Talk:Star Control/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Panini! (talk · contribs) 04:23, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

Dibs. I'll look at it later. Panini! • 🥪 04:23, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

I just stumbled upon the article and did some copy-editing. soetermans. ^{↑↑↓↓←→←→ B A TALK} 19:35, 1 January 2023 (UTC)

Alrighty, let's do this. I'm going to use red text for quotes from the article, and I'm doing this not to emphasize it's wrong, but rather because I like the color red.

Lead

• MOS:LEADLENGTH recommends two to three paragraphs for an article this size (21k in prose), and I feel that's necessary here. This can be expanded with details of gameplay, development, details of critical consensus, and a touch on the aftermath. I'll wait to review this section until the lead is well-fed.

Gameplay

• "The game offers different ships to pilot, which are deliberately imbalanced in ability." How so? And why is that?
• "Match-ups between these ships have a major influence over combat." How so?
• "Other sounds are sampled from science fiction film and television." Despite only being a sentence, I feel this would be better tacked onto a paragraph in development.

Plot

• "as well as game's..." -> "as well as the game's..."
• Ur-Quan should be linked as it first appears in "...the invading Ur-Quan Hierarchy"

Concept and origins

• "Star Control is the first collaboration between Paul Reiche III and Fred Ford." Without explaining the significance of this it lacks purpose (maybe explain what they are known for).
• "At this point, Reiche needed a programmer-engineer and Ford was seeking a designer-artist, so their mutual friends set up a gaming night to re-introduce them." I'm curious about "re-introduce". Have these two met before this?
• The use of "asymmetric", in "where asymmetric combatants fight using different abilities in space", is vague.
• "According to Ford, "StarCon is really just Archon with an S-T in front of it", pointing to the one-on-one combat and strategic modes of both games." I'm curious, then, was this going to be a spiritual successor to Archon or was this name-choice pure coincidence? Is this a detail that's worth mentioning?

Design and production

• Is mentioning "VUX and Yehat" a necessary detail? If so, they need an introduction.
• Is the SpaceWars! in "The first ship sketches were based on popular science fiction, such as SpaceWars!...", in reference to Spacewar!? If so, why the change? If not, can a hyperlink or some further context be given?
• "Reiche describes their character creation process: 'I know it probably sounds weird, but when I design a game like this, I make drawings of the characters and stare at them. I hold little conversations with them. 'What do you guys do?' And they tell me.'" A comedic DYK can potentially come from this.
• "They decided to organize the characters into nominally "good" and "bad" factions"

• Are all of these factions common enemies to the Ur-Quan? There's a lot of details about plot here that are dismissed in gameplay, and I feel you can spare a paragraph or so to detail these characters a bit more.

Porting and compatibility

• Spectrum links to the wrong place, unless they ported the game to rainbows, to which I send my praises to the porting team because that's super rad.
• If this court case is so important, you can spare expanding this section with more details beyond a few sentences. I acknowledge where our one difference in writing style lies is focus on comprehensiveness, but to limit the court case of the game that started it all to a blurb is, in my interpretation, a WP:DUEWEIGHT issue.

Reception

• A general statement like "Critics praised Star Control for its arcade combat, as well as its character designs, animations, and sound" could use some references. For broad overview statements like these, I only use them when there's enough review opinions to cite the statement and have some leftover that can be used for specific critic opinions.
• Usually an award describes itself, like "Best Family Game", but I feel "Hyper Game Award" needs some help so the reader understands. I'd explain the reasoning a bit for why it won this award to help out the context (ex., I don't know, "The game won the "NOW That's What I Call Music!" award for its acclaimed soundtrack")
• I feel less weight should be given to the reviewers scores in prose and more so their opinions. After all, all or the scores are all neatly organized to the right. That could just be me being heavily against citing reviewer scores in prose, though.
• Wait, now the game has "unique humor" I was unaware of?! I gotta know more about this plot, man!

Reception (2)

• To avoid super long chains of inline citations I split up the general statements to clarify who liked what. An extreme example: "The game was praised for its graphics,, setting, and worldbuilding."

• You seem to already have this format set up with "Several publications celebrated Star Control for its character designs, animations, and other artistic details", so you can cite the references behind each point instead of all six at the end, for example.

Legacy and impact

• Is Sega-16 in relation to Sega? Is this a primary source praising their own licensed game?
• Should Polygon be italicized?
• There are two mentions of Sega-16 at the beginning and end of this section, and I recommend you combine them.

Aftermath

• What do you mean by a "new Star Control 3"? Is it a suggested remaster or a sequel to the third game?

More coming. Panini! • 🥪 19:01, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for all this. You've opened my eyes about a bunch of things. I usually think that a reader will use Wikipedia as a starting point, and dive deeper into the sources if they want more detail. But it becomes confusing if I leave out certain game details that the reviewers are reacting to, let alone that these are print reviews that might be hard to access. So I've tried to make the article more comprehensive, even just with a solid plot and character section. I've also soured on review scores, and I tried to get the review section to really explain what people liked about this game.

I think my other changes will clarify some of the good questions you had. I tried to explain more about the Sega v. Accolade case, which was important to society, but mostly a piece of trivia when it comes to this game. Most of the other fixes were simple enough. I dropped Sega-16 because WP:VGSOURCES hasn't received it well.

If any of the additions have added too much, I don't mind scaling back. I figure I can write a better lead once we are solid on everything else. Let me know how we're doing. All this feedback is super helpful. Shooterwalker (talk) 21:13, 11 January 2023 (UTC)

Few quick replies:

• Now that's a plot! It doesn't need to inline citations (the game is the source itself), so you can remove those if you choose to.
• I was unaware that several games were the cause of the lawsuit, not just Star Control, but regardless, this expansion gives some nice due weight.

I'll re-review your new additions and the rest of the article in a bit, I just need to let my device charge. Thank you for your patience! Panini! • 🥪 13:48, 17 January 2023 (UTC)

• That should be all from me!

• Thanks again for the thorough review. I made a few more tweaks based on your feedback. I decided to keep the citations for the plot, just in case someone wants to distinguish between the manual vs. the game itself. I also left the review references bundled the same, but tried to clarify that there was one bundle about combat, and another bundle about art / character design. Let me know if that works for you. I should also do something about the lead, but wanted to make sure I handled the other details first. Shooterwalker (talk) 01:20, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

Oh, also, the game might benefit from a better screenshot of the character art.[1] It's kind of a shame that the only screenshot is from the critically panned Spectrum port, made by a separate team. The creators are pretty permissive with their copyright as long as it's not for profit. Shooterwalker (talk) 01:23, 18 January 2023 (UTC)

If you feel replacing the image is necessary I'm okay with it as well. I support the other changes a eagerly await the new and improved lead. Panini! • 🥪 15:27, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for all the patience and feedback. I wanted to make sure the article was basically stable before re-writing the lead, and I think the article has closed the last few gaps to reach WP:GA. Let me know what you think. Shooterwalker (talk) 19:08, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Looks good to me! I made a few hyperlink changes, but this article Passes the GA criteria. Good Job! Panini! • 🥪 23:53, 20 January 2023 (UTC)