Reception:
- "Crash called it the Spectrum's best game and said it was unlikely to be improved." Does this mean they thought it was likely to be surpassed in quality (by other games)? If so, I would not use "improved" in this way.
- "but nevertheless named Knight Lore the Amstrad's among of the best three games on the console": I think some extra words must have been left in during an edit.
Moisejp (
talk)
04:14, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
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Legacy:
- "Ultimate's last two isometric games were poorly executed, but consumer interest in the genre endured." Consider rewriting to make the opinion sound more objective (e.g., "were widely considered to be poorly executed" or "were described as poorly executed by XXX source).
Moisejp (
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04:32, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
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- "Sandy White of the pre-Knight Lore isometric game Ant Attack was impressed at Ultimate's in-game "balance" and gutsy design decisions." So White was a developer of Ant Attack? I'm not sure that "Sandy White OF Ant Attack" is the clearest way to express this.
- Here you have a nice list of titles that uses a clean parallel structure (i.e., dates in parentheses after each title): "Retro Gamer wrote that Knight Lore's influence persisted 30 years later through titles such as Populous (1989), Syndicate (1993), UFO: Enemy Unknown (1994), and Civilization II (1996)." It would be great to similarly use a parallel structure for this list: "Apart from Fairlight, Sweevo's World and Get Dexter, there was Jon Ritman's Knight Lore-inspired Batman (1986), 1987's Head over Heels, The Last Ninja, La Abadia del Crimen, the 1990 Cadaver and console games Solstice[17] and Landstalker (1992)."
Moisejp (
talk)
04:44, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
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More comments to follow.
Moisejp (
talk)
04:54, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
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- @
Moisejp, rephrased. Appreciate the review!
czar
05:45, 22 March 2016 (UTC)
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I'll try to finish off this review in the next few days if possible. More comments:
- I'm a native speaker of English and consider myself reasonably learned, but I found the overall difficulty level of the vocabulary in this article to be quite high. Some of the following words or terms I more or less understand but still think they could possibly be difficult for some people, and other words I only understand somewhat or less: seminal (used twice), harbinger, taciturn, crepuscular, nascent, sea change. I can tell from your writing that you are a very intelligent person, and I'm sure these are all everyday terms for you. But people reading the article may be of different education levels, and others won't necessarily be native speakers of English. I'm not asking you to "dumb down" the content, but I think if some of these terms were replaced with easier turns of phrases, it would increase the overall accessibility of the article.
Moisejp (
talk)
02:31, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
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Development:
- "Ultimate did not circulate screenshots of the game in its press materials or cover art." I imagine this was a marketing ploy of some kind, but does the source give information about the specific reason?
- "The Amstrad version upgraded the monochromatic colouring to a two-colour setup[6] while the MSX release was released through Jaleco." Is there any way to avoid "release" - "released" in such close proximity? Does "was distributed by Jaleco" work? Or "put out by Jaleco". Or "the MSX software/game was released"?
Moisejp (
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03:03, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
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- "In 1986, the Famicom Disk System Knight Lore release by Jaleco[16] bore little resemblance to its namesake." If the information is available, it could be interesting to know some of the ways the Famicom version was different. (By the way, as a whole, "bore little resemblance to its namesake" could also be a difficult-ish turn of phrase for some readers. I'm not saying I'm necessarily requesting you to change this one, I'm just saying combined with the other difficult phrases, it contributes to the overall relative difficulty of the article.)
Moisejp (
talk)
03:12, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
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Reception:
- (Minor comment) "Peter Sweasey of Home Computing Weekly was left speechless and predicted that Knight Lore would change the market." "Left speechless" is quite strong, and is a bit colloquial. The reader may wonder whether Carroll is quoting Sweasey, who said, "I was left speechless", or whether that was Carroll's possibly subjective interpretation, or possibly the Wikipedia article's author's interpretation. Probably the former scenario, I imagine, but you clarify this by saying something like "Martyn Carroll of Retro Gamer magazine quotes Home Computing Weekly's Peter Sweasey as having been left 'speechless'..." (or without the quotation marks if Carroll is paraphrasing Sweasey)—or something like that.
