Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Super Mario Bros. 3/archive1

The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted by SandyGeorgia 17:05, 15 February 2009 [1].

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Super Mario Bros. 3

Nominator(s): Guyinblack25 ^talk

Another bundle of gaming goodness from the good old days. Super Mario Bros. 3, the creation of the great Shigeru Miyamoto, is recognized by Guinness World Records as the best-selling video game sold separately from a system (over 17 million copies). A feat few other video games have ever come close to beating. It introduced several elements that were carried over to later titles in the series. Among the new elements are whimsical power-ups like special suits that turn Mario into either a frog, tanuki, or Hammer Brother.

For those interested, it recently passed GA and underwent a peer review. I feel that it meets the FA criteria and will do my best to address any comments or suggestions that reviewers bring up. (Guyinblack25 ^talk 16:19, 11 February 2009 (UTC))

• Oppose My check of the development section did not inspire confidence, and suggests that an audit of the entire article is necessary. At random:
  • "approximately ten people" Approximately? Ten seems a rather low number to waffle on.
  • "To assist less skilled players, earlier worlds were populated with bonus coins and 1-ups, while later worlds presented " Parallelism and tense issues. Presented does not make sense in past tense. Also, why not use stronger active voice instead of "were populated"?
  • "The two player mode had" Hyphen needed. "Had"?
  • "to balance the amount of play time between the two" Spot redundancies
  • "developed concepts revolving around Mario transforming " awkward
  • "and was kept because the designers felt it was practical " How exactly was this practical?
  • "Mario's style." What style? His design?
  • "from different real-life experiences." Different is unnecessary. Whose real-life experiences?
  • "children were based on seven of the game's programmers " Grammar
  • "as a tribute to their work and efforts, and were each designed to be unique in appearance and personality." Ambiguous their. So many redundancies.
  • "that generates a " Odd shift in tense.
  • "MMC chips are smaller..." More odd shifts in tense in that sentence. BuddingJournalist 21:15, 11 February 2009 (UTC)

    Myself and others have done some copy editing to the article. I believe the prose is tighter and the verb tenses match up now.

    To answer some of your questions:

    • I'd love to tell you the exact number of staff involved, but I'm just going by what the source said, "over ten people". Do you think stating that exactly would be better?
    • Again, I'm just going by the source for the raccoon tail, "worked best from a practical point of view and it fit right in with Mario's style". If I had to guess, the practical point of view was easy to animate (not like a larger sprite that may be needed for a centaur), and the style being the somewhat whimsical/silly idea of a plumber in a kingdom of mushroom people fighting giant reptiles by jumping around collection colored mushrooms and flowers. But that's just my guess and I have no source that explains "practical" and "style" further.
    • The their references to the work and efforts of the programmers. I'm actually at a lose at how to make that blatantly apparent without a pronoun. I figured "their" was better than "seven programmers as a tribute to the programmers' work and efforts."

    Hopefully the copy edits address you issues. Please let me know otherwise. (Guyinblack25 ^talk 16:53, 12 February 2009 (UTC))

That's unfortunate that there are no other sources for that number. For "practical" and "style", if you're unsure of what is being meant, then it makes little sense to include it in the article. Only serves to confuse readers. As far as "their", I have no idea what my original point was; sorry! Will revisit the article soon, but on a cursory glance, it seems like many of my above points remain unaddressed or only partially addressed. Thus, I'm not striking my oppose for now. BuddingJournalist 17:36, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

I removed the content about "practical" and "style". Let me know what issue you're talking about: verb tense, redundancy, or needing clarification. (Guyinblack25 ^talk 01:49, 13 February 2009 (UTC))

• Still not terribly impressed with the prose. See my edits for some examples.
  • "paid close attention from the initial concepts through the final stages." Paid close attention means what? And paid attention to what?
  • "He processed ideas with his staff in order to organize thoughts into full concepts." Vague and unclear what is being meant here; whose ideas? This high-level sentence could use some more fleshing out to make it more informative. An example of this collaboration process, perhaps?
  • "Miyamoto considered interesting and original gameplay ideas to be the key to making a successful game." Danger of slipping into platitude territory here.
  • "The two-player mode has" In my admittedly vague "had?", I was questioning both the tense and the word choice. Such a weak verb for the job.
  • "The development team sought to introduce new power-ups, and develop concepts that would give Mario the appearance of different creatures to provide new abilities." When doing copy-edits, carefully re-read the result. Here, we have an out-of-place comma. With the current construction, you can either remove it and tie "develop concepts" to "sought to" or keep it and switch develop to developed. However, you should be thinking carefully about your sentence structure. You have "sought to", which, when not dealing with the abstract, emphasizes the attempt and often implies a failure (which doesn't seem to be the case here). Can it be eliminated for tighter prose?
  • The second paragraph is full of the weak passive, which made for some dull reading.
  • "a bad experience Miyamoto had with a dog as a child" Nothing objectively wrong, but "bad experience" is unduly generic and not the most encylopedic way of phrasing things. More use of weak "has".
• Skimmed through the Gameplay section and still found little errors here and there (some of which I've corrected).
  • "In addition to running and jumping moves, the player can fly and float with the aid of special items, slide down slopes, and execute new types of jumps." Unclear which one of these (all of them?) are the aforementioned "new elements".
  • "Each region is a kingdom that serves as a game world, which is divided into stage levels, and an eighth is included as the final world, Bowser's kingdom." Redundancies and opportunities for tightening of prose (for example, we're told a king rules each region in the previous sentence). Two clauses are uncomfortably mashed together with "and". BuddingJournalist 16:47, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

• Images
  • File:Smb3.jpg could be shrunk to 256px horizontal
  • File:SMB3-overworld.jpg's rationale is to show two new features, the overworld and one of the new suits, but File:SMB3-gameplay.gif overlaps with that rationale. As such I think one of these needs to go (I would say the former).

--Der Wohltemperierte Fuchs ^(talk) 01:52, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

I've reduced the size of the box cover.

Of the two gameplay images, I'd prefer to keep the over world map as I think it's a more prominent feature among the images. But if others think the frog suit image should stay instead, I'll go with that.

(Guyinblack25 ^talk 16:53, 12 February 2009 (UTC))

Comments - sources look okay, links checked out with the link checker tool. I did not check the non-English sources. Ealdgyth - Talk 14:30, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Dengeki.com is the website for a series of Japanese hobby and gaming magazines, many of which have been around for over a decade. The publication is owned by ASCII Media Works.

Impress Watch is media site owned by Impress Group, a holdings company. GameSpot has cited their articles and interviews before. This source is not really needed, and I can remove it if there is any problem.

(Guyinblack25 ^talk 16:53, 12 February 2009 (UTC))

• Comments
  • Can Image:SMB3-gameplay.gif be enlarged a bit? It looks a bit...bad. (I don't know what other word to use.) The subtitle caption for it is fine
  • I think the overworld map image should be removed.
  • References seem okay, but if you can, change the YYYY-DD-MM dates to the "regular" format (February 13, 2009.) Tezkag72^{私にどなる}_{私のはかい} 21:38, 13 February 2009 (UTC)

Please withdraw: Given that I'm not a great writer, I have more pressing real-life matters to take care of, and I believe the accuracy of the development content is starting to slip, I request this nomination by withdrawn. Thank you for the time and attention given to the article. (Guyinblack25 ^talk 15:37, 15 February 2009 (UTC))

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.