Talk:Sonic the Hedgehog 3/GA1

Latest comment: 9 years ago by PresN in topic GA Review

GA Review

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Reviewer: PresN (talk · contribs) 21:28, 29 January 2015 (UTC)Reply


Review will be up in a day or two. --PresN 21:28, 29 January 2015 (UTC)Reply

PresN, still planning on finishing? Tezero (talk) 18:12, 1 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
Yes, been busy this weekend. --PresN 19:03, 2 February 2015 (UTC)Reply

Sorry for taking so long; life's been busy. Here's this; I'll get to your review of my FAC when I can.

Lead
  • Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is redirecting
  • "However, this concept was abandoned..." - second half of the sentence is awkward; would be better as "However, this concept was abandoned early into development as the team did not want to change the Sonic formula too radically for a sequel." Sonic should be italicized since you're talking about he games (and their common elements), not the character
  • Second paragraph is a bit strange- you say it's a commercial success (and it is), but then say it "only" sold 1 million copies compared to 21 million for the last two combined; try to reword it to make it clear that 1 million is still really good, just not as phenomenal as the last two
  • GameCube is redirecting
Plot
  • Robotnik, Sonic 2, and Super Sonic are redirecting
  • Tails and Sonic are never linked here; you should link things the first time they are used outside the lead as well as in the lead
  • "He is also..." - 'he' is ambiguous here, specify it's Knuckles
  • Italicize the Tornado, since it's the name of an airplane (MOS:ITALICS)
  • "Sonic travels to a platform on the Death Egg, fights, and defeats..." - better phrased as "Sonic travels to a platform on the Death Egg, and fights and defeats Robotnik..."
  • "Island - leading" - should be an mdash (—), not a hyphen
Gameplay
  • You need to specify early on here that the game is split up into levels, with two acts each level; as it is, readers must infer it from when you mention the bosses at the end of each act
  • "2D, side-scrolling" - no comma
  • "Through the latter choice" - In the latter choice
  • (facetious) where the heck do the badniks come from, if Robotnik just crashed in a small aircraft?!
  • Hmm, never thought about that. I assume they get around and cause mischief wherever they please, given their presence in some games in locations where Eggman never appears. Tezero (talk) 00:53, 4 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
Development
  • "were mainly responsible" - "were the main creator of"; this changes the meaning to be that the design doc was mostly by them, instead of that they mostly worked on the design doc (and not much else)
  • Mention that the game was made by, you know, Sega
  • ", after the team" - "as the team", like the lead
  • "However, as time constraints" - this sentence wobbles on and on; split it in half
  • non-volatile RAM is redirecting
  • "The song was used both in the game adverts, and released as a single" -> "The song was both used in the game adverts and released as a single"
  • "James Hansen of Sonic Stuff Research Group states" - "has stated"
  • Even in direct quotes, you still cut out the all caps - "ALL, BUT" -> "all, but"
  • I had it slightly wrong; MOS:QUOTE says to basically strip all text formatting that's not in the WP style; it does, however, say that words that are all-caps'd for emphasis you can replace it with italics or bold ("other unusual forms of emphasis (colored highlighting, all caps or small caps, etc.) should likewise generally be normalized to italics or boldface")
Ports
  • GameCube is redirecting again
  • The first paragraphs is one sentence; merge it with the next
  • The first sentence/paragraph splits up the elements with semicolons... except when it uses commas - "Sonic & Garfield Pack (1999) for the PC,[32] Sonic..."
  • "but does not track progress in the game post-completion..." - I have no idea what this means. Can you play the game post-completion? You haven't mentioned that before...
Reception
  • "Similarly to its predecessors" - "Like its predecessors" (or "similar to", similarly is an adverb but Sonic 3 is a noun)
  • Consensus now is to roll GameRankings to the nearest whole percentage (78%, not 78.33%), since the inputs are whole percentages at best; it's all sigfigs if you took high school chemistry. Related to this- it's optional but nice if you append "(X reviews)" in the table after the MC and GR scores to say how many reviews went into that average.
  • Rounded. I've always assumed it was merely an issue of giving too much detail for the reader, which I've always thought was ridiculous but didn't feel like challenging. Technically sig-figs shouldn't matter since you're adding the totals, not multiplying them, but I see the point - I'd rather not include the number of reviews, though, since it's a slightly volatile total and could call into question why we're including these reviews and not others. Tezero (talk) 17:29, 4 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • Sega Magazine is redirecting (also in the table)
  • "...better special stages and is not only..." - tense conflict with the rest of the sentence, should be "was not only"
  • "Thomas stated that..." - restate who Thomas is; the last time you mentioned him it was in the context of the remakes but now it's the original game. Same for Whitehead.
  • Don't start a paragraph with "however"- there's nothing for it to play off of. The "also" makes it even worse. Start he paragraph "Some critics felt Sonic 3 had innovated too little from previous Sonic games."
  • Optional: I've already forgotten who Humphries is. Consider changing the bare names to be "Humphries of Hyper" or "Hyper's Humphries" or "Hyper reviewer Humphries" or "Writing for Hyper, Humphries said", etc.
  • "enjoyed its new power-ups" - its is ambiguous, try just "the new power-ups"
  • "Many aspects of the game's level design were praised. Electronic" - JimmyBlackwing just sharpened his knives at the thought of this at FAC. Replace the period with a semicolon. Same for the other bare statements like this, but this one jumped out at me as easy to modify
  • "use of wordless cutscenes to effect a coherent story" - props for using "effect" correctly as a verb, but "create" would be cleaner
  • "well received, though somewhat less so" - than what? The visuals?
Legacy
  • "Issues 33 and 34 of Sonic the Comic, and issue 13" - no comma
  • "For Sonic's twentieth anniversary" - italics
References
  • Pretty sure it's Nintendo Life, not NintendoLife
  • Redirects for GameSetWatch, US Gamer, and Sega Magazine if you want to fix them
  • Magazine references really need publishers, and ISSNs if you can get them
  • Done. I also noticed that Game Revolution and Kotaku weren't linked for some reason; might've been because those references were copied and pasted from Sonic 1 or 2, where they corroborated the same information, and in that article they weren't the first instances of sources from those sites. Tezero (talk) 21:56, 4 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
  • If you're only going to link the first use of a site in the references, make sure it is the first- refs 29/30, for example
  • Is... is US Gamer just EuroGamer with a reskin job? Huh.
  • Ref 54- The Magic Box is not an RS. Their methodology for figuring out game sales numbers is suspect as best, and "magic" at worst
Images
  • All three non-free images need better rationales - specifically, they need a better/longer explanation of why that image is adding to the article, beyond "it's a shot of the gameplay" "it's a shot of the special stages" - check any video game FA for examples

--PresN 04:59, 3 February 2015 (UTC)Reply

For what its worth, "The Magic Box" is currently identified as a WP:RS at WP:VG/S. I've always used them in the past and had no problem, though I can't say I've dug real deep into it or anything. Sergecross73 msg me 18:01, 4 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
I was gonna say; if it's somehow not an RS, it needs to be stricken from a lot more locations than here. Tezero (talk) 18:38, 4 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
Wait, TMB is an RS? Why did I think it wasn't? I don't know how I combined it in my head with VGChartz, but I guess I did somehow. Striking that line. --PresN 18:56, 4 February 2015 (UTC)Reply


GA: Pass! --PresN 19:31, 5 February 2015 (UTC)Reply