I played this quite a bit on an an iPad. Excellent song quality and variety, and beautiful song artwork.

This game used to have song packs unlocked one chapter at a time every 100,000 downloads, until the fulfillment of the 1,000,000 downlaod campaign, which was met. Now only a few song packs are locked by DLC and over 180 songs are available with the initial purchase.

I like the scanline note presentation and it's one of the few rhythm games where I don't mind the speed of notes being based on BPM. The timing windows are fairly loose, which might be a turn-off for more "hardcore" players but there are certainly players who don't mind it too much. Also, the difficulty scale is out of 9 and there's a huge spread of difficulty in the level 9 range. Also scoring is combo-based, with all the problems that entail (miss 1 note in the middle and it's worse than missing several notes at either end); there is an alternate scoring system called TP that is accuracy-based, but it's heavily de-emphasized in favor of score.

Frankly I prefer this over Cytus II. Cytus II is too grindy and reliant on DLC purchases.

Bioshock: YOUR CHOICES MATTER!!!

Bioshock Moral Choices: Do you kill child for one bullet or not?

wins 22 awards

I think a lot about the time in my life before maybe my junior year of high school where I would just walk around in a game because it was just some game to play. This was essentially THE game I did that with in middle school and it’s very interesting how essentially the first half of a decade since I started this game was me treating this game as a goofy sandbox adventure I’d play with my siblings (or use as basically a sort of weird first MMO) to “oh yeah that thing I should beat in survival mode”.

Weekends after school where I’d build Finn and Jake’s house from Adventure Time while Steven universe was airing or messing around and overreacting to any monsters was neat, at best Minecraft is a space to be in.

This weekend I sat down and grinded up through the survival portion to make it to “The End” which felt like just taking those memories and hanging them up in a boring as hell office cubicle. The awkward combination of RPG and Zelda mechanics in survival is novel at first until you are tempted to look something up to cut down time. It was so strange how I booted up survival and I was so dead set on seeing the end I didn’t even bother to make my own epic tower until I had diamonds and was just around the corner to starting the old Endermen and portal hunting. That’s really just what hit me, survival is kind of sad as it is currently because in another reality (hint: Terraria) there’s a single player (or just not modded LAN co-op) adventure that could’ve utilized the sandbox element so well but now we’re here and Minecraft is an icon that is so beloved this core just will not be touched by Microsoft and so they edge around the main problem by just adding more.

Minecraft will always be great to me because it’s a space to be in and the survival aspect while awkward can be a great thing to do with others, but it’s hard not to think about how we’ve moved on from an era of hype for Terraria’s and Cube Worlds.

Reviewing Minecraft on here is absolutely meaningless, but also building a house in a world where there’s a place you have to go to to see the ending credits called “the end” feels pretty pointless as well so why not build that house and horribly dangerous single block highway.