For all of its screaming electric guitars and raucous drums, Hi-Fi Rush is surprisingly low-key. Smashing apart killer robots to the beat of licensed rock tracks from artists like Nine Inch Nails, The Black Keys, and The Prodigy is rad as hell. It’s like going for a run and trying to sync each step to the album you’re jamming to. It’s playing Devil May Cry, but every drum hit in Bury the Light (opens in new tab) is an opportunity to continue your combo. But after establishing its hook in a killer opening, Hi-Fi Rush’s high energy starts to wane.

Hi-Fi Rush has a bright, cel-shaded world and top-heavy killer robots, the kind of goofy aesthetic that’d play well on a blurry TV screen in the background of an NCIS episode—it looks extremely like a videogame from the mid-2000s. It’s largely the music, combined with its snappy animation style, that elevates this simple aesthetic. Trees, lampposts, and pipes bounce along to the soundtrack, and main character Chai is constantly snapping his fingers, which causes a tiny comic book spark to appear each time.

Vandelay Technologies, the evil corporation that accidentally replaced Chai’s heart with a Walkman, is the stage. It started out manufacturing robotic limbs for people in need, and then pivoted to selling helpful robots that are a software update away from becoming an army. The man at the top, Kale Vandelay, has a very cartoon villain plan to use the implants for mind control.

Everything in Hi-Fi Rush runs on classic cartoon logic. Chai casually dusts himself off after being punched through a wall and, in one scene, faces the camera in shock just before he plummets down a chute like a Looney Tunes character. He isn’t bright but neither are a lot of the characters in Hi-Fi Rush. At times Chai sounds frighteningly close to a Joss Whedon character. I’m pretty sure he did a “Well that just happened!” in the first hour.

Chai’s incompetence is the point, and the game quickly partners him with a crew of much more interesting and charming characters to bounce off. Peppermint and her cute robotic cat, 808, team up with Chai to go after Vandelay’s C-suite. Soon you meet Macaron, a pacifist robotic psychological analyst with a metal buddy named CNMN (pronounced like cinnamon). And a fourth character that I won’t spoil, but will say is fun to have around even if their accent is totally incomprehensible.

Band together 

All of these characters (except CNMN) are available as summons during the beat-based combat. Chai has heavy and light attacks that you can combo together and end with a finisher in time with the song. At any moment (or as a finisher) you can pull in a teammate to help you. Peppermint blasts enemies with her gun and is necessary for knocking enemy shields out. Macaron smashes armor apart, and the final character you get is able to douse pockets of fire in the arena.

As you progress and defeat bosses that test your parry timing and sometimes become just literal rhythm games, you can buy additional moves and passive bonuses. By the end I could grapple toward a robot, launch them into the air, and then call in Peppermint to fire a massive laser beam into them, and if that didn’t cut it I had Macaron on standby to smash them into scrap metal. Because the enemies only attack on the beat and are telegraphed with lines and circles on the ground, you can easily dodge or parry them back for damage. Some attacks can only be dodged, but spamming parry when the song lined up just right almost always kept me safe.

I’m not sure if it’s because I funneled a lot of my upgrades into lowering the cooldown on the summons or by playing on normal difficulty, but Hi-Fi Rush eventually stopped being much of a rhythm game halfway through. The game starts to use original songs that all feel like a similar tempo and aren’t particularly memorable and the combat loses all its oomph. I was suddenly playing an OK character action game where every fight I cycled through my summons and performed simple combos until the score screen came up. Other than a few gimmicky boss mechanics, Hi-Fi Rush rarely pushes back on button spam. And without recognizable music or challenging tempo shifts, everything blends together.

The only place the music remains important are the sections in between each battle arena. Geysers of lava and other environmental hazards make up the platforming sections. You have to time your jumps and quickly summon a teammate to break through shields and doors before the next beat hits. Sometimes the game even locks the camera and becomes a sidescroller. Nailing these parts without dying or breaking your rhythm is like making it through a Mario level on pure reflex. The song guides you through the obstacles. You almost don’t have to look at the screen.

Hi-Fi Rush’s setlist is too limited to fully embrace its chosen era of music.

