Talk:Transformers: War for Cybertron/GA1

GA Review[edit]

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch

Reviewer: Pres N 23:23, 31 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Will be starting the review soon. --Pres N 23:23, 31 January 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Alright, subdivided by type of problem.

Prose

Lead

"...were released for the Nintendo DS, with one Autobot campaign, the other the Decepticon campaign."

Rephrased

Synopsis

"Transformers have the ability to transform from their robot mode to one of many alternate forms, such as tanks or jets." - Maybe "Each Transformer has the ability to transform from their robot mode to an alternate form, such as a tank or jet." Right now it implies that each has several alternate forms.

Changed

like minded -> like-minded

Changed

"Zeta Prime is killed leaving behind..." -> Zeta Prime is killed, leaving behind...

Changed

Don't capitalize campaign ("Decepticon Campaign", "Autobot Campaign")

lower cased "campaign", but kept Decepticon and Autobot occurrences upper case due to being proper nouns

You should mention that Cybertron is itself a robot, so dark energon affects it. You don't really mention it until late in the section, and then it's just implied.

Added

It's not entirely clear that when the game opens the Decepticons haven't split off from the rest- that doesn't seem to happen until Megatron comes up with his dark energon plan.

Clarified the opening a bit

Gameplay

You say that players can transform at will twice in the first 2 paragraphs.

Removed second occurence

"Competitive multiplayer games do not allow use of canon Transformers." - jargon, change to something like "Competitive multiplayer games do not allow players to control official, named characters, and instead must design their own Transformer".

Changed

"Conquest is a capture-and-hold style game, similar to the conquest mode found in the Star Wars Battlefront series". I never played that series, so I don't know what that means. Change to a quick description of what capture-and-hold is.

Expanded

"Also available is the Escalation game mode. Escalation is a mode for canonical Transformers from the campaign or available via downloadable content." Choppy, repetitive, and confusing. Maybe "Also available is the Escalation game mode, the only multiplayer mode where players can control characters from the campaign or downloadable content."

Changed

Development and marketing

Nothing jumped out at me.

Reception

What happened to the Edge and Eurogamer reviews? You say that Edge gave it a 50%, and EG gave it a 60% in the side box, which are both really low compared to the others, but you only mention EG's ammo complaint and don't use Edge at all. Were they both just complaining about the repetitive visuals as well? If they had different complaints, those should be mentioned

Will expand tomorrow

References

1- tformers.com? Is this reliable? I don't know that you need a source for system requirements anyway- those are on the box.

Removed

2- Joystiq is generally a situational source (as much as I like it)- does Mike Schramm write for anything else that would show his reliability independently of Joystiq? Or could you replace that ref with something else?

Simply cited the game, the best source for gameplay anyway when you think about it.

10- again, is tformers.com an RS? you also capitalize it differently than #1

Lower cased the ref. While not traditionally reliable, it is a transcription of an panel directly at BotCon 2010 which is why it's used. I found no other source which covered the event aside from similar sites that have not yet passed WP:RS. Given it's first-party nature I opted to keep it.

11- Kotaku is also situational. There's usually a source that they're going off of, though- looks like a Hasbro announcement, somewhere.

Kotaku was recently promoted to reliable per Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Video games/Sources#Promoting Kotaku

12- ugdb.com? Never heard of it- is it an RS?

Typically I'd agree, however it's been cited several times by other sources. I can replace it with any one of those, but given that they all point back to ugdb I kept it, lesser known though it is

14, 15- Kotaku again.

See above

29- uh, need a few more fields filled out than that.

Added the page number. I don't have any more information than that; no article title nor author. Short of hunting down the actual magazine (truthfully I'd rather just let the GAN fail than bother) that's the best I can do.

In general, I prefer to link all occurrences of a publishers name, not just the first ref that uses it, but whatever. Just means more upkeep if you use a ref earlier than you used to.

I only link the first occurrence per this GAN review given by MuZemike

Images

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transformers-wfc_concept.jpg - you could have a better purpose of use here, but it's okay.

Expanded rationale

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Transformers-wfcautobots.jpg - good

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:War_for_Cybertron.jpg - wow, verbose. Good.

Categories

Should this really be in the Superhero video games cat?

removed

It's in both the "games dev'd in the US" and "games dev'd in Canada" cats?

Removed United States (that was the DS/Wii versions)

Overall: Looks good overall, really. Gameplay is normally before Plot, but the way you have it set up you'd have to rewrite a good chunk of it to make it work that way, not just switch the sections. I think it works out fine the way it is.; You have a lot of links that are redirecting, but they all seem to be going to the right spot eventually, so that's not a problem.; I'll watchlist this page, so just ask here if you have any questions or want to push back on anything. --Pres N 00:13, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Response

I hope you don't mind, I posted in-line responses above. --Teancum (talk) 01:23, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Prefer it actually! Looking good.

I think that's enough for the Edge ref (anyone interested could find it with that info).

Muzemike and I will just have to disagree on the linking styles in refs, but I don't really care, was just pointing it out.

I'll let you get away with citing gameplay to the game instead of, say, the instruction manual, though I'd be shocked if FAC let that go. This isn't FAC, though, so whatever.

I didn't know that about Kotaku! Just wished they linked to their sources like Joystiq.

Alright, I'll wait and see what you do about the reception section tomorrow; all of the other issues are now fixed.

--Pres N 02:28, 1 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've expanded the Reception with more commentary from Eurogamer, however Edge was print-only and I didn't find anything in the print archive nor at next-gen.biz, so I couldn't add any commentary there. Aside from that I think I've addressed everything. --Teancum (talk) 02:13, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Just a couple of other things:

I replaced the original Joystiq ref with an IGN preview. I'd agree that using the game as a reference works, but is a bit cheap, so I updated it.
In regards to the Tformers and UGDB refs I normally wouldn't use them, but since they're either transcriptions or direct quotes from the developers themselves (BotCon 2010 and an interview, respectively) I kept them on the grounds of WP:PRIMARY since it's from Hasbro/High Moon Studios, albeit indirectly. I know I've already justified them, I just want to solidify that.

Anyway, let me know if I missed anything. --Teancum (talk) 14:45, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Alright, looks good. I'm going to go ahead an promote! --Pres N 20:47, 2 February 2011 (UTC)[reply]