Talk:Castle Wolfenstein/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Blue Pumpkin Pie (talk · contribs) 12:52, 16 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

i decided to review this article. I'll post soon on what i find.Blue Pumpkin Pie (talk) 12:52, 16 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Blue Pumpkin Pie, any update on this? --► Sincerely: Sola virum 19:31, 26 May 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Solavirum: i apologize for the very late reply. i had a medical emergency that took some time away from Wikipedia. i will now focus on reviewing the GAs i set out to do.Blue Pumpkin Pie (talk) 14:09, 5 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, sorry to hear that. Don't worry, it ain't a problem. Your well-being is more important. I hope you'll get better soon :) --► Sincerely: Sola virum 14:19, 5 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Overall: I think one of my biggest issues is how wordy it when it can be more concise.

Lead

"The protagonist is an Allied prisoner of war who is held captive in a Nazi fortress called Wolfenstein."

^I would word this instead to be "The player takes the role of an allied prisoner of war who is held captive in the fictional Castle Wolfenstein.

"Sneaking, killing, and impersonation are used to deal with Nazi soldiers"

^ I would reword this to "Nazi soldier enemies can be dealt with by impersonating, sneaking, or killing them."

"Castle Wolfenstein received high ratings from reviewers and became one of the best-selling games of the early 1980s."

^High ratings for what specifically? If you're trying to say that it had positive reviews, I would just go with "The game was received positively amongst critics".

"The game was criticized for its long waiting times when opening chests but the reviewers found the graphics simple and effective and praised the gameplay."

^If the paragraph started positively, this sentence should as well since the negative response is the outlier

Gameplay and premise

The premise of the game is too short to have its own section. It is common to merge it with gameplay.
There is no need to mention what type of pistol the player starts off with. Any minute details like that don't add any context to the gameplay can be removed or simplified.
A general rule to have the tone be as objective and less personal as possible is to avoid words like "it is impossible", "must", "should", and "need" as it is too subjective to say the player needs to do anything. I usually replace them with "is required", "In order to", or "can".
Overall, the gameplay has too many sentences that can be simplified and merged.
"To win the game, the player must escape from the castle. If the player finds the battle plans before escaping, he will be promoted and the complexity of the subsequent run will be increased. Following this, the castle's layout changes and the game starts again."

^This sentence can be merged, and instead of saying "To win the game", I would instead say "The objective is...". I also recommend mentioning the objective of the game near the beginning of the gameplay section in order to give context to the obstacles.

"Bulletproof vests, uniforms and secret documents can be found in chests, which must be opened using keys the player finds. Chests may also contain sauerkraut, sausages or schnapps, which the player character can eat without affecting the gameplay. The uniform allows the player character to pass guards unnoticed but it is useless against SS Stormtroopers. Chests can be opened more quickly by shooting at them but this will attract the guards in the room. The player must also be careful when shooting at chests containing ammunition and grenades, which may explode. Locked doors in the castle can be opened with a key or by shooting at them.

^With the previous advice is given, this entire section can be reduced and made smaller.

The player character can die from being shot by the enemy and from the explosion of their own grenades. If the player dies from enemy gunfire, the game restarts, the castle's state is preserved, and the chests and guards remain the same. If s/he is killed by his or her own grenade, the game restarts in a newly generated castle

^S/he looks unprofessional in the body of the text and I would recommend replacing it with "they" would probably be easier and simplifies the article.

More information coming soon, but please follow the same principle on the other sections if you see it.

Development, Reception, Sales, Legacy

@Solavirum:

Overall all three sections suffer from over-quoting. A lot of the information can be summarized and get straight to the point. I'm going to recommend avoiding quotes as much as possible. Some of these quotes in legacy don't paint a good picture of what the person saying them means.
Castle Wolfenstein became so popular that the publisher released an advertisement in 1984 containing bug fixes to speed up the opening of chests and the startup time of the game

^the source is the advertisement itself, nothing about this ad indicates the reason why is because it's so popular, and even so I wouldn't use a 1st party source like that to verify popularity. There's also not a lot of context here. Seems to be some external cheat device called "The Great Escape"? If it's necessary for the article, more information should be provided. Just not part of Sales or Reception.

According to Harvey Bernstein of Antic, after its release, Castle Wolfenstein "quickly shot to the top of the charts" and became "one of the most popular games for any microcomputer".

^The source stops at page 80. Do additional pages exist and somehow missing from the archival? it's hard to believe this was verified unless it was an advertisement. If it was an ad, then I would recommend trying to verify that from other sources. if the majority of the sales section can't be verified, I recommend merging with Reception.

