It's an interesting idea in the abstract but reading through it once again exemplifies why these "I played through every X game on platform/in a specific timespan" featurettes are doomed to be more curios than valid analysis. The work-like nature of "I'm going to give these games 30 minutes" is inherently weighted against games that are slow-burned and not tuned for instant gratification (Management games, simulations). It doesn't encourage in-depth thought or fact-checking either.
The Thunder Force III review states "Choose from any of the five levels. Only five levels, but they're quite long. " (which I assume is why the game gets dinged one point from the "level design" criteria despite the rest of the writeup praising it) but the game has eight levels - you play through three more stages after clearing the initial five. They're not hidden or anything, it's something you would know from finishing the game normally. I wouldn't be surprised to find more weird/straigt-up wrong statements if I looked for the games I'm familiar with.
@VoidofLight In a 2018 interview, the director of the series specifically said they'd be open to a make a new game if Gold was well-received (which it was).
@mrbogus MAME only has the export versions of the game (which have worse audio and messed up stage order) emulated; protection on the original release and the "New" version (which are what is featured in the Arcade Archives release) still has not been cracked, so they certainly didn't source this release from MAME.
Saying "Included variations of Sagaia adjust both the difficulty and the order you visit the levels, but none of them are huge change-ups." is a bit misleading. Though that is mostly the case for Sagaia ver 1 (though the stages in the final cluster are brand new), all of the levels in Sagaia ver 2. are brand new.
@AG_Awesome Both packages are good but I'd recommend arcade. Darius Gaiden is the highlight of the series and it's the half that got the most T&A in term of extra features.
@Dirty0814 The console versions is really only 5 games (Darius Alpha is just a boss rush mode of Darius Plus) and there's really no reason to play Master System Darius II over the genesis version beside nostalgia. On the arcade collection, the "Sagaia" and "Sagaia version 2" variants of Darius II are very different from the base game so you get bang for your bucks than it appears.
@Milenko No, they've been patched in the Japanese release for months.
@Andrew5678 WW Gold did pretty well by late 3DS standards (at least in Japan). It was the only new 3DS game for 2018 to break 100k sales (the tracker with them ot up-to-date numbers has it at 136k as of Week 51). The amount of marketing Nintendo is giving 4 months after release (bi-weekly charater trailers, cross-promotion with Band Brothers P in October and an interview with the VAs in the February 2019 of Nintendo Dream magazine) would also indicate to me the company is satisfied with its performance.
@Majora101 I mean, you started your first post here with dismissing people as "Antifa GEDs" and not very subtly implying in your last paragraph critics of the bok are so because they're no-fun ninnies. That's not really being adult or respectful, is it?
People fixate on the "they stole that fan name" thing, but the truth is: if the english translators of the book had left in the "Soarin' Stu" name in there as a sly nod but literally everything else was perfect, maybe some people would've raised eyebrows at the lack of credit, but there wouldn't have been much noise about it, and certainly not articles about the reaction. The bulk of the critcisms come from multiple factors:
-An overreliance on the wiki result in some objectively sloppy stuff, like a page listing enemies with plain english names like "Bear" and "Floating Face" next to obvious transliterations like "Furiko" and "Goronto", etc.
-The French and German translations of the book were handled more professionally, with the translators properly and uniformly localizing names instead of relying excessively on fansites.
-Deadlines were likely not a factor, as the original book was released in 2015 and was not updated for any of the stuff that happened in-between that and its western release (Super Mario Odyssey isn't mentioned, for instance).
Obviously, it's not world-ending stuff. It's Mario. I won't give the book money, and I don't think it's unreasonable to state why (infact I'm sure Dark Horse's staff appreciates the feedback so they can avoid similar responses in the future).
Furthermore, while hardly the worst instance of this stuff, this fits in a pattern of official tie-in books and the like relying too much or plagiarising fan-ressources (incidents which include things like an Halo guidebook straight up lifting large chunks of texts from the Halo Wikia, complete with factual errors and spelling mistakes, or a Transformers mobile game plagiarizing the character bios from the Transformers Wiki) and I hope the discussion surround this draws attention to this kind of practice, because it's not good.
I do think there was some misreading of the book's target audience. Judging from his twitter statements, it really does seems Zack Davisson (who, by the way, has been nothing but A+ in his response to our criticisms of the book) thought he was doing something swell by "canonizing the fanon", but that's really not what people wanted.
