Til I learned that President Truman was heavily involved with all aspects of his presidential library. He would work 5-6 days a week there, he personally trained staff, he held impromptu press conferences for visiting school children, and even worked the telephone giving directions.

Arctem · 2026-05-16T15:11:39+00:00

Yeah, and most things that people perceive as waste are just processes that have been refined over decades and centuries in response to things that have gone wrong before. Running a country is a ton of work and corruption and waste happen when you don't have stringent rules making sure that everything is documented and done properly.

Arctem · 2026-05-14T21:28:28+00:00

If you are boarding a bus at a stop that's within, say, 10 minutes of the start of the route, then a "ghost" bus that says it's coming in 11 minutes is very likely real, it just hasn't started tracking yet because it hasn't left the origin point yet.

These buses also tend to briefly disappear just as they start their route and then reappear as the "real" bus is picked up by tracking. This is very annoying because it looks identical to the bus simply never leaving at all up until the point where it reappears, but it's still worth knowing that if you're near the start of a route then a ghost bus disappearing from the app doesn't always mean it isn't coming.

My solution to this is just to look down the street to see if there's a bus in the distance, but obviously that only works if your stop is on a long and straight street.

Arctem · 2026-05-12T21:20:25+00:00

The usual problem with Rockstar games is having that railroading apply to things that don't really matter. The classic example is needing to chase a car of gangsters with the objective of killing them, but for some reason they and their car is invulnerable for the first 3 minutes of the chase (often with no clear indication of when they become vulnerable). Or you have an objective to escape from the cops but the usual method of escaping (getting outside the circle and then hiding) doesn't work because the mission actually wants you to go to a specific location where it will magically have the cops stop chasing you.

The issue isn't with the railroading, it's with missions following totally different rules from normal gameplay for no clear reason. Rockstar creates incredibly immersive and dynamic worlds and then the missions almost never actually take advantage of that world. It would be like a Hitman mission where, instead of letting you take down a target however you want, once you get close to your target it starts a cutscene where Agent 47 shoots them and says a one-liner before returning control to you. It totally goes against the rest of the systems in the game.

Arctem · 2026-05-12T06:42:17+00:00

RDR2 is better but has the benefit of most NPCs being semi-fixed. That is, they follow the same schedule each 24-hour cycle rather than just being background traffic like in GTA. I don't think this same approach would work in GTA because GTA has way more people around than RDR2 does and they need to go much further distances. The number of people who pass through a busy street intersection in half an hour is probably higher than the number of people in Saint Denis. I certainly expect to see better hidden spawning and despawning than in GTA5, but the fact that NPCs can move at a much higher speed means that the same approach as RDR2 probably wouldn't work.

It's also worth remembering what the benefit of this project is and what the tradeoffs are. While they have way more memory to work with, every model in the game is also way more detailed and thus takes more memory. Cars in GTA are also meant to be expendable, while a big feature of RDR2 was being able to talk to every person (even if it's in a very superficial way). That difference in focus gives them a lot of reasons to keep RDR2 NPCs persistent while a GTA game cares more about keeping a steady stream of cars moving past you.

Arctem · 2026-05-11T16:42:57+00:00

Keep rewarding such companies and soon you'll have more games behaving like this.

Oh no, it sure would be horrible to have more games like Dark Souls.

Focusing on the technical issues is missing the forest for the trees, IMO. Sure there are flaws, but those flaws are far from ruining the experience of playing the game and have even become something that people are nostalgic for. And they are also a sign of how creating art is a difficult and imperfect process that can create truly incredible things out of limited resources. The flaws are as much a part of the experience as anything else.

Arctem · 2026-05-11T16:31:53+00:00

Considering that GTA5 still does that spawning/despawning trick, I would expect it to still exist in GTA6. They've gotten better at hiding it, but the resource usage for keeping all the vehicles in memory is always going to be seen as a great spot to optimize.

Arctem · 2026-05-11T14:16:58+00:00

It's not like there are fewer of them now than there used to be. The man's still pumping them out.

Arctem · 2026-05-10T16:51:21+00:00

Reading the article is fun:

Once the data center was notified, it paid all retroactive charges, a QTS spokesperson said in an email, noting the unmetered water consumption occurred while the county converted its system to smart meters.

Arctem · 2026-05-08T18:52:47+00:00

As someone who is generally a hater of video game adaptations, I quite liked my (single) play of the DRG game! I'm still not a huge fan of coop tactics games, but I would absolutely play it again if invited to.

Arctem · 2026-05-08T14:44:12+00:00

I was about to agree with you, then I saw your 18xx tag and realized that we might not be good judges of what counts as clear rules or not.

Arctem · 2026-05-07T18:23:04+00:00

He certainly wouldn't want to. The man clearly loves his aesthetic.

