Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Uncharted: Sony's Fortune

Main

Current

Reviewed

Archive

Guidelines

FAQ

Committee

RotM

Uncharted: Sony's Fortune

Scofield 19:30, October 1, 2010 (UTC)

Sorry you've had to wait so long for this. I'll start now, and will hopefully finish later today. --Black Flamingo 16:02, November 13, 2010 (UTC)

Humour:	4	Ok, I'm going to be blunt here; this article is in pretty bad shape. Sorry. Now that's over with though, let's see what can be done about that. As a whole, the concept is inherently flawed. I, for one, found it rather confusing and would expect others to as well. The core idea seems to be the melding of the actual plot of Uncharted with a fictionalised account of how the developers came up with the idea. They then, for some reason, made a game based on their adventures, with themselves as characters. Sorry, but it's all a bit ludicrous, and I struggle to really see what's funny about it. You've blended real life and fantasy, but not even in a humorous or postmodern kind of way, just in a way that is ultimately bemusing to readers. The main question that springs to mind when I read this is; why is it funny? What is the point of making it "Sony's Fortune" rather than "Drake's Fortune"? What makes that a good idea, if anything? I hope you can see what I mean here, and why I'm so bemused. This seems to be the only real idea you have here, but unfortunately it's not enough. I can commend you on how focussed it is, as you really do stick to the same tone and concept all the way through. But still, the plot is silly, the prose are clumsy and the few jokes you do make are either clichés or too random to be funny. The plot itself is also deeply, deeply flawed I'm afraid. In no way does it resemble a video game plot, there's no bosses or stages or quests or puzzles or anything like that, it's just a really crazy story with very little to no logic to it. It wouldn't have made any difference if the header had been "Development" rather than "Plot", in fact it probably would have made more sense (since the plot of the game is supposedly based on the development of the game, I mean, not because it sounds like something that would actually happen in real life). Because of all this, I really have trouble envisioning this as a story that could be used for a game. If possible, try to make it more like a typical game story. I expect it is somewhat inspired by the real life plot of Uncharted, so maybe try and align the two even further. Simplifying it would probably be a good start, but generally just make it more "gamey". It's also way too long, by the way, you don't need all of it. A lot of it just seems to be unfunny padding because you wanted to have a complete story with a beginning, middle and end. The problem is, it's not worth it, if you can't come up with a plot that has one hilarious joke per paragraph then I wouldn't bother having one at all. Cut it down, get rid of it, or rework it so you're left with snippets of the best bits in different sections on other aspects of the game. This leads me nicely to my next point; besides the plot and a brief section on reception, there's a severe lack of information on any other parts of the game. What is the gameplay like, for example? Perhaps you could have a section on the characters. "Development" tends to be another common area dealt with on Wikipedia, but it's sort of null here because your plot and development are apparently identical (unless they're not, in which case; great, let's hear more about development). Take a look at both Wikipedia's articles on games and our own featured game articles (of which I doubt there are many) to get a better idea of how to set this out, and what kind of subjects to deal with. So let's start looking at a few specific jokes, beginning with your opening quotes. Opening quotes are a bit of a lame joke, to be honest. Not only are they horrendously overdone on this site, but they actually jar with the whole encyclopaedia format (Wikipedia doesn't have them, for instance). These ones in particular actually have a decent idea behind them, but the tired, cursory nature of the opening quote format spoils it. The idea that people underestimate PS3s then become obsessive Sony fanboys upon playing this game is a workable idea, and probably true too. I recommend you ditch the quotes and find a way of reworking this as a prose-based joke. Just to give you an example, you could say something like "the game is notable for convincing gamers that their Playstation 3 wasn't a waste of money after all". Not a hilarious example I know, but I hope you can see why something like this would be better than having opening quotes. Another noobish pitfall you sadly succumb to is the way you put a lot of your humour in parenthesis. A punchline confined to brackets at the end of a sentence will rarely be funny, and will often be quite predictable. From a literary perspective, it also ruins the flow. You do this a few times, where you're talking about becoming a gold merchant, and the bit where they steal gold from Sir Francis Drake's coffin. Like I said earlier about the opening quotes, try to reword parts like this so they flow better. Try to make the punchlines less obvious by working them into the sentence itself, and don't be afraid to take your time with them. A rushed joke is also never funny, and such bracket-based jokes really do look rushed. It looks like you've just shoved the funny part on as an afterthought. The gold merchant joke is actually pretty funny, by the way, so I hope you can sort it out. Then there are just a few more Uncyclopedia clichés I'd like to highlight for you; the use of strikethrough and the old "citation needed" thing. Like opening quotes, older users find these slightly tiresome. Newer users tend to feel the need to include all aspects of encyclopaedic conventions, twisted for comedy. At least, that's how I felt when I was a noob. Unfortunately it's been done many times over the past five years, and unless you can think of a totally unique and funny way of using