The deal is that the wiki's names are not the One True Fanon but often a "best we could do" deal. Naming follows a pretty rigid convention: If a thing isn't named in the game, we look at the support material (websites, strategy guides, etc.). If no english name is found, we use whatever official foreign name exist (preferably from the game's language of origin). If there's none, we use the internal filename if available. And if truly nothing can be found, then a name is made-up. If a "better" name is found, the page is immediatly moved to that name
I totally get past experience with the scanlation scene and deadlines might have made the translators cautious, but nobody would've shed a tear if the weird swimming cow enemy in Super Mario Land 2 was renamed from "Mōgyo" to something actually intelligible in English. Infact, many people who bought the book wanted precisely that: Finally give these obscure, unlikey-to-resurface enemies and items proper english names and not ugly transliterations from Japanese. In that respect, what the English translation of SMBE did is very dissapointing.
Yo! Super Mario Wiki admin here and author of the Twitter thread quoted in the OP. Few things I want to clear up:
@Smigit @Mortenb I would agree that calling what Dark Horse did here "plagiarism" is a bit extreme, since as far as anyone can tell, they only lifted the names used by the wiki and not actual text.
However as I wrote on the wiki's forum in response to one of the translator's justification for the choices (https://www.marioboards.com/index.php?topic=40406.msg2032507#msg2032507), there's a bigger issue here and it's the "Soarin' Stu" name. The wiki has a content redistribution license that allows commercial use, but only if the original author is credited, the license cited and the content distributed under the same terms. Dark Horse took the original creation of a wiki contributor (here the Soarin' Stu name), included it in a book they sell for money... without doing any of that. That's not good.
re Smigit's last paragraph: The wiki makes it abundantly clear when a name is made-up, either through the use of an impossible-to-miss template at the top of the page or mouseover text. In recent years, we've also stepped our efforts to cite names that are not easily found in the game itself.
@geheimxy : While the lion's share of the blame would fall on Dark Horse (since they produced the English translation), Nintendo isn't completely blameless here as they had two "Nintendo fact-checkers" credited who signed off on a book they really shouldn't have.
Comments 9
Re: Random: How Do You Find Out The Best 16-Bit-Era Game? Play Them All, Of Course
It's an interesting idea in the abstract but reading through it once again exemplifies why these "I played through every X game on platform/in a specific timespan" featurettes are doomed to be more curios than valid analysis. The work-like nature of "I'm going to give these games 30 minutes" is inherently weighted against games that are slow-burned and not tuned for instant gratification (Management games, simulations). It doesn't encourage in-depth thought or fact-checking either.
The Thunder Force III review states "Choose from any of the five levels. Only five levels, but they're quite long. " (which I assume is why the game gets dinged one point from the "level design" criteria despite the rest of the writeup praising it) but the game has eight levels - you play through three more stages after clearing the initial five. They're not hidden or anything, it's something you would know from finishing the game normally. I wouldn't be surprised to find more weird/straigt-up wrong statements if I looked for the games I'm familiar with.
Re: Video: WarioWare Could Have So Much Potential On Switch
@VoidofLight In a 2018 interview, the director of the series specifically said they'd be open to a make a new game if Gold was well-received (which it was).
Re: Mini Review: Arcade Archives Zero Team - A Long-Lost Coin-Op Relic That's Worth Unearthing
@mrbogus MAME only has the export versions of the game (which have worse audio and messed up stage order) emulated; protection on the original release and the "New" version (which are what is featured in the Arcade Archives release) still has not been cracked, so they certainly didn't source this release from MAME.
Re: Mini Review: Darius Cozmic Collection Arcade - Coin-Op Highlights From Taito's Seminal Shooter Series
Saying "Included variations of Sagaia adjust both the difficulty and the order you visit the levels, but none of them are huge change-ups." is a bit misleading. Though that is mostly the case for Sagaia ver 1 (though the stages in the final cluster are brand new), all of the levels in Sagaia ver 2. are brand new.
Re: Darius Cozmic Collection Arcade And Console Bring More Shmup Action To Switch eShop On 16th June
@AG_Awesome Both packages are good but I'd recommend arcade. Darius Gaiden is the highlight of the series and it's the half that got the most T&A in term of extra features.
@Dirty0814 The console versions is really only 5 games (Darius Alpha is just a boss rush mode of Darius Plus) and there's really no reason to play Master System Darius II over the genesis version beside nostalgia. On the arcade collection, the "Sagaia" and "Sagaia version 2" variants of Darius II are very different from the base game so you get bang for your bucks than it appears.
@Milenko No, they've been patched in the Japanese release for months.
Re: Disappointing 3DS Software Sales Show The Console's Slow Death In Japan
@Andrew5678 WW Gold did pretty well by late 3DS standards (at least in Japan). It was the only new 3DS game for 2018 to break 100k sales (the tracker with them ot up-to-date numbers has it at 136k as of Week 51). The amount of marketing Nintendo is giving 4 months after release (bi-weekly charater trailers, cross-promotion with Band Brothers P in October and an interview with the VAs in the February 2019 of Nintendo Dream magazine) would also indicate to me the company is satisfied with its performance.
