What games have you been playing, and what's your opinion on them?

Less conventional: I have been looking for a decent tetris android APK that has comfortable controls, satisfying UI, and most damn importantly, NO ADS.

Found it in Falling Lightblocks.

You can also download custom themes or make your own.

The blocks move a bit quicker than the app store equivalents from level 1, but I don't mind.

Never cared for tetris but someone said it helps trauma survivors and I'll admit, I do like how it takes me outta my dark spots sometimes.

Still playing Arc Raiders, I've settled into a rhythm of very casually looting or doing easy trials solo, and then throwing away actually good gear in duos/trios with friends where kill-on-sight is more or less the norm now. The expedition to wipe progress in exchange for some minor permanent boosts is coming up but I quite like having some decent blueprints and don't play enough to justify needing to get lucky with them again. There's another update coming tomorrow which will introduce a snowy weather condition, and I love snowy maps in post-apocalyptic settings (I still miss you Division 1 Survival) so that should be a good time.

Also played some of the content in the Fractured Utopias DLC for Frostpunk 2, which adds a fair bit of content to the endless Utopia mode of the game by giving every faction its own progression tree and hub building which can drastically alter the way you develop your city. I admit I wasn't expecting much since I went through the trouble of getting all the achievements prior to this update but it's actually pretty refreshing.

Today, I want to talk about UNBEATABLE, a rhythm game where music is illegal and you do crimes. I've been playing it this past week, and I've been so captivated that I've even been high-score chasing in the arcade mode, something I've never done before. I'm not a rhythm game fan, but I think UNBEATABLE is making me into one -- turning me into even more of a transgender stereotype. And it all started not with the rhythm mechanics, but with the story mode.

UNBEATABLE is one of the most voice-y games I've ever played. What I mean by that is that is that the dialogue and the writing style are very strong, very distinct, and probably very divisive. There's like a fifty percent chance you love it and a fifty percent chance you get annoyed by it; the voice is a bit late-millenial, with goofy self-aware jokes and flowery metaphors and a level of earnestness that you might find unbearable. At points, this really didn't work for me; at other points, it worked so well that it broke my heart. In either case, though, it's rare for a game to have a strong voice at all -- even very good games more often shoot for a sort of realistic, accessible style -- and UNBEATABLE's strong voice synergizes neatly with its equally distinct art direction and its well-worn "bandmates rebel against the system" core plotline (that later gets delightfully subverted).

UNBEATABLE consists of I think 5 episodes (or is it 6?) where you play a sort of walking-sim esque level with optional exploration and minigames and dialogue choices, and then end with a big, explosive, lo-fi musical set piece that can last as long as fifteen minutes, that blends regular dialogue scenes with rhythm game portions, and that often integrates non-rhythm inputs from the minigames. These sequences are some of my favourite moments from any game this year, not just because of their incredible energy and the great music behind them, but because of how well they're integrated with the themes and the characters, and how heartfelt they can often get. In particular, the final chapter of the game broke me to pieces -- without even resorting to melodrama. I immediately went and wrote an effusive Steam review that said: "all great art, I think, speaks to the time in which it was written. UNBEATABLE sings." And then was shocked to see the general consensus around the game settle into the 87% positive 'yeah, it's pretty good, but...' camp.

People experienced some pretty severe jank with this one, and it is missing some key features, like a chapter replay function, and yeah, some people found the narrative voice off-putting. But for my part, I found that where I experienced these frustrations, they were massively outweighed by the parts of the game that worked for me. Whether it be the quiet montages of your main character composing a song, whether it be the neat way that the dialogue system lets characters talk over one another, whether it be the very particular and carefully-crafted ambience of the nostalgia-inducing world, whether it be the loveable and well-realized characters, the game's empathetic perspective, the way it so neatly and seamlessly unified its themes about art, family, hopelessness and politics with its left-field sci-fi worldbuilding without ever feeling dour or depressing -- there was just so much that worked about this story, to an extent that it might be my pick for game of the year, coming at the back of Silksong with a steel chair.

I think, if you're interested in games as an artistic medium, UNBEATABLE's story mode is almost a can't miss experience. Even if some of the stuff it does doesn't land as well with you as it does with me, it's so interesting, distinct and dynamic that it's absolutely worth a look. Just make sure you take all the photos with Quaver in Chapter 3-- I discovered through watching streamed playthroughs that my favourite musical scene in the entire game is completely missable if you don't.

Soo, I finished UNBEATABLE and my heart was broken and I didn't want to just move on, so I opened up Arcade Mode.

I think rhythm game people are a bit like fighting game people in that they love and will evangelize their genre but will never do a good job of making it sound appealing. I, someone who DNFed Hi-Fi Rush, who played Just Dance on the Wii as a kid by just moving the hand that held the Wii remote, who will only barely tolerate rhythm sections if they're part of a genre I prefer -- a minigame in a gacha, a boss fight in a metroidvania -- was expecting for the rhythm part of the story to be something unpleasant between story segments. So I was shocked by how much I enjoyed the musical sequences in UNBEATABLE, and how badly I wanted to improve my scores in arcade mode.

UNBEATABLE uses a two-lane system that some long time genre fans call simplistic, but that means it's a good jumping on point for a beginner like me, while the toughest charts are still complex and varied enough that I have no hope in hell of ever clearing them, so there's room to grow as well. The reason I want to eventually try to clear my favourite songs from the game's entirely original score on UNBEATABLE difficulty (or higher) is that the skill demanded by a rhythm game is different from any I've experienced in the medium. The way it works is that each 'note' you have to play, or each input, is clearly telegraphed, but there are so many telegraphs that the challenge is to parse and respond to all of them, within tight windows, in sequence. It's not unlike the experience of playing an actual instrument, really; the skill you're learning when playing a rhythm game is sight-reading: quickly parsing cues into inputs, or failing and getting overwhelmed. It's not too different from a hard boss fight in, say, a souls game, but it requires less decision making and more precision and speed. And I've found it pretty fun, in a slightly brain-off way. Rhythm game flowstates are like nothing else in gaming -- where something in me short-circuits, and I don't even know what's happening on screen, or what buttons I'm pressing, but somehow, it's sounding right and the combo isn't dropping. And this isn't unique to UNBEATABLE, but UNBEATABLE is the first game where I've actually been convinced to experience it, so I'm very happy to have played it, and unlocked a whole new genre to play and love.

Been working my way through GTA San Andreas Definitive Edition. I haven't played this game in probably 15 years at least. Wow I forgot how much there was in it. I played 3 and VC a while back when I picked up the trilogy and I've already passed the playtime on those but still have a ton of SA left to go. I finally finished the airfield and am about to start the Las Venturas area. It's wild how much bigger this one is compared to the other two. Maybe a little too big, I'll have to see when I finish it.

Along those lines it kinda feels like they crammed two different GTA games together. The Los Santos Grove Street game and the SF/LV game. The plotlines have very little to do with each other once you leave Los Santos, they have a few connections but easily could've been a separate game/plotline.

Forgot about a lot of this game. I remember some major beats but I'm surprised how much I didn't recall.

Also how did they not fix the fucking flying in this game??? It's atrocious by modern day standards. I would expect them to have updated that with the definitive edition. Very disappointed in that.

Wish more games had stats like this one. Having to eat every day or two is annoying, but otherwise I love the stat system in SA and am sad it isn't in many games.

I'll evaluate once I finish, but I think VC is still my absolute favorite of the bunch. SA does some cool things but has some annoying as well.