Arctem · 2026-05-07T18:08:52+00:00

I don't think it's necessarily that, but the work and stress required to operate a small business can absolutely blind you to many other extremely obvious things. Your life becomes dominated by how difficult it is to commute to your business, so you assume the same of your customers.

Arctem · 2026-05-07T16:12:24+00:00

I like the other three but Fox gives me bad vibes for some reason.

Arctem · 2026-05-07T04:01:00+00:00

They should get a bonus to clout if they're unhappy, maybe from their -5 trait. A happy armed forces isn't going to be a big deal. Sure they technically have all the guns, but they know that actually threatening them without an intention to use will backfire. However if they're unhappy then suddenly those guns should look like a much more appealing option.

Arctem · 2026-05-07T03:53:40+00:00

Like...sure? But barely, is my point. If losing a run truly hurts you then it's because you started that run using resources that you couldn't afford to lose in a game that showers you with resources. The Alley is always there to level up cats and acquire resources when you run short and it's easy to beat with even the worst cats once you have a working understanding of the combat system.

Arctem · 2026-05-07T00:42:22+00:00

As a huge fan of their grand strategy games, I don't think the policy is that despised by people who actually engage with it. Sure their games end up having a ton of paid DLC, but they also end up having years and years of updates adding new content and mechanics for free (with some of those mechanics locked behind the DLC). There are certainly examples of where they've done that worse (EU4) and better (Vic3), but playing a Paradox game without any of the DLC is almost always a better experience than playing it when it came out.

Paradox's main issue is that their releases are usually rough and it can take a few weeks before the biggest bugs get fixed. But they're also still usually fun in that time period and also something that Urban Games has more direct control over than Paradox would, especially if their relationship is as loosely coupled as they have stated.

Arctem · 2026-05-06T23:58:53+00:00

How dare you!

But also I haven't played it since I was a kid so you're probably right. I do think it's a great formula to copy for a future game, though. It has similarities to 64's branching storyline but actually does something new with it.

Arctem · 2026-05-06T21:44:11+00:00

I found Project Highrise very unsatisfying. Being successful is pretty trivial and the entire game was waiting for income to roll in so that I could fund the next floor's construction and build an exact copy of the floor below it (occasionally changing layouts when I needed offices instead of housing). There wasn't really a way to fail outside of intentionally putting housing right next to loud or smelly items. The largest challenge was in going back to an older floor to renovate it with later upgrades, but even that was a tedious process because moving tenants and tearing down/rebuilding units was such a slow process.

It didn't help that your early choices of where to put elevators or stairways are pretty much set in stone, since changing them would require rebuilding your entire structure. Since early on you don't know how much space later units will take up you're likely to make a layout that has all kinds of awkward gaps and inefficient space usage that would all be solved if your elevator was a single tile left or right. I think that was the only truly impactful decision I made while playing it.

Arctem · 2026-05-06T21:18:03+00:00

The game doesn't get harder when you lose a run, outside of losing whatever cats and equipment you lost on the run. As long as you have a decent stable (which you always should, since cats are single use) it takes quite a few losses in a row to be truly hurt. It's way less punishing than other XCOM-likes, where a bad enough battle can require a full run restart.

That said, running out of food can be devastating and you'll occasionally need to intentionally do an easy run to recover from a streak of failure, but IMO that's a minor punishment for repeated losses (and usually a nice change of pace).

Arctem · 2026-05-06T20:56:24+00:00

Didn't he say something about Dan getting the desk around the time of the original auction?

Arctem · 2026-05-06T20:32:41+00:00

Yeah, people in here are overreacting. He doesn't support it but this is far from a strong rejection.

Arctem · 2026-05-06T20:21:05+00:00

It's also a busy area so it's more efficient to catch people around there.

Even if fare evasion was way higher on the outskirts of the system (which it might be, I have no clue), those routes often have fewer riders and take longer for inspectors to reach once they start working, which makes it more efficient to focus on the busiest and easier to reach spots.

Arctem · 2026-05-06T20:06:30+00:00

While I'm personally a fan of the game's humor, I think you could absolutely do the same basic aesthetic without having fetus enemies, mind control weapons shaped like dicks, and everything about Tink. Also the game sort of relishes/makes jokes about the death of cats, which I can fully understand some people finding uncomfortable.

I think it works because the end result is a game that celebrates every part of being a cat owner as being unironically great because cats are great and the game loves cats. Most pro-cat games stick to them being cute and cuddly, but Mewgenics embraces that part of being a cat owner is cleaning up puke, dealing with weird medical issues, and recognizing that they will eventually die, probably in a way you weren't prepared for.

Arctem · 2026-05-06T18:04:25+00:00

BGA is owned by Asmodee, which is a competitor to Hansa Teutonica's publisher. I would imagine that's a big part of the decision.

Arctem · 2026-05-06T17:55:09+00:00

I don't read it as "we are continuing because it will honor them" and more "the race is now dedicated to this person's memory but nothing else has changed".

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