Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Portal (game) (two years later)
Portal (game)[edit source]
So I was rewriting this article some complete and total twit wrote two years ago, when I got stuck. Reviews have helped me out in the past in terms of quality and content, so why not? Comments, suggestions, the usual deal. Thanks—
Sir MacMania GUN—[15:21 22 Jul 2010]
- I'm so in here. I think we can put our differences aside... for science. --ChiefjusticeXBox 14:40, July 26, 2010 (UTC)
| Humour: | 8 | Right, as you may have guessed from my brimming enthusiasm for all things Portal and the fact I am currently wearing a Portal T-shirt and occasionally holding a companion cube for reasons too convoluted to go into right now, I am a fan of the series. I'm going to do my best to review without going into too much depth on such things. My first impression of the article is that it is pretty amusing and the existing humour doesn't have that many problems, my main concerns are that the humour doesn't take advantage of all the opportunities there are to get a laugh out of the reader. The very first thing that struck me was the manner in which you have made the article accessible to those who have not played the game, your descriptions are good but in a couple of instances I wasn't certain what exactly you want the article to read as. Permit me to expand; at various points in your article you describe Portal as a video game but at the same time occasionally describe the fictional organisations in the game as though they were real. This is a very minor quibble certainly but worth noting just the same, the reason for this is that I felt that it confused the notion of who and what Aperture Science is in the context of your article, this left me wondering whether I had missed some joke. My recommendation for this is that you go back and try and clear up entirely what Aperture Science is in your article, since you make it pretty obvious that the things you attribute to them are jokes it would make things far more clear cut if instead of "Patent Office approval requires us to say, the Aperture Science Illogical Motion Contrarian to Normal Newtonian Motion of Objects in Three-Dimensional Space-Time™, dpa (destroying physics as) "flinging"." Why not try expanding the joke to suggest that Valve, is trying to patent various game playing mechanisms, this would, with a little more explanation allow you to get another joke out of the above, by saying that Valve now exclusively own the rights to jumping into one glowing doorway and emerging quickly out of another. The above is not necessary to solve the problem and it is unlikely to cause many problems if you leave it in, but I felt that you under use the Aperture Science angle in your article and that this is one area where you could look at expanding it.
The other thing that I thought you could expand on is when you discuss the extras. Currently you mention the commentary, which is good, but I was really enjoying what you were saying and I was quite disappointed when you ended the section after just 7 lines. I felt that there was room to talk more about the story behind the game, it would be a simple enough section for people who have never played the game and would provide a bit more depth for those who have. The thing I felt was under-exploited here was the method of storytelling in Portal which leaves it down to the player to mostly discover parts of the enrichment centre and piece together a suspected back story for themselves, which as we all suspect is to actually save the original creators from bothering to write one. I leave a decision on expanding this to you, your article could, as above work reasonably well without it, but I felt that you just don't hit all of the parts of Portal I saw as most open to satire, especially of the type you are writing. With all the above in mind your article is pretty good and I laughed a few times as I read through, I especially liked " or one of those bakery owners that know the pain of having their patisseries ransacked by vigilantes" and "real-life limitations tend to be motion sickness possibly leading to delirium and jumping out of windows due to illusions of invincibility to high falls." Your humour is intelligent and subtle and more of the same in the case of any improvements would be welcome. |
| Concept: | 9 | As far as concept goes I am somewhat limited in what I can comment on. Your concept appears to be aping the wikipedia style and for the most part does this very well, the tone is subtle and you do well to structure the article in the same way as the wikipedia article on the game would be. My only advice regards the infobox, namely the release date and the "Would Niels Bohr play it?" boxes, which very much dashed away part of the formal feeling that you create with the infobox and the rest of the article, with the practical upshot being that it makes the humour attached to them rather less funny than it would be in a different context. My advice is that you try to consider your article as a whole and decide whether those jokes fit; Niel Bohr is also not particularly well known and for those who didn't take physics to a high level of education this results in your having to look him up to get that joke. Not much needing done here, but some tweaking may be desirable. |
| Prose and formatting: | 7 | To get the part of this that is fine out of the way; your spelling and grammar is absolutely fine, do your proofreading or get someone else to do it and you will clear any very minor issues you have there. My main issue is that the first thing you see in the article is the infobox and the top of a black box near the bottom of your screen, while both play an important purpose for the article and I would advocate the removal of neither there is no escaping from the fact that it looks untidy. The decision on what to do is completely yours I am simply letting you know that it is a drag factor on your article, initially at least. The other images do occasionally squeeze the images into the centre which would ideally be avoided; this is a less major issue but still worth a look. |
| Images: | 8 | The images themselves and your captions are really good, my main advice would be to reduce the size of a couple of your images as the image of the box art is pretty big and the two images directly beneath are also rather large, perhaps reducing their size would give you some more room to organise any formatting changes you wish to make. Otherwise you have done well here. |
| Miscellaneous: | 8 | My overall grade of the article. |
| Final Score: | 40 | Your article is excellent and far superior to what was there before, you write superbly and it has not become any easier to review your articles. All that is keeping this article from being fantastic are some minor humour issues and some poor formatting, or at least some formatting that didn't sit well with me. Have a quick look at what I suggested and then see what you want to change, it is your work after all. If you have any questions or comments then feel free to ask me on my talk page. Good luck improving this, I hope soon we can feature it and make a note here; huge success. |
| Reviewer: | --ChiefjusticeXBox 14:07, July 27, 2010 (UTC) | |