Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/User:John Lydon/Try Again

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Map Quest

I'm still working on chopping the images so you can skip over that part of the review. I'm more worried about content, or lack thereof. I seem to have lost the ability to determine if something is humouros or not, so I need help. Thanks in advance ~ *You can be Robin* (talk) 15:12, October 22, 2010 (UTC)

I think, just to make matters worse, I shall attempt to review this. Because I'm probably even worse at telling if things are funny, no joke. Er... I'll have a review for you shortly, though who knows how helpful it'll be. 1234 ~ 17:55, December 19, 2010 (UTC)

Hmm... no time, no time... never any time... hells, I am still going to finish this review. Not all at once; hard to with only hour stretches at most, but in bits and pieces, I WILL FINISH IT!

John Lydon, I am so sorry. This may wind up the weirdest review I have ever done. 1234 ~ 05:28, 22 December 2010

Okay, serious apologies about how long this took. I could make a pile of excuses... or I could just finish it off and stop dragging around. I'll just do that. 1234 ~

Concept:	5	It is an idea, fairly standard, with the whole changing the context of things and rewriting them as other, similar things for comedic effect. This does have comedic effect for that, too; overall the notion of Mapquest as a game works better than a lot of such notions. The problem is, I've never used the actual software, though. Not once, at least, not that I can recall, so what all am I missing here? What, specifically, of the mapping service are you mocking, playing off, etc? What quirks does it have? What sillinesses? I mean, as a clueless, I'm not going to get things in general, but you can help by referencing, too. It also feels to me like you're just turning it into a game, playing off the similarity between the Mapquest name and the generic sort of 'Elfquest' or whatever kids are playing these days, and using surprisingly little of the actual service. The article feels rather like detached parts - about travelling, and about the game, and the game is about travelling and about MapQuest... and MapQuest is about travelling... but they're not really tied together. It's just an article about a game, so it doesn't work so well as it could. Even the game itself is strangely inspecific, going into detail about the characters, the creation, the quest, but not how they interact, how the quest actually works, is structured, functions within the game. There is little mention about the history and progress and development of the game, which could probably make for an excellent parallel with the real MapQuest, as little would probably need to be changed. Play off whatever they did that was silly, or funny, or stupid, or strangely intelligent... humour often lies in reality, and upon twists and connections within it. And for that matter, is it an entirely online game? Or does it have real-world applications? Perhaps it has a dual nature - MMORPG, as well as a smaller following to, say, do something like geohashing within the real world, getting coordinants and maps and directions within the game and then applying them to find something outside. Perhaps this is the 'online web mapping service' with which readers would be familiar, and the game only something with which mostly just gamers would be familiar? Just an idea, mind. Might work, might not...
Humour:	5	Mmm, game... so it's a game. Playing off the clichés and whatnot can work, but I think you may be overplaying some of them a bit. The whole 'sex-starved demographic' notion is just too done elsewhere, so not only is it a bit stale and subsequently not that funny from the start, but you also just repeat it a lot, which really doesn't make it any funnier. I'm not saying you shouldn't use it, but if you just pick out the better bits and maybe even work example references or something into them, that might help. Anyway, piece-wise evaluation of funniness, as well as anything else that comes to mind: Introduction - Mostly just listing 'facts', so this really doesn't come across as that funny. Random, in some cases - why 'Branson, Missouri'? And isn't controlling an avatar a given for an RPG? I've never seen one that didn't involve that... Eh, but you need to establish your overall funny here. The facts could be useful, but use them to back up why the game itself is funny, not as the introduction itself. Why is it notable, where did it come from, what's so funny about it, those would be things to address, though some less directly than others. Game Play - Wait, monsters? What? What sort of game is this then? There's no mention of monsters anywhere else that I noticed... Character Creation - Entirely unique characters, on a relatively old online game? Such games function for their simplicity - loading every possible face would be difficult indeed, and when you consider the