What Does Scott Pilgrim Mean about Geek Culture in the Mainstream?

The whole phenomenon of Scott Pilgrim vs The World (the movie) is kind of fascinating to me, because as this Cracked article points out, movies that geeks are crazy for do not seem to do well at all. Scott Pilgrim seemed, for a while, to be the great new hope to change that pattern. Spoiler alert: it didn't.

A brief history for those who don't know about the whole thing: the first Scott Pilgrim graphic novel was published in August 2004. Written by Brian Lee O' Malley, the book has received generally positive reviews, and if there is such a thing as the underground comics scene, it is one of the success stories to emerge from it. The next 5 books have a similar story (review-wise, not plot-wise), and the whole series has benefited from the movie. According to BookScan's Top 20 Graphic Novels for August 2010, all six books have jumped to the top sellers list, with Scott Pilgrim's Precious Little Life (Vol 1) at the number one position, indicating that the movie has fueled a pretty good amount of interest to the series as a whole.

Scott Pilgrim vs The World (the movie) was one of the biggest hype machines that the internet has seen in a while. If you want a physical representation of how excited people were for the movie, look no further than this picture of the Scott Pilgrim Comic-Con panel. The excitement for Scott Pilgrim drew a huge advertising budget from Universal. From billboards to posters on the sides of buses, from commercials to signs on the side of buildings; interested or not, very few people could say they were unaware of the movie. Despite all of this, the movie was poorly received in a numbers standpoint.

Box Office Mojo lists that as of 9/7/10 (the day before this article is being written), Scott Pilgrim has grossed $29,392,215 (Foreign- $9,527,630). This comes after a $60 million budget to make the movie. To put that in perspective, here are two other releases that came out on the same weekend:

The Expendables: Domestic- $94,383,026 Foreign- $90,000,000

Eat Pray Love: Domestic- $70,763,971 (Unreleased outside of the states)

Here's a movie that was released 5 days after Scott Pilgrim:

Vampires Suck: Domestic - $33,367,217 Foreign - $756,000

The Expendables, Eat Pray Love, and Scott Pilgrim all shared similar budgets of 60 million-plus dollars. Vampires Suck was made for about $20 million. I'd like to pepper in some stats for the reviews that these movies have taken. Listing these movies according to Rotten Tomatoes's rating system in order of worst movies to best, we get this result: Vampires Suck (6%), Eat Pray Love (37%), The Expendables(40%), Scott Pilgrim vs The World (81%). The percentages noted are the percentage of positive reviews the movie has received. Metacritic, a similar website, almost mirrors the results of the other search: Vampires Suck (18%), The Expendables(45%), Eat Pray Love (50%), Scott Pilgrim vs The World (69%).

It's difficult to imagine the reasons that the movie did not do as well as people thought it would. Maybe geeks aren't as big an audience that people thought it was. Maybe people are scared of new ideas, and going to the same type of movie that was released last year is comfortable. I'm not really trying to judge here. Eat Pray Love was probably a great movie if it's what you are into, and it certainly doesn't try to hide what it's about. The Expendables's cast is an action movie aficionado's dream, although I'm told it should have been executed better than it turned out. And Vampires Suck... well, you couldn't pay me to spend two hours at at theater watching Vampires Suck. Maybe if it could pay off my college loans, but certainly nothing short of that.

As my title points out, and as much as it pains me to say this, it might be that geek culture does not translate well to the mainstream. It certainly seems like it has its merits, but of course I think that: I'm a huge nerd. I get all of the little in-jokes and what the SNES sounds are. Joe America does not always get those jokes, and he might feel alienated because of it. It is safer to see a more popular movie because you know what you're in for.

But look at the good the movie has done for geeks: a good percentage of people who didn't know about the comics have been motivated to buy them. The movie itself is sure to be a cult classic, and as director Kevin Smith says, the movie's success isn't about the money, it's about the movie itself. Also, Micheal Cera finally got to fight in a movie instead of being a wimp, so that was nice. I know what little money I have to spare on such things is going to a Special Edition Scott Pilgrim DVD, and maybe the comics if I have extra spare money. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game is another huge success story. A $10 game that turned out to be anything but shovelware, it has received hugely positive reviews (Metacritic shows a rating of 77 as of 9/8/10). It even gave pixel artist Paul Robertson a job as lead animator for a video game, something which I personally have been waiting for since I saw Kings of Power 4 billion%.

