It’s the end of Kick Week, an unofficial theme week I just made up after realizing that I’ve spent the whole week talking about the ancient art of foot meeting face. What better way to follow a passionate plea for all games to have a kick button and the beginning of a revolution in which all games will than by honoring the many flying feet that have come before? On this week’s Aftermath Hours, we remember all the kicks that have knocked us flat over the years.
We begin the episode by discussing a week that feels like it’s lasted ten years, largely due to an assassination attempt against Donald Trump, the aftershocks of which have rattled every corner of the internet, including the world of video games. Almost immediately after it all went down, players of games like Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft began digitally recreating the scene. Companies, in turn, have moderated some instances of this and washed their hands of others. We reflect on what it all means.
We also dig into some significantly more lighthearted topics, including the best kicks in video games and Chris’ espresso-centric mad science projects. Then we, three people who are not licensed therapists, offer some extremely good mental health advice: log off.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can amass the time and resources necessary to retroactively add a kick button to every game that’s ever existed.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Nathan: What kicks do you think best represent the form?
Chris: Most obvious is Chun-Li. I mean, that’s just all kicks.
Luke: I’ve thought about this, though, because how are we defining this? There’s a lot of games where you kick, like Street Fighter, like you just said, Chris. There’s a lot of kicking. But it feels like there’s a distinction between a game that features kicking and a game that specifically breaks down a kick button, like a first-person game. In a fighting game, you expect kicks. It’s standard. But a first-person shooter where you can kick a door down feels more special, more worthy of focusing on.
Otherwise, I would just say Yakuza. Because fuck, those kicks are awesome. You kick dudes into walls and stuff, and their faces break. It’s amazing. But I don’t think Yakuza qualifies. I think Duke Nukem 3D qualifies.
Chris: I think Dying Light has one of the best kicks, because it’s just a dropkick.
Nathan: It sends zombies flying off rooftops. Incredible.
Chris: That usually ends with them hanging off a light post or something like that.
Luke: Mirror’s Edge has something similar. It’s not as well staged, but a few bad guys you run into, you can just kick ‘em. I think you kick doors down, when you’re running full speed?
Nathan: That’s interesting, though, because I saw somebody talking about the Mirror’s Edge kick, and they were like “It’s a really good kick, but it also feels at odds with my conception of Faith as a character. I didn’t really feel like she’s somebody who would kill people, and so I tried to avoid using that.” Because you could just kick dudes off buildings.
Luke: You can avoid every fight, I think, except a brief quicktime event battle with a boss. I’m pretty sure every other piece of combat can be avoided. But yeah, that’s the broader argument with Mirror’s Edge: The combat itself doesn’t fit the game. But if you do want to do it, the sliding kick and the dropkick in Mirror’s Edge are – if you can put aside the conflict between the mechanics and the character – very cool.
Nathan: It also just feels like a kick better fits any sort of game that’s very movement heavy. A kick arises from the legs, so you can jump right into it. Much harder to jump into a punch. Not impossible, but harder. And so anytime you slow that entire progression down and start to do hand-to-hand combat, it no longer feels in sync with the rhythm of the game. Which is another cool thing about kicks: They change the dynamic of the way that you’re fighting.
Luke: A kick is more disruptive. You can come in and out of punches really quickly without disrupting your stance or the viewpoint, but for a kick, you have to be way more dedicated. And that’s why the coolest kicks you get in games – like the Mirror’s Edge one, like the Dying Light one – they actually disrupt your view. The camera will jerk in a weird way or there’s a specific sort of animation focus on it where it’s like, for 0.8 seconds, the entire game is focused on this kick. That sort of immersion and dedication to the act is I think what lies at the heart of conversations like this. It makes something that sounds mundane actually really fucking cool and special and fun.