minimal variability of older games due to graphics rendering limitations, if such uniqueness really was feasible, the developers would probably be incredibly rich and not actually working on the game. Which, actually, you might be able to use - high turnover rate of coders, or some such, hence some disparity between versions the MapQuest service itself. Or not, but my point is, make some sort of funny if you are going to include completely ridiculous stuff. Ridiculousness isn't necessarily funny on its own. Eh, but most of this is pretty redundant with the full list of classes. ITS... not it's for possessives. Choosing a Class - Again, pretty redundant with the full list, and the customisability as it is is not that funny, either. Could go into options and mock why they're even there; designers got drunk or something and added in a set of Centauri hairstyles for the French, not that that's funny, either. May want to ditch this here entirely and leave the race/class stuff to the full list section. Starting Out - Sounds like WoW, though what exactly is Radiator Springs? Sounds like a joke I'm missing, reference to something... how about a link? The interface is interesting, perhaps more on that? The road rage, though, might do better left in controversy, as that seems to its main funniness, the reactions. Game Play continued - Ah, at last, gameplay. Very cursory overview, though, and such a harsh world, though they always are in such games, I suppose. Ah, so this game recognises that traffic cones are indeed a sentient lifeform? Er, enemy, I mean. Good. Controversy - This looks like it's based off actual incidents, either with MapQuest itself or with the games off which your version of Mapquest is based... why not link them? Use some citations; provide some actual news of it so people get what's really going on here, and see how you've twisted them? For that matter, even if they aren't based on real ones, you could probably find some. I do like the bit about how the reward points were just decreased a bit as a result of criticism, though. And the bit about Google maps actually being useful... might be able to say more about that case, too. Play out how it progressed, dramaticising the stages until the eventual klunk of the result. Also, order - goes from women -> handicaps -> copyrights -> women again. Full rant about this issue can be found in the Prose section, as it just doesn't read or flow that well. Trivia - first is just repetition and not funny, second is just not really funny, though it and third could make for a lovely example about who plays the thing, which might well be a section to add, or just a bit of background, since who plays a thing says a lot about it. I mean, what does it tell you about Guild Wars that about a third of the players are apparently female? Apparently they like the outfits, or something. So what does it say about this that... fourth trivia, a celebrity, well... so what? I know it's trivia, but it's just so random and has nothing to do with anything else here that I can tell. More about his outspokenness might help, but... eh. But trivia's generally not that useful, anyhow. Full List of Available Character Classes - ugh, giant list... although it might be less horrific if you didn't call it a list. List gripes aside, how about some more list gripes? The advantages and disadvantages columns are perhaps too much information; the funny bits you could probably just include in the summaries themselves, and in many cases, you already do, as it's the summaries that make the stats funny. Though why do you call some by specific names? And how does, say, the travelling in groups with the hispanic males translate to gameplay? All in all, this is a horrible section that is way too listy and horribly racist and rude and stereotypical and biased, and I love it. Actual humour-content-wise, I'd say it's the best here, even though it really does have nothing to do with the actual MapQuest - you may want to look to that, tie it in better, though I couldn't say how. Does MapQuest itself have localisations, perhaps? Or include some sort of connection to the actual mapping part with each. Some sort of relation. Just detached parts, currently... Reference - These aren't references, even if you are using the <ref> tag, just footnotes. Why not call them something more clever, though? Related to the game... Aleister does that, though he sometimes goes a wee bit overboard, but it can help spruce it up. External Links - instead of listing the links here, perhaps you could work them into the article itself? I dunno about other people, but I tend to just skim over external links sections, especially when one of the links is to a giant list. Why not put the link to mapquest.com in the infobox, and work in references and/or links thoughout the article to the games off which you base certain aspects. Link something in the race bit to a game in which race plays a pronounced role, for instance.