A box office success or not, Scott Pilgrim rocked the world. It could be that geekiness is best left to live in the world of the geek, but I am personally ecstatic that this project had such an impact on the geek world. It might not be everyone's cup of tea, but it's like they say: trying to please everybody is sure to result in a mediocre product that almost no one will enjoy. This one's for the nerds, I guess, and I for one am glad to be a member of that group.

A Note When You're Designing Video Game Bosses

Just making a short post because I've been nagging myself to post for... what? 5 months now? Well, at least it's a shorter break then some of the webcomics I read (but at least those are enjoyable to its readers).

So here's the thing: games aren't perfect. That's given. But when you have a JRPG boss that can wipe out your team in two hits, you may have slightly overpowered them. If you have a boss that can use the most powerful unblockable magic that attacks all of your team at once, you may want to reconsider attaching that spell. If that boss can use that spell three times in a row and immediately regain full MP before their turn is over, you're just being annoying.

And you know, all of the above complaining is pretty suitable for final bosses. And I'm not saying that I expect a flashing weak point on everything I fight. But I'd expect that when my main character halves every attack (except stupid unblockable magic), he'd live for more than two attacks.

But when walkthroughs say that you should "Null Fire and hope for the best," and getting the skill to Null Fire isn't something you're warned to do ahead of time, it's frustrating.

That's all, though. The rest of the game is friggin great.

So this is How I Feel about Avatar

Okay, first off, I want to say that I am proud to be probably the three-millionth person to write about Avatar. On a scale of originality, I am probably between talking about drunk college students and how dumb the iPad is.

But still. I have my opinions, and I wish to sling them out into the world where everyone (read: three people) can read them.

So I was one of the miscreants who didn't see Avatar in mind-boggling 3-D. Ya know, I do wish that I had seen it in 3-D, because everything I did like about the movie would have been made much better. Yes, I said it: I did like some parts of Avatar. Anyone who's been around me in the past 3 weeks will probably be shocked or call me a liar or throw rocks at me or something, but yes, I didn't think the movie was a complete waste of time. The thing about 3-D is that it is like the Wii: it is much easier to make a quick, very gimmicky buck with it than to actually put some decent effort into making it a respectable platform. And from what I understand, the 3-D-ness of the IMAX experience made Avatar what it set out to be. I mean really, did you see those floating mountains! Those were awesome! I WISH those mountains had been floating in front of me, popping off the screen. I would have probably been taken into the world more, which segues me nicely into my thing about Pandora:

Something that has been kinda bothering me about Avatar is the world they live on. Pandora is by all means, a beautiful, wonderfully-rendered, awesome accomplishment in film, and everyone involved with creating it needs to be given a high-five. And based on what I can hear from the positive reviews about Avatar, this is where me and the fans are in agreement. The idea of the planet being connected with the creatures inhabiting it by way of electrical impulses is pretty darn cool. Okay, do I have all of the happy out of the way? Good. The thing about Avatar's super-awesome world and the people on it is that it's nothing I haven't seen before. Giant-overmind-world aside, I felt like the planet was just adding to the preachy-ness of the movie. The overmind aspect of Pandora was just used to make more commentary on how bad man is, and if anything will frustrate me about anything, it is when you are prompted to say, "Yeah! Mankind sucks!"

Look, mankind does kind of drop the ball from time to time. In fact, I'd say mankind has dropped the ball more than the Oakland Raiders have lately. But just like my unfounded loyalty towards the silver and black, I feel that to write mankind off as washed up shells of what we once were is stupid. Which brings me to the way that the cardboard-cutout of a military was portrayed. Where, exactly, was our motivation? On looking for Unobtanium, possibly the least-thought-out name since the iPad (ba-dum-pish). Hey, awesome, so we need something that Pandora has, right? And mankind will fall without it? No? Okay then, we have researched the element and have found it to hold immense energy potential, right? No? It's just worth a lot of money. Yes, that makes sense. Because we would approve of spending a probably unheard of amount of money to build a settlement on a new freaking planet, just to look for a new rock. Did you see the Unobtanium on the executive's desk? It wasn't even shiny!! At least gold and silver, two other ways to invest your money in shiny rocks, have some luster and beauty to them. So why fight the giant cat-people to the death? Because MAN IS GREEDY AND LIKES TO FIGHT.