Moisejp (
talk)
04:35, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
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Legacy:
- "While Ultimate's last two isometric games were of lesser quality, consumer interest in the genre endured." Was that Carroll's opinion that they were of lesser quality? It could be worthwhile to clarify who says this.
Moisejp (
talk)
06:17, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
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I think that is all of my comments.
Moisejp (
talk)
06:36, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
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- @
Moisejp, thanks so much! I think I got it all, if you'll take a look. I went to see about those rough vocab sections (particularly "crepuscular") and... thought it might be best the way it is. I don't want this to be tough reading, but I also would think that the vocab isn't too much of a stretch past New York Times-level for the
WP:FACR's "brilliant prose" quota. Open to other opinions on this, though: @
Indrian,
Hahnchen,
J Milburn,
Jaguar, and
David Fuchs. There's no straightforward explanation for why the company was cryptic, though I think there are guesses, but either way I imagine that would be likely out of the scope of this article. The Sweasey quote is, "words fail me when trying to describe it", so I thought "speechless" would be an apt paraphrase. Re: lesser quality—it is a statement of fact rather than opinion.
czar
01:22, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
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Hi Czar, I don't really understand how you can say "lesser quality" is a fact rather than opinion. Couldn't there conceivably be some people out there who liked Ultimate's last two games best of all?
Moisejp (
talk)
02:31, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
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- Insofar as all quality assessments are subjective, Ultimate did not spend the time/resources/polish on the last two games—the source isn't saying that they're better/worse from a reviewer's point of view. I would rephrase to be as explicit as I just was, but it isn't said like that in the source.
czar
19:39, 28 March 2016 (UTC)
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- @
Moisejp, thanks again for the review. Are there any outstanding points that keep you from supporting the nomination?
czar
15:33, 3 April 2016 (UTC)
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I'm very close to supporting, just noting a few other little things in my re-read-through just now.
Reception:
- In the second paragraph, for the Crash review, you refer to "They... their reviewer... they". It struck me as odd, because on one hand this treats it as a collective review, but on the other it is attributed to a single reviewer.
- In the same paragraph, possibly consider reorganizing the points so that the two mentions of its particular difficulty (Crash's and Your Spectrum's) are together?
- In the fourth paragraph, if you switched the first and second sentences, possibly this would help the flow slightly in that it would be referring to Signor - Gillen - Gillen, instead of Gillen - Signor - Gillen? (I'm not totally sure either way—feel free to ignore this if you don't think so.)
- Do the first two sentences of the fourth paragraph belong in the first paragraph of the Legacy section? It's not clear to me what the distinction is between the praise in the "retrospective reviews" and the praise in the first paragraph of the Legacy section.
Legacy:
- Wiki-link Atari? For consistency with the other video game systems wiki-linked earlier in the article.
- "The developer of The Great Escape, another isometric game, considered Knight Lore... " Just confirming, the developer's name is not given in the source?
Moisejp (
talk)
05:29, 5 April 2016 (UTC)
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Since David Fuchs has already done a check of the sources, these are all of my comments. Thanks.
Moisejp (
talk)
05:33, 5 April 2016 (UTC)
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Hi @
Czar: I finished my comments a while back but didn't ping you at the time. I wasn't sure if you were waiting for my ping and didn't see these. In any case, they are done whenever you have time to look at them. :-) Cheers,
Moisejp (
talk)
22:30, 10 April 2016 (UTC)
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- @
Moisejp, I must have missed it—thanks for the ping. I didn't combine the two difficulty comments because they were different in scope (some rooms vs. the whole game). I think Gillen - Signor - Gillen flows better with the ideas, even while the other way works better for keeping the subject. I think retrospective reviews often combine Reception and Legacy but I moved it to the latter in this case. Not sure offhand if the dev of The Great Escape was mentioned by name but I think the point is that their expertise was on the basis that they developed that game. (If the dev was independently notable by name, I would have used and wikilinked it.)
czar
22:46, 10 April 2016 (UTC)
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