Prose and formatting:	4	Your order, where is your order? How are you actually organising this? It jumps around, parts are redundant with each other... why is there a 'Game Play continued' subsection of 'Game Play'? That should be obvious; of course it's about game play, unless you were talking about something else entirely, in which case that something else entirely shouldn't even be in the section (in this case you actually were pretty on topic, so I'm even less clear on why it's 'continued', but it's a general point). And the Choosing a class part, not aptly named, either - it talks about race. Are the races the classes? But you have a full set of races later, so why the short discuss here that ends only referring to the later table? And why is that a table? It has some good content... very good, some of the funniest of the article, perhaps, but tables are scary. Who reads through them, all the way through? It's not what they're for; the entire point of tables is to be able to find specific information, skipping the entries that do not interest the searcher. That is why they are sortable. I know, I know, it looks encyclopaedic. Good, right? But despite the parodic nature of Uncyclopedia, you probably noticed that we don't always necessarily mirror Wikipedia. If, as with this case, the presentation interferes with of the content itself, I'd suggest you don't use it. Use something else. Lay it out in paragraphs, perhaps, because paragraphs suit the read. Just make the information flow. You needn't talk about all of them, either. That could be an article in of itself; people have done that before, after all, or it could... perhaps you could write them all, say, a section for each, one or two at a time, some with male and female together, perhaps with contrast, perhaps not, and some not... and randomly swap in a couple as examples. Have a cursory overview, introduction to the section that remains constant, of course, but bring in an example of specifics at random. A <choose>, perhaps. But that's probably a crazy idea. I wouldn't know. I'm just throwing out thoughts here, though I seemed to have lost all focus when I wrote that originally. It's better now; I revised it. That, though, is exactly what you need. Revise for focus. Shorten parts, lengthen parts, but organise it so it flows, idea to idea. Go into detail, but discuss. Talk about it, really talk about it, and pull out, say, just how loud the black females really are. Paint it in our minds - how does that actually translate to the game environment? How does it affect gameplay? For this is what it is. The magic is in the details and in how they fit together; the entire thing must fit together or it will go nowhere. Well, not very far, at least. It does go somewhere already. Just not very far. Another thing - consistency. Are they races or classes? Is the goal to rank up or finish the quest? Is it 'mapquest', as their current website design might suggest, 'MapQuest', as Wikipedia insists, 'Mapquest', as you refer to it in text, or 'Map Quest', as it appears to be in the image? Pick one and settle with it for everything, unless you actually want to make a point about how it keeps changing with new releases/expansions/updates/whatever long-lived games these days do. As it is, it just looks somewhat silly. And why do you have a section on trivia? Such sections tend to be IP-magnets, prone to redundancy and silliness. Indeed, here, you already have or could probably work all of these into the body of the article itself, so why not leave it at that? Spelling, grammar, tone, etc are mostly fine. Sentences kind of choppy sometimes, but nothing major. Not sure why you pluralised 'MMORPGs' with an apostrophe. Some typos. Tone slips out of the encyclopedicness a bit sometimes, but consistently enough to not be an issue, save for the footnotes, which become perhaps too apparent due to being all bunched up together at the foot... and why not, er, end the sentences with periods, eh? Even if they are footnotes.
Images:	4	So how are the images coming, eh? They could really make this... or break this. As for the one you have - you can do better. Why not make it look like the game world you describe. Give it depth and feel and flourish as only posters/cover art/merchendising can... depth and feel and flourish which is of course entirely non-present in the game itself, of course... mind, even a fairly unmodified satellite image would work if you only lay it properly; amazing things can be done with dark and light and appropriately sinister text. Not that this would be sinister... would it? Cover art for each release could be nice, too... and if you keep the whole character list, an iconic image for each might work well... many games do have symbols for each class, so it would fit. Otherwise, a couple of images, perhaps a few posing together, would also work well. The most distinctive, perhaps. Maybe some sort of confrontation. But this is a MMORPG - you could do such grand, sweeping images, because such is the nature of MMORPGs - they are grand. They are massive. And the longer they last, the prettier they get. Not that you can't make fun of the lack of pretty... a comparison of graphics, beginning to end, could be amusing as well. I'm sure the actual Mapquest has changed quite a bit in the intermediary years... how long has it been around, now? A while, at least.
Miscellaneous:	5	Number that is possibly an overall impression, but probably not because I made up all the numbers at the end upon remembering that these aren't entirely about the comments. But seriously, ignore the numbers. They hopefully at least make sense, but that's not really the point.
