I don’t understand why this isn’t done more often. Publishers announce games early, then have to go great lengths to keep the hype up all the time, then the announced date comes close, but game isn’t anywhere near finished, so it has to be delayed, fans are disappointed, developers are stressed. Next date comes close, game still isn’t finished, delay it again, fans are disappointed, developers burnt out. Next date arrives, game still isn’t finished, but cannot delay again, as fans would really be disappointed now, so buggy mess of a game is released, fans still are disappointed, developers have to work hard to restore the reputation of the game and themselves by repairing the biggest issues, and fans are still disappointed as now things work this way that worked that way before. And anyway it’s still not what was promised in the first place.

Instead: Work secretly until the game is in a good state. Release, get good reviews. People get exactly what they expected, as their expectations came from the finished game and not some blown-up early-development marketing visions. Fans are happy, more good reviews.

It actually was vaporware. Announced in 2012 and originally scheduled for release in 2014, it was officially cancelled in 2016, only to be re-announced in 2018, with a release probably “several years away”.

If you have billions of targets to scan, there’s generally no need to handle each and every edge case. Just ignoring what you can’t understand easily and jumping on to the next target is an absolutely viable strategy. You will never be able to process everything anyway.

Of course, it changes a bit if some of these targets actually make your bot crash. If it happens to often, you will want to harden your bot against it. Then again, if it just happens every now and then, it’s still much easier to just restart and continue with the next target.

It’s not the full game, it’s the “First Store” edition/chapter/whatever. The full game has a separate Steam page. So it’s likely yet another demo version.

There aren’t a lot of reviews yet, but so far they are mixed.

Well, one thing is that it is a ranking of 50 games without a word of explanation how this ranking was created. Who says #37 is better than #38 is better than #39 is better than #40? And then also, if this is a ranking, why make it that big in the first place? Different people have different tastes, but a ranking says #1 is the best game, #2 the second-best, #3 the third-best - who should care for the 50th-best one if there were 49 better games this year alone?

EDIT: This was meant to be a reply to the “What’s odd about this list?” comment.

I haven’t played GTA Online in a while, but a thing we always used to do in our group was ending the session by visting someone’s apartment or biker club or yacht or whatever, going to the bar there, and getting drunk until someone had to respawn at the hospital. Visits to public nightclubs or the casino and getting drunk there (sometimes even dancing or gambling before doing so!) was more a mid-session thing for us.

Well, in the world of esoteric candidates, there would be some easy ones, like Brainfuck or Shakespeare, but maybe Whitespace is enough of them in the list.

That’s not what’s meant by “the alt text” in the context of XKCD comics, though, it’s the transcript. The alt text is an additional joke in the title tag: “In the aviation world, they don’t use AM/PM times. Instead, all times are assumed to be AM unless they’re labeled NOTAM.”

(Some explanations for the comic, for those like me who need it, are here: https://explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/3024:_METAR)

And while the USA are roughly double the area of the European Union, the whole continent of Europe is larger than the US.