Action role-playing game

Action role-playing games (abbreviated action RPG, action/RPG, or ARPG) form a loosely defined subgenre of role-playing video games that incorporate elements of action or action-adventure games, emphasizing real-time action where the player has direct control over characters, instead of turn-based or menu-based combat. These games often use combat systems similar to hack and slash or shooter games.

Early real-time elements

Early dungeon-crawl video games used turn-based movement: if the party didn't move, neither did the enemies.Dungeons of Daggorath, released for the TRS-80 Color Computer in 1982, combined a typical first-person dungeon crawl with real-time elements, requiring timed keyboard commands and where enemies move independently of the player. The game lacked numerical statistics such as hit points or vitality, but instead used an arcade-like fatigue system where the heart pulsates to indicate the player's health, a concept inspired by the 1978 arcade game Space Invaders where a heartbeat-like sound gradually increases pace as enemies advance towards the player.

Action

Action may refer to:

Businesses and organizations

Technology and mathematics

Live action

In filmmaking, video production, and other media, live action refers to cinematography or videography that does not use animation (though sometimes based on an original animated series).

As the normal process of making visual media involves live action, the term itself is usually superfluous, but it makes an important distinction in situations in which one might normally expect animation, as in a Pixar film, a video game, or when the work is adapted from an animated cartoon, such as Scooby-Doo, The Flintstones, 101 Dalmatians films, or The Tick television program.

The phrase "live action" also occurs within an animation context to refer to non-animated characters: in a live-action/animated film such as Space Jam, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Looney Tunes: Back in Action, or Mary Poppins in which humans and cartoons co-exist, "live-action" characters are the "real" actors, such as Bob Hoskins and Julie Andrews, as opposed to the animated "actors", such as Roger Rabbit himself.

As use of computer-generated imagery (CGI) in films has become a major trend, some critics, such as Mark Langer, have discussed the relationship and overlap between live action and animation. New films that use computer-generated special effects can not be compared to live action films using cartoon characters because of the perceived realism of both styles combined.