Final Score:	23	Well, this is what I seem to think of the article, anyhow. Needs order. And sense. And perhaps more to do with the actual MapQuest. Whatever I said up there, anyhow. But the article certainly has potential; it's not too terrible now, just not terribly good, either. Hopefully this will help, you know where to find me if you have questions and whatnot, etc etc. Again, sorry about taking so long, and good luck.
Reviewer:	1234 ~ 21:55, 26 December 2010

5	Concept The idea, the angle, the grand funny of the article...
	It is an idea, fairly standard, with the whole changing the context of things and rewriting them as other, similar things for comedic effect. This does have comedic effect for that, too; overall the notion of Mapquest as a game works better than a lot of such notions. The problem is, I've never used the actual software, though. Not once, at least, not that I can recall, so what all am I missing here? What, specifically, of the mapping service are you mocking, playing off, etc? What quirks does it have? What sillinesses? I mean, as a clueless, I'm not going to get things in general, but you can help by referencing, too. It also feels to me like you're just turning it into a game, playing off the similarity between the Mapquest name and the generic sort of 'Elfquest' or whatever kids are playing these days, and using surprisingly little of the actual service. The article feels rather like detached parts - about travelling, and about the game, and the game is about travelling and about MapQuest... and MapQuest is about travelling... but they're not really tied together. It's just an article about a game, so it doesn't work so well as it could. Even the game itself is strangely inspecific, going into detail about the characters, the creation, the quest, but not how they interact, how the quest actually works, is structured, functions within the game. There is little mention about the history and progress and development of the game, which could probably make for an excellent parallel with the real MapQuest, as little would probably need to be changed. Play off whatever they did that was silly, or funny, or stupid, or strangely intelligent... humour often lies in reality, and upon twists and connections within it. And for that matter, is it an entirely online game? Or does it have real-world applications? Perhaps it has a dual nature - MMORPG, as well as a smaller following to, say, do something like geohashing within the real world, getting coordinants and maps and directions within the game and then applying them to find something outside. Perhaps this is the 'online web mapping service' with which readers would be familiar, and the game only something with which mostly just gamers would be familiar? Just an idea, mind. Might work, might not...
5	Humour The implementation, how funny the article comes out...
	Mmm, game... so it's a game. Playing off the clichés and whatnot can work, but I think you may be overplaying some of them a bit. The whole 'sex-starved demographic' notion is just too done elsewhere, so not only is it a bit stale and subsequently not that funny from the start, but you also just repeat it a lot, which really doesn't make it any funnier. I'm not saying you shouldn't use it, but if you just pick out the better bits and maybe even work example references or something into them, that might help. Anyway, piece-wise evaluation of funniness, as well as anything else that comes to mind: Introduction - Mostly just listing 'facts', so this really doesn't come across as that funny. Random, in some cases - why 'Branson, Missouri'? And isn't controlling an avatar a given for an RPG? I've never seen one that didn't involve that... Eh, but you need to establish your overall funny here. The facts could be useful, but use them to back up why the game itself is funny, not as the introduction itself. Why is it notable, where did it come from, what's so funny about it, those would be things to address, though some less directly than others. Game Play - Wait, monsters? What? What sort of game is this then? There's no mention of monsters anywhere else that I noticed... Character Creation - Entirely unique characters, on a relatively old online game? Such games function for their simplicity - loading every possible face would be difficult indeed, and when you consider the minimal variability of older games due to graphics rendering limitations, if such uniqueness really was feasible, the developers would probably be incredibly rich and not actually working on the game. Which, actually, you might be able to use - high turnover rate of coders, or some such, hence some disparity