Talk:Hamurabi (video game)/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Indrian (talk · contribs) 00:59, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Well, I've come this far, so I guess it's too late to turn back now ;). Comments to follow. Indrian (talk) 00:59, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Haha, well, I'm not going to complain, you give very good and thorough reviews. :) I do have an semi-related question for you, though- when I wrote this article, I checked out Category:1968 video games through Category:1971 video games, and you'll note that there are a few games listed there that are not in the "early history of video games" template (nor mentioned in the early history of video games article) - Civil War, Highnoon, Star Trek, etc., and aside from, you know, being universally awful articles, they generally only exist when someone made a variant BASIC version or stuck a port on a BBS in the 70s/80s. While I haven't started researching (I need to go back and do Spacewar first), I really doubt I'll be able to find a lot of sources for them- Hamurabi started 2 genres, and Space Travel launched a multi-decade OS project, and they were difficult enough. I was thinking about merging them all together into a Early mainframe games article, which would be half-article, half-list of notable games from the 60s through early 70s - does that make sense to you? Is that a terrible name? --PresN 05:22, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

That does make sense, and would be the best way to deal with these early products. I would keep the Mayfield Star Trek game in its own article, however, as it proved highly influential on later products, including Star Raiders, one of the first killer apps in the computer game space. Lunar Lander is the only other pre-1972 mainframe game that I can think of off the top of my head that can also stand on its own, as it spawned many imitators, including the Atari arcade game. The name seems fine to me. Indrian (talk) 20:17, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

Lead and Infobox

• The Infobox gives both the PDP-8 and BASIC as platforms. BASIC is not really a platform; its a language. Even if we keep BASIC in there though, we give the only release date in the box as 1968, while the BASIC version, of course, did not hit until 1973.

• Changed to personal computer, and added the second release year

• "The early computer game was developed by Dyment at Digital Equipment Corporation as The Sumer Game before the rise of the commercial video game industry in the early history of video games as a piece of early software for fellow employee Richard Merrill's newly invented FOCAL programming language." - That's a lot of earlys for one sentence.

• Chopped down and reworded

• It may be worth mentioning the McKay game in the lead. I know that we cannot conclusively say that Dymet's game was based on McKay's, but it seems an awful coincidence that two people would independently decide to simulate ancient Middle Eastern economies on a computer in the 1960s. A "possibly inspired by" phrase in the lead would not be going too far I think.

• Added

Gameplay

• "too many people starve in a single round" - How many people is too many? Apparently not the entire population since the possibility of everyone dying is listed separately. Can we narrow this down a bit?

• Fortunately, we can see the source code, so I'll just adjust it to 45%

• "The resources that the player must manage are people, acres of land, and bushels of grain, over the course of ten rounds of decisions, each termed a year." - This sentence is a little overstuffed. "The resources that the player must manage are people, acres of land, and bushels of grain" is a complete thought, and then the following dependent clause about time periods comes out of nowhere. This could be a compound sentence, but it feels like a verb missing. Also "termed a year" is awkward phrasing.

• Adjusted

• "The end-game appraisal, not present in the original version of the game" - Do we know when this was added? If not, maybe we could say "not present in the original game but incorporated by the xxx version"

• Noted that it was the 1973 version (Ahl added it, it's noted in his book)

• The Rosenberg quote seems out of place here. Any additional gameplay elements could be cited to this source, certainly, but the quote itself seems like more of a reception kind of thing.

• Removed; it was a bit of unnecessary padding

And that's it. The article is mostly solid, and I am confident that these fixes can be implemented relatively easily. Therefore, I will put this nomination  On hold while concerns are addressed. Indrian (talk) 17:27, 10 February 2016 (UTC)

@Indrian: Thanks for the review, all done! --PresN 03:18, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

@PresN: Still one little problem with release dates in the infobox: the 1973 release was not for PCs. Leaving aside a few early false starts like the Micral, the microcomputer era began with the Altair in 1975, and the first microcomputer to really do really well was the TRS-80 in 1977. Ahl did not write his book for PC users, he wrote it for people who had access to a minicomputer, particularly at schools, for at the time he was in charge of a DEC education initiative. The book was re-released in 1979, which is when it was targeted at micro users and topped a million copies sold. Maybe the best solution would be to keep minicomputer and PC as the platforms, but discuss release dates in terms of programming language, so "1968 (FOCAL)" and "1973 (BASIC)." If you have a better idea though, let me know. Indrian (talk) 22:59, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

@Indrian: went with your suggestion. The "release platforms" fields in the infobox is a little weird for 60s-70s video games, yeah, since it's really "platforms you could run BASIC on", which of course is different if we're talking 1973 or 1978 or today. --PresN 23:36, 11 February 2016 (UTC)

@PresN: That's perfect. I made a few more grammatical tweaks, and I now feel the article meets the GA criteria. Well done! Indrian (talk) 15:22, 12 February 2016 (UTC)