It's the black knight riding in to destroy all that is good. He lands a good blow on the white knight, who struggles just a little bit before he pulls himself together in time to avenge all that has been destroyed. It's a good story, if a bit (A LOT) overdone. I do have a problem with the fact that I felt like I had seen the movie before. But I have connected to much better fictional worlds than this one. Have you seen what Bioware and 2K Games did in making the Mass Effect universe and Rapture, the underwater world of Bioshock? They are beautiful, wonderful places, and, importantly, filled with atmosphere. When I played Bioshock, I wanted to (and still do) find out everything about Rapture. When I watched Avatar, I didn't care. I didn't care that the big home tree was blown to pieces. By that time, I was so tired of the Na'vi, I was kinda rooting for the humans.

So, to wrap up and hop off of my soap box. Avatar: good movie? Yes. Great world, technologically awesome, and the overmind-world thing was way cool. Movie of the year? Did you see Up? Inglorious Basterds? Those movies earned it so much more. Even if they don't win, just don't let Crapatar win (see what I did there?).

Sonic Chronicles: The Dark Brotherhood

Sonic the Hedgehog is one of those controversial video game series that shares a mix of delight and intense hatred. Of course, it's not the quite the same sort of controversy that games like GTA and anything else Rockstar North has produced. Sonic evokes these mixed feelings because a lot of gamers (like me) love the character and most of his sidekicks. How else could Sonic's arrival in Brawl produce so much excitement for the game? Of course, some characters are not so well-made (Big the Cat needs to fall in a well and die). The biggest problem with liking these characters is that the games about them...well…suck. And they're getting more ridiculous as they go. I'm not talking about the early games, of course; Sonic 2 sets itself nicely on my "Favorite Games Ever" list. But Shadow the Hedgehog? This should have been an awesome game! Talking about Sonic's dark rival and his backstory should have been a shoo-in for an amazing game. Then they announced that he has a gun. Real edgy, Sonic Team. Then Sonic was forced into settings of literary classics (ironically getting a sword; maybe he and Shadow can have a showdown), he had an ever-so weird relationship with that chick in the ill-fated Sonic the Hedgehog for the 360, and now he's apparently a "Were-Hog." I pretty much hold Sonic Heroes as the last "true" Sonic game, though I never tried it, simply for the fact that it didn't have a blatant gimmick. At least using teams sounds like a gameplay difference rather than an attempt at being "cool."

    Then Bioware got their hands on the character and they did what they know how to do: they put him in an RPG. They took a fast-paced character and put him in a turn-based RPG. If your facepalm reflex has just been triggered, don't fret; this just means that you are still thinking logically. But you know what? The game wasn't very bad by any account.

    The gameplay is rather typical of turn-based RPGs. You have the typical attack, defend, magic, item, and flee options for your turn. In fact, now would be a good time to point out that this game is not doing anything new to the RPG formula. The POW moves (magic) are what keep the game standing out. When you initiate a POW move, you are given a series of pokes and prods to match so that you can maximize your damage potential. The pokes and prods match the way that the moves are done on-screen, and the more complex and powerful the move, the more difficult it is to execute the sequence. What's nice, though, is that these same sequences are used to defend against your opponents super-moves. So they can use Hellfire of Ten Thousand Deaths and you at least have some defense against their attack. It's a nice balance in favor of the player, though I occasionally had issues with how easy the battles were; I never lost a fight. My characters would die occasionally, and some of the middle chapters are very difficult, but I never had my party die.

    Well, that's enough about gameplay (this is an RPG, after all), what about the story? If you played up to Sonic Heroes, you'll probably be just fine; in fact, I had stopped at Sonic Adventure 2 and all you needed to know from Heroes was the existence of E-123 Omega. Well, Robotnik (I will never call him Eggman) has been defeated, his ship destroyed, possibly leading to his death. Then Knuckles is kidnapped, and the team comes out of retirement. Well, things happen (as one would expect in a story), and as you can tell by looking at the box, Robotnik is not the cause of the kidnapping. In fact, in the middle of the game, he joins your quest for justice, and winds up being a pretty powerful character even without a giant robot. And if you're drawing parallels between this and Super Mario RPG, don't worry; it appears that Sonic continues trailing behind his rival. Then again, he could do worse than this game. The story is very well told, and the dialogue is wonderful, and although the final battle left something to be desired, the dialogue between Sonic, Tails, and Omega was so brilliant that I could care less. The game ended on a great note for me, and I can't wait for another.

Metal Slug 7 (DS)

If you don’t know Metal Slug yet, I’d suggest getting acquainted with it right now.  The games are basically like those wonderful B-movies that should be horrible, and you know they should be horrible, and you feel horrible because you enjoy them so damn much.  As much as you want to tell yourself that this is mindless and low-culture, you are just having too much of a good time to care.  The game is just too charmingly self-aware to get mad at it for any of its faults.  I mean, the soldiers’ screams are hilarious, and the violence is so ridiculously over-the-top that it’s more funny than gruesome to blow apart enemies with a shotgun.

