Virtually nil. Subscriber count has risen steadily (yay!), but as you can see from the posts the traffic is mainly me. I haven’t had to break up a single fight lol.
Hopefully the community has an active future, but for now it’s a pretty sleepy corner of the site.
I love them both. I feel like they both need to be played on harder difficulties because they’re built for a pushy playstyle, especially Eternal which requires melee finishers for ammo drops even more than the '16 game already did.
'16 has more of a straightforward plot. The story is fine. The main NPC looks and sounds like James Spader’s Ultron, which thrills me. I love the Mars station design and wish the Hell levels were a bit more creative. Other than some mysterious hints at a connection between Doomguy and all the Hell stuff, '16 doesn’t bother much with lore.
Eternal takes everything good about '16 and gives it an espresso, some laughing gas, and a whole bunch of lore that might have been written by Tenacious D. It’s deeply silly, very hard and has some of the best game design I’ve ever seen. I don’t think one is better than the other; 2016 is more nostalgic, but Eternal is more ambitious. The only catch about Eternal’s ambition is that you really have to be on board, because there aren’t optional play styles — you play Eternal the way the devs tell you it’s supposed to be played.
Incidentally I just started Prey about an hour ago after sitting on it in my backlog for a couple years. It’s very good so far, seems to have a good spread of systems with decent depth and the graphics are still 2023-approved.
I’ve been playing a lot of DOOM so the combat feels a bit Lite™, but I felt that way about Dishonored too—blows land like wing chun and not like a rock crusher.
It’s got BioShock’s turrets, F.E.A.R.'s slow-mo and Dishonored’s stealthy parkour, and so far it all comes together nicely.
It feels very much like an Arkane title, too. Maybe a bit too much going on at once, but boy do they know how to throw everything at the wall to see what sticks.
It’s a consequence of retail. Because carriers in the US determine which phones most of us can access, with the exit of LG from the market the Android landscape in the US was effectively reduced to Samsung. Other manufacturers may as well not exist for all the average shopper is led to believe – the brick and mortar store where you pick out your phone gives you two options: iPhone or Samsung.
Certain markets too, perhaps. I’m in the US with an A32 because I’ve just flat-out stopped paying for flagships, and I haven’t seen any junk in the most recent update.
I’d like to think that our digital traces could compose a sort of self-portrait like those images that describe movies by the average color of every frame. For instance, this is the whole Harry Potter series in one go.
It doesn’t look like much, but if you’re familiar with the movie you can follow the plot just based on your memory of the scenes’ colors. I like the idea of my digital footprint leaving a similar “ghost” that doesn’t mean anything unless you can fill up the negative space with context.