Knight Lore

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We're fixing up a few articles as part of the Rare Replay project. I think my research into this 80s classic went fairly deep, so in advance of taking it to FAC, I wanted first to see if anyone had preliminary comments. Appreciate your time, czar 20:54, 12 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Happy to take a look through.

• The lead strikes me as a little long and over-detailed for an article of this length.
• "Ultimate released Sabre Wulf to commercial and critical success, and released the other two soon after." Does "the other two" refer to Sabre Wulf and Alien 8? Why no mention of the second Sabreman game?
• "Tim Stamper added" Added to what?
• I'm afraid I found the explanation of the graphical technique a little difficult to follow, but A) it's really not the kind of thing I know anything about and B) I'm rather tired.
• "Ultimate asked Shahid Ahmad, the Chimera (1985) developer inspired by Knight Lore," First, this is the first time you mention a release date on first mention- perhaps some games mentioned further up the article should have this. Second, would something like "Ultimate asked Shahid Ahmad, the developer of the Knight Lore-inspired Chimera (1985)," (if that is indeed what is being claimed) be clearer?
• "In 1986, a version of Knight Lore was released for the Famicom Disk System, but it had little in common with its namesake." A different game, then?
• "was left speechless" Somewhat hyperbolic to be said in "Wikipedia's voice", perhaps? "wicked difficulty", too?
• According to our article on the publication, it is Amtix!, not Amtix.
• The OED suggests that "on-screen", rather than "onscreen", is correct.
• "Amstrad Action also complained of slowdown but called Knight Lore the Amstrad's "first Ultimate blockbuster" (one of the best three games on the console) both an improvement on the Spectrum release and on par with the quality of Commodore 64 titles.[7]" I don't follow.
• "Retro Gamer reported that it was more robust than Nightshade as the Stamper brothers' last game for Ultimate." I don't really understand what this means
• Is there a reason that you have some full citations in "Notes" rather than "References"?
• Perhaps you could dig out the original Crash reference for "Game Design" and link to it on Archive.org?
• Are your Your Sinclair/ysrnry.co.uk references consistent? I've seen finicky complaints about reference formatting sink FACs before!

Generally a very strong article. I can't promise that I've caught everything, and please double-check my copyedits. Josh Milburn (talk) 23:35, 26 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Czar: Just in case you missed my comments. Josh Milburn (talk) 17:46, 6 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, @J Milburn—still digging out from the holidays. Ya, a number of the weak parts of the article were rephrased by someone else... I'll have to revisit them. Having read the article, what parts of the lede do you think can be reduced? (Which points are not important for the lede?) Also (2) what do you think of that second image with the Pacman? Questionable copyright? I haven't heard back from the author. "the other two" can be generalized—it was just meant to refer to the other titles that soon followed (all three titles followed). The graphical technique is the type of thing that is better illustrated than written, which is likely worth the effort but the request went stale. Still, let me know if you have more specific suggestions. Ah, I removed "wicked difficulty" but so much for brilliant prose. "Speechless" is accurate and preferable to "lost for words", IMO. NOAD says onscreen is fine (and OED cites similar examples), but the hyphen is fine. The full citations in Notes were either from other editors or laziness, I believe—fixed. I believe recent edits have addressed the rest. What do you think of the changes? Appreciate the thoughtful review, czar 00:29, 12 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Concerning the lead: You could perhaps trim some of the details about gameplay and some of the details about Filmation, especially the legacy information. I did wonder about the image copyright; it is a little cheeky to use Pacman and one of the ghosts. WP:ICQ may be the place to ask. Do let me know if/when this hits FAC, but it may be beneficial to have someone else look through before nominating. (Also, I've not done anything by way of a literature search- there may be more out there...). Josh Milburn (talk) 19:36, 12 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

@J Milburn, thoughts on the trimmed lede? And @Masem, what's your take on File:Sprite rendering by binary image mask.png (mentioned above)? czar 22:29, 12 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

On the image, I am trusting that all assets were generated by the user that uploaded (eg not copy-and-paste of some parts of other games). The only thing that puts me a bit uneasy with that is the somewhat iconic images of Pac Man and the ghost. Pac Man is probably too simple to copyright, and I think one can argue the same for the ghost (given that we also have the artifacts atop it), so I would say it is likely okay to call free, just that it would be helpful for any additional checks on that to avoid it being a derivative work. --MASEM (t) 01:40, 13 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]