There is no need to have a picture of the advertisement. There are already two Non-free images. The Cover and the gameplay. The ad image will fail NFCC guidelines for not being informative or vital to explain any issues.

Sequels/spin-off

Since this is the first entry of a series, I would recommend creating a section for sequels or some information indicating a series was created. Castle Wolfenstein having a 3D version isn't necessarily "Legacy" and recommend moving it to a Sequel/spin-off section. Examples are Kingdom Hearts (video game), Lumines: Puzzle Fusion, and Patapon (video game) to see a sequel/spin-off section. This also is necessary to reflect on the lead.

Comments by Solavirum

Y Did the recommended changes to the text.
Y Merged "Plot" with "Gameplay", moving it to the second paragraph in the section.
Y Moved the "player objective" to the third paragraph in the section.
Y Tried to merge some sentences in the "Gameplay" section.
Moved the gameplay image to right in order to avoid the interruption in the text.
Will look into more stuff here tomorrow per the advice Blue gave. It is bit late here :d --► Sincerely: Sola virum 20:37, 8 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I will take a look at the new comments tomorrow, don't know why Wikipedia didn't notify me about the tag. But firstly, should I create a new Sequels section for the first and third paragraphs of the Legacy section, then keep the second paragraph as it is? --► Sincerely: Sola virum 18:12, 21 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- @Solavirum: Since the first and third paragraph are more strictly related to just Sequels, yes.Blue Pumpkin Pie (talk) 18:17, 21 June 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- @Solavirum: are you still interested in the rest of this GA review? Ahoy's review takes an entire paragraph that should be summarized to a couple of sentences. I removed the image of the advertisement. But theres still false information that the ads for bug fixes was the result of its popularity of the game. I already removed the advertisement image as it added nothing to the article and didn't meet NFCC guidelines. Blue Pumpkin Pie (talk) 14:16, 13 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Blue Pumpkin Pie, hi. Yes! I just have to give my university entrance exams on 15 July, so I would really appreciate just a little more patience on your part. Thank you for your review again. --► Sincerely: Sola virum 21:01, 13 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I understand, take your time.Blue Pumpkin Pie (talk) 22:05, 13 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Blue Pumpkin Pie, so, to touch upon the new comments,

that The Great Escape thing is apparently is a cheat mode (and per Retro Gamer, first one of its kind), so I expanded the topic a bit and merged it to the development section.

that Antic source is actually this. Don't know why it got messed up. --► Sincerely: Sola virum 09:11, 18 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Blue Pumpkin Pie, tagging again as a reminder. Anything else I should do and touch upon? Should I tweak the text more? --► Sincerely: Sola virum 11:47, 30 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The development section goes into too much detail of Warner's prior works. I dont know if that is to compensate for no actual article on Silas Warner but I think it is best to summarize it further.
There's too many quotes in the second what can be reduced is the conception of Castle Wolfenstein.a lot of the information is too basic to quoting it.
also no need to indicate what Warner told which outlet, if the outlet is the source itself.Blue Pumpkin Pie (talk) 19:56, 30 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]
- Blue Pumpkin Pie, summarized Warner's previous work. Yeah, I agree that detailing them in such a way is out of place. Also, moved that text to a different paragraph as it was weird to have a text that goes as "turned out to be" at the beginning of a section.
- Removed the quote box and merged the required info to the main text.
- Y --► Sincerely: Sola virum 12:51, 3 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@Solavirum: you use a lot of subjective words for the sake of quoting Warner. I made some adjustments but definitely try to avoid words like "very", "total", "obviously", and so on. The more I think about it, the less I find Silas previous works relevant and may need to be cut. But there are still more adjustments to do.Blue Pumpkin Pie (talk) 08:45, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Blue Pumpkin Pie, if I recall correctly, the source itself had "obviously" in the quote. Yeah, I will remove that part completely as it is kinda out of place. I'll try to adjust stuff more. --► Sincerely: Sola virum 09:33, 4 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Solavirum I reduced the redundancy, but at this point, I recommend reviewing the article one more time. specifically in the legacy and Sequels sections. Its missing refs and Legacy can reduce some of the quotes.Blue Pumpkin Pie (talk) 20:54, 9 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I decided to give it a pass, the article is well written and some adjustments had to be done on my part but I still highly recommend cleaning up the quotes in the Legacy section.Blue Pumpkin Pie (talk) 21:53, 14 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Blue Pumpkin Pie, thank you for reviewing this. Yeah, I'll try to clean up some stuff here. Good luck! --► Sincerely: Sola virum 22:18, 14 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]