The exploration sections are where the mid-2000s vibe begins to feel a little like a curse. There are crates to smash, collectibles to find, text logs to read, and power-ups for your health and special attack meter hidden throughout each level, but all of it just slows the game down. I was strong enough for anything Hi-Fi Rush could throw at me after only a few hours, and there were only so many emails I could read about robot labor abuses and incompetent bosses. Nostalgia for this era of games (if you even have it) can’t make up for the hours you spend dashing past a bunch of stuff you don’t need.

Hi-Fi Rush’s commitment to the marginalia of the games it’s aping is impressive for its specificity, but makes me wonder if it could have retained a retro feel without it. A dull lead with a group of way more interesting secondary characters and only a handful of solid licensed rock songs struggle to match the energy of the game’s first few hours. Another version of this game could have swapped Chai out with Peppermint and filled the tracklist with sharper rock and punk hits that match the anti-capitalist message the game is reaching for but can’t quite grasp by the end.

As a surprise from a developer known for its horror games, Hi-Fi Rush is a promising concept. A sequel that refines its samey level design and combat and expands its list of songs could be the game I wanted Hi-Fi Rush to be. As an average action game with a handful of stellar moments that heavily rely on its rhythm-based structure, it’s not worth choosing over all the other great options in the genre.

Hi-Fi Rush is like going back and listening to the songs you listened to as a teen. Sugar, We’re Going Down still goes incredibly hard, but Fall Out Boy’s newest songs (opens in new tab) are able to nod at their roots and incorporate enough modern production and structure to sound like something new. Hi-Fi Rush’s setlist is too limited to fully embrace its chosen era of music, and it’s too dated to resonate with what’s hot right now. It’s stuck, unable to fully commit to its own pitch and unable to capture the moment. It’s a strong teaser for a more cohesive game, and it has me crossing my fingers that one day it will come.

“The woke mind virus has infected not only our government institutions but our educational institutions and our entertainment institutions,” claimed conservative commentator Dave Rubin on Fox News. Rubin lamented that The Sims 4 did not have the same “educational value” as games he played in the ’90s like SimCity, claiming he learned a lot about urban planning from the latter game. Rubin concluded that this update to The Sims was “completely consistent with everything we’ve seen of the woke.”

Former real estate agent Chaya Raichik weighed in on the issue from her popular “Libs of TikTok” Twitter account, taking particular issue with visible top surgery scars as a customization option on Sims. As reported by NPR (opens in new tab), Raichik’s fixation on gender-confirming surgery and lurid, fallacious accounts of such operations being performed on minors have inspired threats of violence against children’s hospitals throughout the country.

Nick Adams (Alpha Male) (opens in new tab), a person that Donald Trump once called his “favorite author,” also weighed in. “The Sims has gone woke. You know what that means,” Adams wrote (opens in new tab). Whether you know what that means or not, Adams went on (opens in new tab) to urge readers to “Put down The Sims 4 and pick up a Bible!”

Our hobby has been taken up as a cudgel in a retrograde and largely unpopular political campaign, and if that sounds familiar to you, you probably lived through the moral panic that videogames experienced in the early ’00s. This week’s infantilizing, fearmongering statements by right-wing figures echo the outcry of Jack Thompson, Hilary Clinton, and others who for years used videogames and their place in our culture as a tool in their respective political projects. 

You can observe similar parallels in the backlash against obscene music that culminated in a 1990 supreme court case (opens in new tab), or to the moment, just a few years removed from the end of WWII, when Catholic organizations and other groups inspired children in some cities across the United States to ban, round up, and burn comic books (opens in new tab) that they viewed as responsible for child delinquency.

Like the manufactured controversy around Xbox’s new power saving feature (opens in new tab), it’s a bad-faith play for an outrage news cycle, in this case centered on free, optional videogame DLC. The Sims catering to an LGBTQ+ audience (opens in new tab) is nothing new, and actual fans of the game seemed to largely enjoy the new trans-inclusive content pack. Anyway, I guess I’m off to play The Gay Sims on my Wokebox One.

But that hasn’t stopped people from speculating about the actual release date. On a daily basis. In forums, on Discord, on Reddit, on Twitter, that’s pretty much the only thing about Starfield that is being discussed these days. Things have gotten so bad the subreddit had to create a pinned “Release date speculation / False information megathread” to push back the endless, constant waves of release date rumor posts that were eating it alive.