between versions the MapQuest service itself. Or not, but my point is, make some sort of funny if you are going to include completely ridiculous stuff. Ridiculousness isn't necessarily funny on its own. Eh, but most of this is pretty redundant with the full list of classes. ITS... not it's for possessives. Choosing a Class - Again, pretty redundant with the full list, and the customisability as it is is not that funny, either. Could go into options and mock why they're even there; designers got drunk or something and added in a set of Centauri hairstyles for the French, not that that's funny, either. May want to ditch this here entirely and leave the race/class stuff to the full list section. Starting Out - Sounds like WoW, though what exactly is Radiator Springs? Sounds like a joke I'm missing, reference to something... how about a link? The interface is interesting, perhaps more on that? The road rage, though, might do better left in controversy, as that seems to its main funniness, the reactions. Game Play continued - Ah, at last, gameplay. Very cursory overview, though, and such a harsh world, though they always are in such games, I suppose. Ah, so this game recognises that traffic cones are indeed a sentient lifeform? Er, enemy, I mean. Good. Controversy - This looks like it's based off actual incidents, either with MapQuest itself or with the games off which your version of Mapquest is based... why not link them? Use some citations; provide some actual news of it so people get what's really going on here, and see how you've twisted them? For that matter, even if they aren't based on real ones, you could probably find some. I do like the bit about how the reward points were just decreased a bit as a result of criticism, though. And the bit about Google maps actually being useful... might be able to say more about that case, too. Play out how it progressed, dramaticising the stages until the eventual klunk of the result. Also, order - goes from women -> handicaps -> copyrights -> women again. Full rant about this issue can be found in the Prose section, as it just doesn't read or flow that well. Trivia - first is just repetition and not funny, second is just not really funny, though it and third could make for a lovely example about who plays the thing, which might well be a section to add, or just a bit of background, since who plays a thing says a lot about it. I mean, what does it tell you about Guild Wars that about a third of the players are apparently female? Apparently they like the outfits, or something. So what does it say about this that... fourth trivia, a celebrity, well... so what? I know it's trivia, but it's just so random and has nothing to do with anything else here that I can tell. More about his outspokenness might help, but... eh. But trivia's generally not that useful, anyhow. Full List of Available Character Classes - ugh, giant list... although it might be less horrific if you didn't call it a list. List gripes aside, how about some more list gripes? The advantages and disadvantages columns are perhaps too much information; the funny bits you could probably just include in the summaries themselves, and in many cases, you already do, as it's the summaries that make the stats funny. Though why do you call some by specific names? And how does, say, the travelling in groups with the hispanic males translate to gameplay? All in all, this is a horrible section that is way too listy and horribly racist and rude and stereotypical and biased, and I love it. Actual humour-content-wise, I'd say it's the best here, even though it really does have nothing to do with the actual MapQuest - you may want to look to that, tie it in better, though I couldn't say how. Does MapQuest itself have localisations, perhaps? Or include some sort of connection to the actual mapping part with each. Some sort of relation. Just detached parts, currently... Reference - These aren't references, even if you are using the <ref> tag, just footnotes. Why not call them something more clever, though? Related to the game... Aleister does that, though he sometimes goes a wee bit overboard, but it can help spruce it up. External Links - instead of listing the links here, perhaps you could work them into the article itself? I dunno about other people, but I tend to just skim over external links sections, especially when one of the links is to a giant list. Why not put the link to mapquest.com in the infobox, and work in references and/or links thoughout the article to the games off which you base certain aspects. Link something in the race bit to a game in which race plays a pronounced role, for instance.
