op arcade basher. It’s true that the game starts off “feeling slow and sluggish”, but controlling it becomes far less stiff as you moveset grows. Pick your guy (or girl) then beat up some goons, power up, fight boss, rinse and repeat. Arcade beat-‘em-up action merges fluidly with role-playing game mechanics to recreate the gameplay style of those NES era bashers. The World: The Game’s previously mentioned inspiration from River City Ransom is far from superficial. However, the hype that it had re-built for itself has made the overall experience disappointing…without any actual disappointments.ĭemon babes and live music: Together at last! Undoubtedly a wholeheartedly pure re-release… The World: The Game – Complete Edition is every bit the pleasurable arcade fighter, with a superb soundtrack, that it was ten years ago. That’s not to say that it’s secretly been an awful game this whole time and that we were all lied to. With Scott Pilgrim’s re-release, this mystique built over the span of ten years is finally in danger of breaking apart. If you didn’t have a copy, you had two options: Take out a chisel and carefully break apart the ebay clutter to find consoles with the game on it, or brush away the authenticity and settle for an emulated version. The World: The Game, you had to rely on video game archaeology. Its unattainability has lent it an aura of invincibility that is persisted through the occasional retrospective puff piece. Perhaps the most iconic example of a lost video game of the last decade, Scott Pilgrim’s status as that excellent beat-‘em-up from yesteryear has essentially gone unchallenged. The game’s fans, its designers, and even the franchise’s creator hoped for its return, but their cries went unanswered for the better part of a decade. Downloadable games were still a relatively new and generally tolerated phenomenon, making Scott Pilgrim’s disappearance resonate through the gaming landscape.
The World: The Game’s removal from digital marketplaces in 2014 was, for many, a first caution about the pitfalls of digital distribution (but certainly not the last). Its heavy inspiration from 1989’s River City Ransom proved to be much of its appeal: “It may start off feeling slow and sluggish”, wrote Kotaku’s Mike Fahey, “but as new moves are unlocked and your stats increase, it begins to grow on you, ultimately delivering an overall satisfying experience.” The World: The Game was released in 2010, it was met with generally positive reactions.