Metal Slug 7 lives with Contra in the platformer/shooter vein of games, and like Contra, the one-hit KO is present for you, the good guy.  The difficulty of the game lies in taking on legions of soldiers without getting hit by anything.  Sure, the soldiers are mostly one-hit KO pushovers like you are, but the sheer amount of them mean that a few are bound to get a lucky shot or 5.  This really didn’t bother me until I realized the sheer amount of lives I was losing due to these small deaths.  This of course, led me to be nice juicy prey for Metal Slug’s ridiculous boss fights.  At the end of each level, you fight a boss, and the difficulty ranges from appropriate to I want to kick a puppy.  The level four boss’s nickname may as well be game over.

Metal Slug 7 brings a couple of changes to the series, one bad and a couple good.  I don’t know why they decided to leave two-player co-op out of the final product; I loved playing the game with someone alongside me.  But to compensate for this, SNK gave each soldier a unique ability.  Fio carries a heavy machine gun always, Eri gets extra grenades, Tarma is the best person in a metal slug, etc.  In addition, you can carry two special weapons in addition to your standard handgun.  This helps level out some of the difficulty, but as I said, some things just cannot stop those bosses.  As far as porting it to the DS goes, the only noticeable difference lies in the smaller screen; some of the wonderful detail is admittedly lost from the game.  It is very easy to overlook this, though, when the character is moving

I love the Metal Slug series, and here I got to play it anywhere I went.  That alone gives this more than a recommendation from me.

Geometry Wars: Galaxies (DS)

So I am admittedly late to the Geometry Wars scene; I unfortunately am a poor college student who can not afford the time and money to own an Xbox 360, thus leaving me with the equivalent status of a third-world country in the gaming world. I haven't played Left 4 Dead, Gears of War (1 or 2), and I have no access to the Xbox Live Arcade. Luckily, like any good Nintendo devotee, I have a Nintendo DS, which seems to be attracting more and more ports of cheap, easy to develop games. So when my birthday came around last week, I dropped a nice $10 on Geometry Wars: Galaxies.

I always get a certain apprehension when I see a subtitle put on a game I knew was a success in another form. When I saw Galaxies instead of Retro Evolved, I was worried that the 360-DS translation was going to go awry somewhere. It could've been in the gameplay, the hardware requirements, or the user interface, but I had this trepidation on whether or not I should have bought it. Well, the $10 price was enough to convince me that even if it wasn't bad, it would at least give me some fodder for my first videogame review.

Let me start off my review with what is likely going to be the conclusion of that same review: Geometry Wars: Galaxies is basically crack. I'm serious. I haven't lost track of time on a videogame like this since the original Super Smash Bros came out in 1999. Galaxies is one of those games that, if you're not careful, will make you forget that it is dinner time and when you put the game down, you will be wondering what that awful feeling in your gut is. It means that you haven't eaten in a week, and that your family is very worried about you.

So the game's addictive. That suggests that the 360-DS translation didn't go so bad for Sierra and Kuju. The game handles extremely well; you steer with the D-pad, which is expected, and you fire with the touch screen. The game is extremely simple; you are a ship, and there are glowing multi-colored shapes heading towards you. That's about all there is to understand. With it, we have the triumphant return of the high-score-only objective. It's very easy to get used to, and it allows the OMG-quick-reaction change of firing direction that these types of games need. I don't know how many times I have failed to notice a blue diamond sneaking up behind me before it is almost too late. I can immediately fire behind me and shy away behind my shield of bullets. The single-player campaign is not really compelling in its own right; there is no story, there is no mission structure, just a bunch of solar systems with a bunch of different levels and bronze, silver, or gold medals. The only thing making me want to gt through these levels is the promise of a new, interesting stage with like a black hole in the middle or a maze or something like that. It all comes together and works, especially if you are the OCD-fueled gamer who needs a gold medal on every stage to feel accomplished.

I really like Geometry Wars: Galaxies. It is what it wants to be and nothing more. There isn't a nonsensical story about an alien invasion that drives brightly-colored ships, and you aren't saving the galaxy from the scourge of a virus or plague of something. Heck, you might even be the bad guy; you're the one going from galaxy to galaxy killing everything on the planet. Either way, the game works extremely well, and I always feel good about games that I have to make a conscious effort to put down.