Category: Action

Hi-Fi RUSH

  06/16/2023       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

Hi-Fi RUSH is a hybrid of action and rhythm games. I think this is an excellent combination, as most action games are all about timing and rhythm already, so this is honestly a pretty obvious step to take. It’s also remarkably good at accessibility: It has multiple colorblindness filters and subtitle options, and the entire game environment moves with the beat, so you can time yourself visually even if you have a bad sense of rhythm. I enjoyed it a lot, even though the battles did get a bit too frenetic for me to follow at times. In particular, I think its best feature was sharply segregating combat and platforming sections; each combat encounter is a major one-time setpiece instead of you running into enemies all the time. jRPGs, take note.

I don’t want to talk about the gameplay, though. The story and writing are actually much more noteworthy. I believe it to be a very instructive example of Rebellion Chic: Despite being a cyberpunk story about a ragtag resistance fighting an evil corporation, its core messages are actually very conservative and pro-capitalist.

(Spoilers for the ending, but I don’t think they’re particularly ruinous.)

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   Action, Recommendations, Video Games     

Megaman Battle Network 1-3

  11/24/2023       St. Elmo's Fire      4 Comments

Megaman Battle Network is a spinoff of the Megaman series for the GBA and DS. I’ve never played any of the mainline Megaman games and am only vaguely familiar with them, but I played the third Battle Network game as a kid and greatly enjoyed it. Recently, a remastered port was released on Steam, so I decided to pick it up and give the whole series a whirl.

The premise is that this is an alternate universe where Megaman is a computer program instead of a robot, and the technology focus is similarly shifted: Everything is online, everything is a smart device, and everyone needs the help of sapient programs to navigate it all. This was wild science fiction when the first game was released in the early 2000s, yet in the present day it doesn’t sound too far off from our everyday lives. Surreal, and kind of eerie.

Gameplay-wise, MMBN made the interesting decision to switch from the platformer/shooter focus of the main games to an action RPG with deckbuilding elements. I like its gameplay a lot, and I find it demonstrates how adding even a small spatial component to RPGs greatly improves their complexity and engagement. (It does, however, retain the worst of grindy jRPG mechanics in spades.)

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   Action, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games      , ,

The Knight Witch, and Climate Change Allegories

  09/23/2024       St. Elmo's Fire      1 Comment

The Knight Witch is a shoot-’em-up Metroidvania, which is a pairing I haven’t seen since Hero Core in 2010. I’m usually not great at shmups, but I managed to fumble my way to the end and it was pretty enjoyable.

The most unique mechanic is a deckbuilding element, where you can equip a large number of spell abilities but only three are available at a time, chosen at random. I thought this was an okay idea that encouraged you to use spells often to cycle through your cards, but it was pretty awkward to be constantly flicking my eyes over to the corner of the screen to check my available spells while also needing to keep track of all the bullets and enemies flooding the screen. I think the biggest problem was that each of the three cards in your “hand” are assigned to a different button, preventing you from building up muscle memory since the function of each button changes constantly. You need to look at the cards to even know what your buttons do, during gameplay that requires you to make split-second decisions about which buttons to press. That’s kind of an intractable problem with the random card draws, though; I can’t think of a good solution other than limiting you to one available card at a time.

What I really want to talk about is the story, though. It’s an environmentalist climate change narrative. It does a surprisingly good job of this up until the end, where you (of course) solve climate change by punching it in the face. I think this merits some discussion.

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   Action, Metroidvania, Recommendations, Video Games     

Prey (2017)

  02/12/2025       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

I’ve heard lots of people insist this is the bestest game ever. I was dubious since I’ve never been able to get into FPSs, but a while back Epic Games gave it away as a freebie, so I picked it up on a whim. While going through my Christmas games I remembered it, and decided to give it a try.

File this away next to Fallout: New Vegas in excellent stories that were tragically packaged with terrible gameplay. Because by god the gameplay is terrible. I can tolerate simple FPSs, but ones that try to get fancy with verticality and exploration and platforming are just painful.

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   Action, Horror, Survival, Video Games     

Detective Games, Pt 4

  12/28/2025       Act      Add Comment

Inside: Brok the Investigator, Song of Farca, Chicken Police: Paint It Red

CW for alcoholism and depression/suicide in the Chicken Police review — I talk a bit about how Chandler died, largely because I don’t like how the game treats drinking as a character quirk.

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   Action, Adventure, Point-and-Click, Puzzle, Video Games, Visual Novels      , ,