them (which, to be fair, does happen occasionally) I wouldn't bother. There are funnier ways of doing the "citation needed" joke anyway. You just need to have the text itself imply that the statement isn't true. So when the Sony guy is saying "PS3s are doing awesome" or whatever he says, you just need to work in some kind of subtle indication that things aren't going very well for Sony. There are tons of ways you could do this, whether it be a slip-up in his speech where he inadvertently admits the truth, or a description of his setting when interviewers took the quote (ie. maybe he was in the queue for unemployment benefits or something?) There is a bit of an issue with random humour here too, although nowhere near as badly as in a lot of noob articles. The plot section itself is rather silly, eg. the gold actually being women (that makes absolutely no sense), holograms being used by ancient Incans, and walkie talkies coming alive. It's all really absurd and lacks any kind of satirical elements. If the joke here was something along the lines of "don't computer games have silly plots?" it might work, but that's not it, the intended the joke is just "isn't this silly!" And yes, yes it is, but it's not really a joke. There's a difference between silliness and jokes. Jokes play on reader's expectations, they use irony or they satirise things. This is just an overlong and bizarre story that barely even contains punchlines. What I would thoroughly recommend here is that you go and read How to be funny and not just stupid. Even if you've already read it, do it again. It's a totally invaluable guide to writing for this website. And the way I see it, you're still allowed to break "the rules" (insofar as there are rules), but it's always better to know the rules even if you're just going to do the opposite, that way you can break them in a clever and satirical way. Whatever the case, just give a read, it will really help you avoid cheap randomness in future. Just to emphasise, you don't have a huge problem with randomness, but there's other good advice in there too that I'm too lazy to recite to you. Another thing that will definitely help is our best of, particularly any game-related articles you can find in there. Take a look at a few of those too and get a better idea of what passes for humour around here. Anyway, that's all I've got for humour I think. Sorry if I sound a bit harsh here. To cut you some slack, I think video game articles are rather difficult to write. I'm not sure why though, perhaps humour at the expense of video games is a little easy. The best this site has to offer is almost certainly Dragon Warrior, which is also possibly one of the best pieces of writing on the site overall. Note how it satirises popular elements of such games and analyses the absurdness of their conventions. Do you think there's a way you could do this here too? I'll leave it with you.
Concept:	4	No further comment as it's all above. I have scored it separately though.
Prose and formatting:	6	Although set out like an encyclopaedic article, with professional narration, you often lapse into more conversational, informal language, like "awesome" (a word you use a lot). I really recommend settling on one of the two styles, and then combing through the article carefully to eliminate anything that contradicts that tone. The encyclopaedic style would probably work best here, although naturally it's up to you. It would be a lot more of a rehaul if you wanted to make it more informal, although this wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, providing you had a good angle. Just be consistent. The sheer length of the plot also forces you to continually "list" action, if you know what I mean. So for instance, you'll say something like "Sully did this, but then blah blah blah, so then so-and-so attacks Sully, but the pirates were like..." This gets very, very tiresome to read, even after one paragraph, and you have it pretty much all the way through. Describing action-oriented plots does not lend itself to comedic writing at all, so try to avoid it at all costs (which I guess will be hard considering it makes up the majority of your piece). The best advice I can give is to simplify it, and try to think of more interesting ways of relating the action to the reader. Or generally, just think of more interesting things to talk about, and try trimming the plot as I've already suggested. Your spelling and grammar, on the other hand, is actually pretty good, so at least you can write well. That gives me hope that you can sort out this article.
Images:	4	Your images are all fine and dandy; all fairly attractive shots from the game and aren't too silly in themselves. Although you should probably increase the size of some of the smaller ones so they're all roughly the same size. What really needs work is your captions. They all tend to be a bit conversational, whereas the vast majority of the text is encyclopaedic, as I've said. When you write captions, try to bring out the humour already apparent in the images. Don't just throw in any old relevant image you can find, only include them if you think you can make a decent joke in the caption. Have a think about how these images are funny, and if you can't find anything, a Google search should lead you to others.
Miscellaneous:	4	My gut feeling.
Final Score:	22	Right, so there you go. I'm sorry if you think I've been harsh here, but it's just my opinion at the end of the day. Key things to remember when redrafting are to work on trimming or otherwise sorting out the plot, and see what other content you can get in here. It may also be worthwhile reconsidering your angle on this, although I can appreciate how difficult that may be. You should definitely check out those links I gave you too, I'm sure you'll find them very helpful. If there's anything I've said here that you want me to explain better, or if you want my opinion on anything I might have missed, please let me know and I'll try to help. I hope the review is ok.
Reviewer:	--Black Flamingo 20:42, November 13, 2010 (UTC)