Chris: I do think that, historically speaking, kicks in FromSoft games have been bad. However, the kick in Sekiro, if I remember correctly, is really, really good. And kicks in Elden Ring, that wasn’t a good Ash of War, but then they introduced Dryleaf Dane’s weapons. He has one that’s fists and kicks, and then you later on get one that’s just kicks. And so kicks just got better, and now there’s an actual amulet you can get that is all kicks, basically. So it buffs your kicks, which makes it a very powerful move, because a lot of things count as a kick. So there are kick-based builds that are now fun in Elden Ring.
Nathan: Going back to what Luke was saying for a second, I agree that the disruption of a moment with a kick is really key to what makes it so much fun. Because I got into this in one of my pieces a little bit, but I do think there are a lot of things that are not explicitly kicks that could be considered akin to them. I included the Baldur’s Gate 3 shove, just because it’s a means of very forcibly relocating your enemies – making them go flying from one place to another place, or off a ledge.
Chris: I don’t know if I agree with that on a basic level.
Nathan: I’m building to a broader point here, though. You could also put, like, the Fus-Ro-Dah from Skyrim in a similar category if you were categorizing it this way. But, in both those cases, you do not have a giant foot coming out of nowhere to deliver that force and, as you were saying, Luke, disrupting your field of view – causing everything to shake and move in this tangible way. I think you can make both arguments, but sometimes you just want the big foot to appear.
Chris: I think I’m a foot purist. I think I’m really a foot purist. I don’t think it counts if you use your hands. That’s a different thing.
Nathan: Here on Aftermath Hours, we’re all foot guys.
Chris: I’m not. But I am a purist when it comes to the form. I think it being a concussive or pushing thing is a venn diagram of, there are many foot things that involve pushing, but there are many foot things that also involve striking, and so I think it can encompass both of them, but it’s sort of a logical fallacy to believe that all things involving pushes are implicitly kicks. It doesn’t make sense logically to me. But I understand the spiritual gameplay mechanic.
Nathan: I think I mean more in the sense that, when we’re talking about games, some of the most enjoyable parts of a kick often involve people being sent flying backward and that forcing them to traverse terrain in a way they were not expecting – or being pushed onto new terrain, or being harmed by a wall, or a spike trap or whatever. And so, as a result, these other motions that kind of accomplish something similar feel like kicks to me, because that’s what kicks in games so often do. It’s the purpose they actually serve, mechanically.
Chris: I think Bayonetta’s got a lot of good kicks. Does Devil May Cry have a boot thing? I forget. It’s been a minute since I played the last DMC game.
Luke: I feel like God Hand has some good ones.
Chris: God Hand has a lot of good kicks. Anything in that lineage, I think, is going to have a pretty good kick. But Bayonetta’s all legs, so it’s gonna happen. And by extension, Smash Bros has some good kicks, I think. Doesn’t Ganondorf have one where he lifts his leg up and slams it down?
Nathan: He has a similar move set to Captain Falcon, so he has his own version of the Falcon Kick.
Did either of you play Dark Messiah of Might and Magic? That was the game that sealed the deal for me in terms of being a video game kick appreciator. It was such an interesting game for its time, because I believe it was running on the Source Engine, and it came out not long after Half-Life 2. But it was pretty radically different. It was not a shooter; instead it was a first-person melee sword-and-shield brawler game, with some magic. It was kinda immersive sim-y, but a little bit removed from that.
And yeah, it just ruled. The combat was very detailed and hard hitting in first person, which you still don’t see that much of and definitely didn’t see that much of back then. I remember back then it was, like, that and Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay if you wanted really good first-person melee combat. But what Dark Messiah had going for it was this amazing kick. Opponents would cover up a lot, so then you’d kick them, and because the game was Source-based, it was very physics-y. And so if there was somebody standing next to stairs and you kicked them, they’d go tumbling down and ragdoll around.
Chris: Source had the best fucking physics.
Nathan: Yep. It was amazing. And then enemies would climb back to their feet, but what this game got right is, instead of them just being perfectly OK after that terrible experience, your enemies would be pretty beat up from falling down the stairs. And then they’d drag themselves at you very slowly in this honestly pretty pitiful way. But when you’re in that mindset already, you’re like “Hahaha, I feel so evil.” That, to me, is the best kick in video games.
