Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Neglected Medium

My earliest memory is of me and my mother. I am five. I know this because my mother has told me that I’m going to get a younger brother, but she’s not yet obviously pregnant. We are in the basement of the house I lived in from the time I was 18 months old until I was 16.

We are sitting on the large wood-framed couch together and playing Super Mario Bros. I’m less prone to dying than she is, but whenever we get to Bowser’s castle I hand the controller to her because I’m afraid of the stark black and white architecture, the manic music, the fireballs that fly in from off-screen without warning.

I’m young, couldn’t tell you how old. Maybe 7? Memories from so far back are hard to pull up, nebulous. I know I’m not yet 8 because for my 8th birthday I received an SNES and never looked back. But today I’m not concerned with the NES, I’m concerned with waking up early on a Saturday morning. I descend from my bedroom to the basement, my parents both still asleep. It’s freezing in the basement. I don’t care.

I kneel down in front of the TV in my pajamas and start up Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I’m really bad at the game. I can’t beat the fourth level and rarely even see it. Little do I know I’ll never get further in that game. I’m too young to realize it’s not that the game is hard, it’s that the game is terrible.  I lack the capacity to make those judgments still.

Games have formed a pretty important part of my life, as much a part of my childhood as my parents. The problem is, games have always kind of lived in a section of my life walled off from everything else. As a kid, friends would come over and play Mario Kart or whatever. But they never seemed to think of things the same way I did. How many of them burst into tears when their parents gave them A Link to the Past for their 8th birthday but hid the SNES as a surprise gift in the closet? How many of them could hum the music to dozens of games on command? How many of them doodled in their notebooks not in stick figures but in pixels?

But the world didn’t seem to work that way. So my gaming obsessions were never connected to everything else. I enjoy music. I enjoy movies. I enjoy books. And while they’re all connected to each other and feed off each other and form this cultural mélange that allows a person to enjoy all the type of media together. It’s a foundation of culture. It’s a history. But gaming was never a part of that club. And so that part of my life was different. Separate. Alien. The people I would talk to about movies or books were not the same people I could talk to about games. And I thought that was just the way it was.

But Scott Pilgrim has come out, and I feel like something has changed. You see, Scott Pilgrim isn’t based on a video game, and it’s not even really about video games, but it is at its core drawing as heavily on the cultural references of video games as much as it does music or movies or the comic books its based on.

Movies have been getting away with this for years. Blade Runner isn’t overtly referencing Metropolis, but it uses the concepts and images of the previous work to help enrich its world and story. Similarly, Scott Pilgrim references games but doesn’t overtly name them or use them, but it uses the concepts and images to craft this world where games are just as relevant as all the movies one has seen and all the books one has read and all the music one has listened to.

Scott Pilgrim is the justification of the neglected medium. It is, at heart, a love story. But it uses concepts such as boss battles, leveling up, extra lives—things that games have been using for years—not as simple references for laughs, but as concepts that help enrich the world and as storytelling beats, as relevant as the concepts of every other medium. It welcomes the games medium, with its own culture and references, to join the mess of other forms of entertainment that have all been feeding into each other for decades. And in doing so, it not only provides a good film, but it provides a conduit for all the ideas that have been so long separated to spill out, not as nudge-wink references, but as devices used to tell stories, without shame or apology.

Scott Pilgrim is interesting for many reasons, but it’s magical because at its heart, the movie speaks to the child in me who remembers living a life that was ruled by how many lives I had, what level I was on, the final boss leering at me in the distance, my desire to explore these digital worlds and have these experiences of numbers and pixels and mechanics laid out before me as important and immediate to me as any other world I could experience.

That child would look at something like Scott Pilgrim and say “Of course that’s what the world is like” but the adult in me can only sit back and marvel that what I felt could never happen has already come to pass, that the two countries I thought forever separated in my life could be brought together in ways I had never considered, that someone could decide that all of these things that had been so long ignored were important.

And if that’s true, and the mediums are compatible, if games and every other form of culture and entertainment are on equal footing, who knows what incredible and interesting ways they can interact now and in the future?

Phase!

I don’t normally deal with everyday things here. Movies and music and books and games are so highly individualistic that I can’t claim to have an opinion that anybody would find worthwhile. I like a lot of things that nobody else does, and I understand that. So I make a conscious effort not to review every little thing that comes across my plate.