4	Prose and formatting Appearance, flow, overall presentation...
	Your order, where is your order? How are you actually organising this? It jumps around, parts are redundant with each other... why is there a 'Game Play continued' subsection of 'Game Play'? That should be obvious; of course it's about game play, unless you were talking about something else entirely, in which case that something else entirely shouldn't even be in the section (in this case you actually were pretty on topic, so I'm even less clear on why it's 'continued', but it's a general point). And the Choosing a class part, not aptly named, either - it talks about race. Are the races the classes? But you have a full set of races later, so why the short discuss here that ends only referring to the later table? And why is that a table? It has some good content... very good, some of the funniest of the article, perhaps, but tables are scary. Who reads through them, all the way through? It's not what they're for; the entire point of tables is to be able to find specific information, skipping the entries that do not interest the searcher. That is why they are sortable. I know, I know, it looks encyclopaedic. Good, right? But despite the parodic nature of Uncyclopedia, you probably noticed that we don't always necessarily mirror Wikipedia. If, as with this case, the presentation interferes with of the content itself, I'd suggest you don't use it. Use something else. Lay it out in paragraphs, perhaps, because paragraphs suit the read. Just make the information flow. You needn't talk about all of them, either. That could be an article in of itself; people have done that before, after all, or it could... perhaps you could write them all, say, a section for each, one or two at a time, some with male and female together, perhaps with contrast, perhaps not, and some not... and randomly swap in a couple as examples. Have a cursory overview, introduction to the section that remains constant, of course, but bring in an example of specifics at random. A <choose>, perhaps. But that's probably a crazy idea. I wouldn't know. I'm just throwing out thoughts here, though I seemed to have lost all focus when I wrote that originally. It's better now; I revised it. That, though, is exactly what you need. Revise for focus. Shorten parts, lengthen parts, but organise it so it flows, idea to idea. Go into detail, but discuss. Talk about it, really talk about it, and pull out, say, just how loud the black females really are. Paint it in our minds - how does that actually translate to the game environment? How does it affect gameplay? For this is what it is. The magic is in the details and in how they fit together; the entire thing must fit together or it will go nowhere. Well, not very far, at least. It does go somewhere already. Just not very far. Another thing - consistency. Are they races or classes? Is the goal to rank up or finish the quest? Is it 'mapquest', as their current website design might suggest, 'MapQuest', as Wikipedia insists, 'Mapquest', as you refer to it in text, or 'Map Quest', as it appears to be in the image? Pick one and settle with it for everything, unless you actually want to make a point about how it keeps changing with new releases/expansions/updates/whatever long-lived games these days do. As it is, it just looks somewhat silly. And why do you have a section on trivia? Such sections tend to be IP-magnets, prone to redundancy and silliness. Indeed, here, you already have or could probably work all of these into the body of the article itself, so why not leave it at that? Spelling, grammar, tone, etc are mostly fine. Sentences kind of choppy sometimes, but nothing major. Not sure why you pluralised 'MMORPGs' with an apostrophe. Some typos. Tone slips out of the encyclopedicness a bit sometimes, but consistently enough to not be an issue, save for the footnotes, which become perhaps too apparent due to being all bunched up together at the foot... and why not, er, end the sentences with periods, eh? Even if they are footnotes.
4	Images The graphics themselves, as well as their humour and relevance...
	So how are the images coming, eh? They could really make this... or break this. As for the one you have - you can do better. Why not make it look like the game world you describe. Give it depth and feel and flourish as only posters/cover art/merchendising can... depth and feel and flourish which is of course entirely non-present in the game itself, of course... mind, even a fairly unmodified satellite image would work if you only lay it properly; amazing things can be done with dark and light and appropriately sinister text. Not that this would be sinister... would it? Cover art for each release could be nice, too... and if you keep the whole character list, an iconic image for each might work well... many games do have symbols for each class, so it would fit. Otherwise, a couple of images, perhaps a few posing together, would also work well. The most distinctive, perhaps. Maybe some sort of confrontation. But this is a MMORPG - you could do such grand, sweeping images, because such is the nature of MMORPGs - they are grand. They are massive. And the longer they last, the prettier they get. Not that you can't make fun of the lack of pretty... a comparison of graphics, beginning to end, could be amusing as well. I'm sure the actual Mapquest has changed quite a bit in the intermediary years... how long has it been around, now? A while, at least.
5	Miscellaneous Anything else... or not...
	Number that is possibly an overall impression, but probably not because I made up all the numbers at the end upon remembering that these aren't entirely about the comments. But seriously, ignore the numbers. They hopefully at least make sense, but that's not really the point.
23	Final score 1234 ~ 21:55, 26 December 2010
	Well, this is what I seem to think of the article, anyhow. Needs order. And sense. And perhaps more to do with the actual MapQuest. Whatever I said up there, anyhow. But the article certainly has potential; it's not too terrible now, just not terribly good, either. Hopefully this will help, you know where to find me if you have questions and whatnot, etc etc. Again, sorry about taking so long, and good luck.