Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight
Command & Conquer 4: Tiberian Twilight[edit source]
A. SHePerD 05:22, December 7, 2009 (UTC) User:POTR/Template:PEEing
| Prose | Concept | Humour | Images | Misc | Score |
Reviewer details:[edit source]
A little bit about the reviewer before we start.
Okay, I have eased off a lot on doing reviews. I am a harsh reviewer (apparently) and people don't always like having their work critiqued. Of course if they didn't like being critiqued, why put it up for PEE in the first place?
As you will have already noticed, I have a slightly different format for the way I do my reviews. It's not any better or any worse than the original, it's just the way I prefer to have my reviews written and laid out as it makes more sense to me. I like playing with layout, and I like writing. These two things have meant that I've gotten a couple of featured articles, and a couple of other awards besides. I haven't had a featured image or been UotM, so I'm still not perfect. Oh, and I've only been here for about 6 months.
Prose and Formatting:[edit source]
How good does it look and how well does it read? 6
Writing style
I'm going to repeat myself a few times along the way, but this reads like an article in a gamer magazine. Now if what you are going for is a review of the game, that works well. Of course, as a general rule we try and make uncyclopedia articles read like an encyclopaedia. However given the topic that you have chosen this can be forgiven. One thing that I have noticed about gamer mags though is that the writing is not always of the highest calibre. If I'm reading about something that I want to read about - the latest version of Pong for example - this works. What you have to consider here is that the readership of an uncyc article will not be limited to gamers. As my comment on Pong probably displayed, I personally would not class myself as a gamer - although I do enjoy a good game - and I have next to no familiarity with Command and conquer series. (I have played RTS games in the past, so I'm not totally ignorant.)
Whenever you write you do have to consider your audience. If I write an article on Love for instance (and thank you for including that link), then I write it for a predominantly male, young and somewhat cynical audience, but I also want my wife, my friend with a chem degree, my mother-in-law, and my work colleagues to be able to read the same article and also get a kick out of it. If you write just for gamers, you are alienating a potential audience.
Spelling
Egads! Proof reading American English. Well, for the most part there are few spelling mistakes if you go into American English, and that's all okay. Crysis should be spelled crisis, and I'm assuming the misspelling was deliberate as a ploy to work in the word cry. If that was the case it doesn't work. Deliberate misspelling makes an article look sloppy and the joke is often missed because people have to read it a second time to get the meaning sorted. It can be done if it is obvious what it is you are doing - the use of udderlines is one way to do that, but even so in order to get it to work the joke has to be really good.
Gameplay, bottombar and ingame should all be hyphenated, but again this is gamer terminology and as this is written as though it were an article in a gaming magazine they are okay. Capturable is an iffy word. Yes, it shows up in a couple of dictionaries, but google doesn't recognise it as a word and Wiktionary has an entry but it's obviously just put there by someone saying "It is so a word!" Able to be captured would be a better phrase to use.
Grammar
I am not a fan of the overuse of particular words. One example is the word however which appears a few times in your article, and in one place it's grammatically wrong. This is a site that talks about the use of the word. Where the problem lies though is that the overuse of any word means that the article can potentially become unreadable - or if not unreadable, just unpleasant to read.
Beyond that I'm not going to harp on about the grammar too much. By strict ruling there are a number of grammatical that could be removed to make this more encyclopaedic, but this reads like a gaming magazine, which is not renowned for grammatical excellence. In short, go for it!
Layout
Lot of white space, which normally should be avoided. The only time I generally okay white space is to ensure that you have your images aligning with your text and not hanging in to the next section, however even with this exception you still want to do as much as possibly to reduce white space in your article.
The other thing that I would kill without question is the lead in quotes. Quotes as a lead in are rarely funny, and is a throw back to days of old when it comes to Uncyc. These quotes are no exception.
Overall appearance
Overall appearance is good excluding the issues already mentioned, and although I'm not a huge fan of the writing style it does get away with it purely due to the nature of the article being about a game. The images make up for a lot and carry this through, but I'll address them in more detail later.