Re: It Looks Like The Official Super Mario Encyclopedia Plagiarised A Fan-Made Wiki
@Majora101 I mean, you started your first post here with dismissing people as "Antifa GEDs" and not very subtly implying in your last paragraph critics of the bok are so because they're no-fun ninnies. That's not really being adult or respectful, is it?
People fixate on the "they stole that fan name" thing, but the truth is: if the english translators of the book had left in the "Soarin' Stu" name in there as a sly nod but literally everything else was perfect, maybe some people would've raised eyebrows at the lack of credit, but there wouldn't have been much noise about it, and certainly not articles about the reaction. The bulk of the critcisms come from multiple factors:
-An overreliance on the wiki result in some objectively sloppy stuff, like a page listing enemies with plain english names like "Bear" and "Floating Face" next to obvious transliterations like "Furiko" and "Goronto", etc.
-The French and German translations of the book were handled more professionally, with the translators properly and uniformly localizing names instead of relying excessively on fansites.
-Deadlines were likely not a factor, as the original book was released in 2015 and was not updated for any of the stuff that happened in-between that and its western release (Super Mario Odyssey isn't mentioned, for instance).
Obviously, it's not world-ending stuff. It's Mario. I won't give the book money, and I don't think it's unreasonable to state why (infact I'm sure Dark Horse's staff appreciates the feedback so they can avoid similar responses in the future).
Furthermore, while hardly the worst instance of this stuff, this fits in a pattern of official tie-in books and the like relying too much or plagiarising fan-ressources (incidents which include things like an Halo guidebook straight up lifting large chunks of texts from the Halo Wikia, complete with factual errors and spelling mistakes, or a Transformers mobile game plagiarizing the character bios from the Transformers Wiki) and I hope the discussion surround this draws attention to this kind of practice, because it's not good.
Re: It Looks Like The Official Super Mario Encyclopedia Plagiarised A Fan-Made Wiki
@Arpie @Moroboshi876
I do think there was some misreading of the book's target audience. Judging from his twitter statements, it really does seems Zack Davisson (who, by the way, has been nothing but A+ in his response to our criticisms of the book) thought he was doing something swell by "canonizing the fanon", but that's really not what people wanted.
The deal is that the wiki's names are not the One True Fanon but often a "best we could do" deal. Naming follows a pretty rigid convention: If a thing isn't named in the game, we look at the support material (websites, strategy guides, etc.). If no english name is found, we use whatever official foreign name exist (preferably from the game's language of origin). If there's none, we use the internal filename if available. And if truly nothing can be found, then a name is made-up. If a "better" name is found, the page is immediatly moved to that name
I totally get past experience with the scanlation scene and deadlines might have made the translators cautious, but nobody would've shed a tear if the weird swimming cow enemy in Super Mario Land 2 was renamed from "Mōgyo" to something actually intelligible in English. Infact, many people who bought the book wanted precisely that: Finally give these obscure, unlikey-to-resurface enemies and items proper english names and not ugly transliterations from Japanese. In that respect, what the English translation of SMBE did is very dissapointing.
Re: It Looks Like The Official Super Mario Encyclopedia Plagiarised A Fan-Made Wiki
Yo! Super Mario Wiki admin here and author of the Twitter thread quoted in the OP. Few things I want to clear up:
@Smigit @Mortenb I would agree that calling what Dark Horse did here "plagiarism" is a bit extreme, since as far as anyone can tell, they only lifted the names used by the wiki and not actual text.
However as I wrote on the wiki's forum in response to one of the translator's justification for the choices (https://www.marioboards.com/index.php?topic=40406.msg2032507#msg2032507), there's a bigger issue here and it's the "Soarin' Stu" name. The wiki has a content redistribution license that allows commercial use, but only if the original author is credited, the license cited and the content distributed under the same terms. Dark Horse took the original creation of a wiki contributor (here the Soarin' Stu name), included it in a book they sell for money... without doing any of that. That's not good.
re Smigit's last paragraph: The wiki makes it abundantly clear when a name is made-up, either through the use of an impossible-to-miss template at the top of the page or mouseover text. In recent years, we've also stepped our efforts to cite names that are not easily found in the game itself.
@geheimxy : While the lion's share of the blame would fall on Dark Horse (since they produced the English translation), Nintendo isn't completely blameless here as they had two "Nintendo fact-checkers" credited who signed off on a book they really shouldn't have.