It’s become, frankly, exhausting. The speculation about Starfield’s release date has fully eclipsed every other topic about Bethesda’s space RPG. Whereas players used to excitedly theorize about what might be on the game’s 1,000 planets, or what skills might not have yet been revealed, or how the main storyline is structured, or the complexities of its ship-building system, the only thing being discussed regularly now is when. When.

We’re not really any closer to knowing. The situation hasn’t been helped by Bethesda’s silence—not only do we not know the release date, we still don’t even know the date of the Starfield showcase that might give us the release date. And several recent rumors and supposed leaks about the release date have spun the community into an even bigger frenzy of speculation.

Recent events that have led to more speculation about Starfield’s release date:

🚀 Jan 13: Starfield’s release date on Steam changes from “2023” to “Coming soon” though it turns out that doesn’t mean anything in particular.

🪐 Jan 16: YouTuber MrMattyPlays says a source told him Starfield was delayed into the summer of 2023.

👨‍🚀 Jan 25: A leaker (who accurately predicted the Hi-Fi Rush release) said Bethesda wants to delay Starfield to the fall of 2023 because it’s in worse shape than Redfall, which the leaker describes as being in “rough shape.”

👽 Also on Jan 25: The Microsoft Bethesda showcase reveals launch dates of April 18 (Minecraft Legends), May 2 (Redfall), and June 20 (TES Online’s new expansion), not leaving much room for a Starfield release in the first half of the year.

🌌 Jan 27: A gray market key reseller shows the release date as March 23, 2023. (It also states the platform will be the Bethesda launcher, which no longer exists.)

👾 Feb 2: The Bethesda support page for Starfield currently says Starfield is planned for the first half of 2023, leading to speculation it definitely won’t be delayed again.

You can see why the community is in a tizz over all this, but it doesn’t stop it from being extremely tiring. I’m not saying Bethesda should come out and give us a concrete release date if it’s not ready to—that’s what led to this mess in the first place. Delays happen all the time in gaming, but there’s a problem inherent in going from a specific release date—especially one as notable as 11/11/22—to a vague release window like “the first half of 2023.” In general, maybe publishers should stop claiming release dates before they know they can actually hit them? Just a thought.

And I’m definitely not blaming fans who just want to know when the damn game is coming out already. Yes, the constant, repetitive posts about every unsourced rumor and uninformed guess are irritating. But they just want to know, and I get that. I want to know, too. If only because it will mean I can stop reading about how nobody really knows. 

We’ll eventually hear the actual release date, and be able to get back to speculating about fun things like the story, the quests, the game systems, and what exactly is on all those 1,000 planets. I’m looking forward to that date just as much as I am Starfield’s release date.

First things first: This is a Russian website that doesn’t appear to have any affiliation with Valve. So this is in all likelihood quite illicit, and trying to get the Russian authorities to take it down is going to be a fun time for some poor lawyer in Seattle. On a more practical level you may be worried about malware or trackers. While I’m no cyber-expert, I’ve run it through three different scanners and it appears clean.

Here then is Play-CS.com, which allows you to play Counter-Strike 1.6 across different regional servers, with all of the game’s different modes and various extra functionality. I have to say that our comrades have done a pretty amazing job here: PCG’s editor-in-chief Evan Lahti had some bad pings, but for me this runs amazingly well. I’ve played several rounds and modes across different servers, the functionality seems great, it feels exactly like CS 1.6, and I just got headshot by Bob Dylan (clearly taking a break from his never-ending tour).

It does seem like a bit of a passion project, and if you loved CS 1.6 back in the day this is sure to provide half-an-hour’s fun nostalgia. It’s clearly a bit dodgy in terms of not having anything to do with Valve, but the fact someone’s made a game from 1999, one of the most iconic games in PC history, playable in a browser with full online functionality and no issues, is seriously impressive. 

The ‘real’ Counter-Strike is still going strong in the form of Counter-Strike Global Offensive, which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary (and was made to run at 4,000 FPS by one of its greatest devotees). And while it’s not quite on Doom’s level, it does turn up in even odder places than browsers: Like this Nintendo DS port, which absolutely slaps.