However, sometimes something is so good, and at such a risk of being overlooked, that I can’t NOT say anything. I must spread the word of good choices, and hopefully let people see something they wouldn’t otherwise. Today’s is a game. Not just a game, but a game for ipod.

I see you rolling your eyes! And yes, it’s true that most iPod games alternate between mediocre and crap, but this is different. This is amazing. This is a clash of gaming and music such as the world hasn’t seen save a few other times (and never done portably so well). This is Phase!

Phase is currently on sale in the iTunes store for $5. It’s made by Harmonix, those same wonderful people who brought you Frequency, Amplitude, Guitar Hero 1, 2, and 80s, and the new and temptingly large and shiny Rock Band. For the three of you who have never heard of these things (especially Guitar Hero/Rock Band) they are music games that take you through songs that you hit buttons in accordance with on-screen prompts. A rhythm game, for the gaming inclined among you.

Phase has a few features going for it most do not. 1) it’s much cheaper than Guitar Hero, I don’t care how used and abused the copy you’re looking for is. 2) it’s portable, which is nice if (like me) you’re always running about and not always in plain view of your gaming console of choice.

It’s 3) that’s the real clincher—you can use your own songs.

Let me explain. If/when you purchase Phase, it downloads into your iTunes. It also creates a Phase playlist for you. Now, before you sync your iPod, you have to put songs into the Phase playlist. Pick a song, any song. Once you do, iTunes will spend a few seconds analyzing the song and generating a note chart. Do this with as many songs as you’d like (between :30 and 30:00 min in length, up to 1000 songs) and then sync your iPod. Also, in a weird move, you have to manually sync the game. Once done, you’re ready to rock!

Phase plays similarly to most rhythm games. You select a single song in Quick Spin mode or a song followed by four others in the difficult Marathon mode, and you’re thrown into the game. Three lines drift off towards a simplistic, colorfully drawn landscape that unfolds before you. Circles come up, left right and center, which correspond to the Back Forward and Center buttons on your iPod, respectively. Also, there are swoops of dots that snake across the lines. These indicate a swipe across your touch pad. Whether it’s a quick swoop or a serpentine line of a song, it’s surprisingly visceral to play music circularly as opposed to the rigid binary-nature of the normal note-hitting.

When the circles hit the circles on the bottom of the screen, you hit the note indicated. Line it up, and you did it! Miss, and you suck. The game makes you know this, too, as the volume gets knocked down a notch on the song (similar to the misplays that happen in Guitar Hero). The more circles you hit, and the higher your score goes, and the more stars you gain at the bottom of the screen. If you don’t make enough stars to meet the quota before the checkpoint, you lose health. Lose enough health, and you get a game over.

It’s all pretty straight forward. Which is exactly what it should be. Consider it Guitar Hero lite. The real gem here, though, is being able to use whatever song you want to power the game. The generated note charts don’t have quite the consistency or elegance of a pre-constructed one, but they’re very adequate, and sometimes even brilliant in their execution. Especially with the addition of the touch-ring swoops. Shifting from the very old-fashioned button-matching staccato input style to the sweeping legato that the touch ring brings is surprisingly intuitive and feels musically accurate.

There are three initial difficulty levels and an unlockable fourth and fifth level. But even Hard will be sufficient for most people. I have yet to pass five songs in a row on Hard to unlock the next level. But I keep trying. However, Easy is appropriately Easy and Medium is a nice middle ground for those people who insist on playing Guitar Hero with three fingers. You know who you are.

My only complaint, and it isn’t game-breaking, is that sometimes the background animation can cause a bit of slowdown. You learn to adjust, and look ahead to the notes and anticipate, but I’ve missed a note or two due to a stuttering display before. Nothing game-breaking, and it could easily be because my iPod is a year old and has been treated fairly harshly in that time (I won’t tell you how many times I’ve dropped it).

All in all, Phase is worth it for ANYONE who regularly uses an iPod and has some time to kill now and again. Waiting for a bus, or after school, or on break at work, sometimes you just need some music in your life. With Phase, you can carry it with you. So you’re always just a reach away from being a miniature rock star.

Just don’t smash your iPod after a particularly good (or particularly frustrating) run. Seriously. Those things are expensive.