What's your favorite action scene?

I'll save my biggest favorites in games for last, because I first thought of this when rewatching some scenes from a couple old Nicolas Cage movies that, while not terribly fantastic movies, still had at least a couple moments that made me go "woah."

The first of these was a scene from Next, which for me was a moment of gold in an otherwise bad movie: The chain reaction scene. Long story short, while one character escapes pursuers by running down a hill next to a cabin, another character drives a truck off that same hill in just the right way to piece-by-piece bring down almost everything on the cabin property save for the building itself. I am a sucker for the escalation in this.

The next one's admittedly more grim, and comes from the movie Knowing. A better movie in my opinion, but also a grim one, given it's a disaster movie that's very willing to have things go very wrong. Nevertheless, the airplane crash and the subway derailment clearly had bigger budgets behind them than Next ever did by a country mile, and boy does it show. Sad as the overall movie can be, the spectacle here is intense.

I'd also like to give a shout-out to the movie Mira. It's a 2022 Russian film that revolves around a huge meteor shower, and when that shower hits the movie does one extra-long shot following a select few characters as they escape a city, all while it gets slowly obliterated around them. It goes for eight minutes, and really helped sell the seriousness, spectacle and drama all at once for me. I thought I wouldn't be able to link anything here, but surprisingly I was able to find a video showing the whole thing uncut. It's only in Russian, but the dialogue wasn't the point anyway. (For those wondering, the cat in this scene later turns out to be just fine.)

Moving to games though, I've gotta mention at least two, because one of them is among my all-time favorites and was one which I loved so much it took until Undertale for something to compare.

The first of them is MotorStorm: Apocalypse, which I only learned about in about 2024 after I saw a video going over the history of its developer. I'd have heard about it earlier, but it had the misfortune of being game about racing through natural disasters that ended up releasing the day before the 2011 Tōhoku earthquakes and subsequent tsunami & nuclear meltdowns happened, so Sony rather understandably didn't want to advertise it much anymore.

MotorStorm itself was a series with more than a couple big titles under its belt, and had always been about dangerous racing of some flavor or another, with previous entries dealing with everything from desert cliffs to jungles to beaches to volcanoes. But Apocalypse was the one that got my attention because it was that one that decided the next game would take place during absurdly-powerful earthquakes while in the middle of the very city those earthquakes were in the process of destroying. (This time with said city explicitly stated to have been long-evacuated by anyone with sense, mind you.)

I could name all sorts of things I love about this game, as it's clear that Evolution Studios knew how to make a good racing game. But I'm here to talk about the spectacle I love so much, and I think the best way is to just show some. So here's a selection of my favorite tracks, with timestamps for the best parts: [1], [2], [3]. Alternatively/additionally, you can watch the same video that sold me on it.

Last but not least, there's Split/Second. This one's the favorite of mine. I played it on release back in 2010 and may as well have spent the next year with my jaw slack.

It's a very similar game to Apocalypse above, being a racing game where the tracks are all deliberately going through the most absurdly dangerous route possible in any given scenario. It has two primary differences: The first is that the explosions are deliberately triggered by racers as an attack, thereby integrating them more with the gameplay, and the second is that the story is "It's a TV show," and everything that breaks only does so because it was canonically designed to. If you're thinking "this sounds like an excuse plot to justify stuff exploding," then yes. Yes it is!

I can compare the two games all day, of course, but this comment is already long enough. Suffice to say I love them both, with each having its own strengths. With Split/Second, I prefer the graphics and sound design; it's going for cinematic, summer blockbuster aesthetics, and they pull it off. I'll start with offering a couple of trailers for the game, throw in a video of one of my favorite tracks, and end with another track on the special gamemode where everything blows up as much as possible right in front of you.

I've been dying to get another game like one of these for years, but sadly, both these games got cut down by circumstance before the likely sequels could happen. Split/Second's developer Black Rock got axed by Disney (yes, Disney published that game) as part of a budget cut, and MotorStorm's release being so close to multiple real-life major disasters completely ruined its future in Sony's eyes. Some of Split/Second's team went on to work on Sonic & All Stars Racing Transformed as part of Sumo Digital, which does explain why that game has a few surprisingly explosive gems in its track list, but a proper successor has unfortunately never happened to my knowledge.

I'm still hoping that another game will come along to fill the niche – honorary mention Just Cause 3, here, despite not being a racing game – but in the meantime, I'm still very happy these games happened at all. I mean, shit, I've been writing this comment since I posted the thread, which was apparently two hours ago (?!), so I'd like to think that says something, haha.

In closing... (epilepsy warning)