Concept[edit source]
How good an idea is behind the article? 5.5
I wanted to give a score higher for this but due to the alienating nature of having to know the topics before people can get into the article I've brought it down a little. I love using two influences and melding them together to come up with a consistent whole. The idea of a game developed around battle and violence being melded with an emo culture romance is fantastic. Of course, that's pretty much what the entire Star wars series attempted to do. The problem is melding two things together like this is actually a very difficult thing to do.
Take as an example Isaac The Tank Engine - this was an article that combined children's stories and religious practices. This had been done before with Chronicles of Narnia, which of course was one of the influences behind the creation of this article. An early revision started off with lot's of Thomas the Tank Engine talk, and then switched dramatically into a pseudo-religious diatribe. This went through about 5 different major re-writes before it got to the point where it was featured, and the main challenge was getting the two conflicting elements to agree with each other. The one thing that I found was the most effective was finding all the points where the stories that already existed overlapped - even if it was just the similarity of names. (Betram fits in for Barabbas, Percy fits in for Peter.)
Humour[edit source]
How funny is it? Why is it funny? How can it be funnier? 4
Okay, this score has to be low due to the fact that I couldn't get into the humour of it, and that is largely because I know very little about C&C. I have read the Twilight series and seen both films (and wished that I could have gouged out my own eyes rather than watch either of them.) But in order for me to be able to buy into the humour I need to understand the humour a lot better.
Another article that I wrote, Six Hats, is directly related for a fairly complex system of thought developed by Edward de Bono that is in use within a lot of the corporate culture and generally misunderstood. So in writing this I knew that there was a potential that only 10% of my audience would have even heard about the concept, let alone be able to buy into the humour here. The trick with this is to teach people what it is that you're talking about but do it in a way they can grasp. Closer to your own example though, Street Fighter was about a series of games that were popular in the late 80s and early 90s. I knew that a lot of people would know the game and they would get tired of reading through a mountain of stuff about it to set the scene for them, but instead of avoiding it I just gave them the information that the uneducated needed, but done in such a way that the humour is there.
So, long story short, there should be a significant Story so far... section that tells people who know nothing about C&C (Me) and Twilight (Codeine's Mum) what we've missed so far. (And although the CM test is technically related to Vanity, it does work here.) Here you need to explore characters and characterisation, motivations, significant events, etc.
Once you have that then I would need to re-read the article to be able to give you much more, but I would also suggest some humour that is not related directly to these things.
Images[edit source]
How are the images? Are they relevant, with good quality and formatting? 8
The images are really good. I'd suggest that the guys head in replacement of Edwards in the first image is too large as it just looks wrong in the context of the rest, but the actual potatochopping is really well done. The game cover and the promo poster are good.
The Nod engineer is a fairly accessible joke, and doesn't rely on much to support it, but it's also a fairly bland joke.
The Crayola joke was a good one, and one that I laughed at - once I actually clicked on the image and saw it full size so I could understand what the joke was about. I'd be tempted to cut this image down just to one of the avatars with the crayola guns and have it larger in the page.
Miscellaneous[edit source]
The article's overall quality - that indefinable something. 6.5
Okay, 7 is a good article and one that I would be willing to see put up for VFH - 8 is something I would nominate straight away - 6 is an average article that I wouldn't want to see deleted but I would like to see improved. So that gives you an idea of where I see this article.
There is the promise of a good article here. I can see the humour and where it is based, it just doesn't tickle my funny bone as I don't understand enough. I'd suggest also having a look at an article that I didn't do, Dungeons & Dragons: Real Life Edition. Here is another example of something that is not always accessible by the entire audience, but is made that way by clever writing.
Good start, but needs work. Keep it up.
Final score[edit source]
| Prose 6 |
Concept 5.5 |
Humour 4 |
Images 8 |
Misc 6.5 |
Final Score 30 |
|---|