Outright IP theft would bother me, generally, except for the following features of this instance of it:
1) the photo is owned by a large publishing company that can look after itself

I don’t think six star wanted levels are an Easter Egg.

Yes, thats exactly what they did. Because their time and energy isn’t infinite and *they didn’t feel like cleaning it up.*

Lazy development as in ‘I’m not going to bother erasing this dead code segment because it doesn’t affect anything else.’

What you are talking about are artifacts of that ‘long and complicated development process’, the inevtable cruft of revision after revision that it would take more effort to remove than to leave it…

“The assumption now is that maybe, just maybe, players haven’t found the specific way to trigger the six stars in-game yet.”

No, hundreds of thousands of players across multiple platforms with billions of hours of play time — and they just haven’t found it yet.

How about we turn to Sir William of Occam and get his…

NO THEY WERE LIKE UNTO GODS.

I love that you assume all those people never had moments where they said ‘fuck it, I’m tired’ and left something unimportant half-completed. Nope. Every single line of GTA V code that looks like something someone forgot to delete has a SECRET MEANING.

“Man, the Internet is just fucking perfect for hyperbole”

Agreed.

I definitely believe its the source photo, the odds of standing in that exact position makes it unlikely. But I just can’t get outraged. At off peak times you would just composite a series of photos and infer whats behind the few heads you couldn’t get rid of when tracing.

But I really just can’t get outraged over the…

Again, outrage should be from the right’s holder who for all I know might have sold the right to use the photo as a backdrop to the anime’s production house. It would not surprise me in the slightest for this either to be an unauthorized copying or for it to be perfectly legitimate, but its hardly any skin off my back…

Is that Japanese copyright law, International treaty or USian? I don’t know the appropriate Japanese law regarding photography, but the text of the author’s rights law seems to suggest it only protects creative works expressing thoughts or sentiment. I’m not sure a stock photo of public train is covered there and…

Yeah, I’m sure anyone who pays for 10 redundant accounts is really hurting for money.

In a week he will have a new account on a different IP address with a new character and be doing the same things again. This is hardly any punishment, its a fine equal to the amount of a new copy of the game. Nobody cares about being shamed under an assumed name on the internet. If they really wanted to do something…

Well you’re in luck because the theory isn’t true in the slightest so nothing has been spoiled.

If you look hard enough at anything you’ll see patterns. That doesn’t mean that they are intentional or “real”. I doubt the creators had anything in mind other than that she’s Gehrman’s recreation of his dead wife (which is why he is ambivalent about the player using the doll), who was likely impregnated by the old…

The animators have a hard enough life as it is without requiring them to hand draw every single backdrop.

You’ve never built a high-end PC, and you just assume anyone who has spent the money for real computational performance is a moron. I can easily spend $5K building a server-class machine with multiple CPUs, true RAID arrays, and high-end graphics hardware *for data visualization and analysis*.

If I was doing it for…

“There is no “correct” way to enjoy video games.”

Yes, there is. And we judge the people who don’t do it right. Like you.

Someone should contact Alastair Reynolds and do this right:

Because we’re all out of original IP to sell. Thats why. And how is the guy who produced Prometheus a positive aspect?

Also, violations of inertia, (really a violation of lorentz invariance), lead ipso facto to the production of perpetual motion machines and the creation of energy from nothing, because again, different observers will now measure energy differently and in some frames you get something from nothing. Reaction mass…