Reply With Quotesomebody has a lot of time on his hands
Score one for free content. You no longer need to go to gamespot to get quality gamespot writing. Instead you can go to Games Click and get quality gamespot writing as if it had been run through an english to french translator and back.
I give you Tsunami 2265.
Gamespot Paragraph 1
Gamersclick Paragraph 1Tsunami 2265 begins with a schmaltzy love theme filled with ludicrous but sincerely crooned lines such as, "I see fighters coming for your heart." For an anime-inspired action game about giant robots and their human pilots, it's a promising start. Unfortunately, things go abruptly downhill from there. The designers obviously know their anime--apparently at the expense of ever having played a video game.
Gamespot Paragraph 2Tsunami 2265 is an anime-inspired action game about giant robots and their human pilots. A promising concept that sounded and looked like many Japanese cartoons I’ve seen. Unfortunately, things went downhill from there, and not just a little tumble, they broke every… uh... robot on the way down. The designers knew about cartoons and how to make them work, but being able to put them on a computer… Well that is another story.
Gamersclick Paragraph 2Tsunami's one other strong point is a visual technique commonly called cel shading, which uses flat-colored textures to give a game's graphics a convincingly cartoonlike appearance. The visuals feature lots of clean lines and bright colors. It can be strikingly effective in games that use it creatively, but Tsunami's visual design is so relentlessly bland that the effect loses any impact. Roughly two-thirds of the game's 13 long levels take place in virtually identical mazelike canyon corridors. Most of the rest of the environments are a variation of either blocky, characterless industrial landscapes or nondescript caves.
Gamespot Paragraph 3Now not everything was terrible in Tsunami, they brought cartoon effects to the computer screen none the less, which gave the game a distinct visual feeling that you don’t see very often. But the graphics are plain and they don’t keep you glued to the screen, with 13 long levels it can and does get boring.
Gamersclick Paragraph 3And that's basically Tsunami 2265--a nicely done giant robot ode to love and some potentially interesting graphics. It's hard to imagine how any other aspect of Tsunami could have seemed like a good idea, even in theory. The designers have apparently ignored many of the traditional principles of designing an interesting action game. But when you play the game, you won't get the sense that they deliberately chose not to use these principles. Instead, it almost seems like the game's designers were never aware of these simple rules in the first place.
http://gamespot.com/gamespot/stories...875959,00.htmlNow other than Tsunami having some rather interesting graphics, and some innovative ideas. That was it, the game wasn’t able to flow like other games, the reason for this is that the developers didn’t use any of the principles to making a good game. They made a game that would have been a better concept as a Japanese anime robot-killing cartoon than a game for the everyday person to buy. Don’t get me wrong, someone in Japan may like the game, but for the rest of the world I don’t see it.
http://www.gamersclick.com/review.cfm?p=v&id=682
Good Stuff.
Chet
somebody has a lot of time on his hands
Since he's not updating his own website, I'd say that somebody was Chet. And the guy who paraphrased the gamespot article. And me. And you.Originally Posted by Gamersclique
/jeep/
Funny and sad. Gave me a chill as I flashbacked to teaching freshman composition. With an assignment to analyze an essay, most would hand in flat summaries using same vocabulary as the original, sans the ideas.
But everybody's got to make some money by driving traffic to their banner ads, so go for it Gamerclick! Fuck copyright, you changed it enough!
Because, as we all know, the killer content that all of the game sites are fighting for is the ultimate Tsunami 2265 review...
[EDIT] Post removed because it's lame. Sorry for wasting your time.
- Alan
Dude, he's using the the exact same words and phrases in the exact same order.Plus, they are reviews of the exact same game.
Alan, thanks for the early morning laugh. But just in case you were serious and not pulling my leg.
It is not in the pay section and I quoted the paragraphs in question, but way to start right in with the flimsy excuses. And just in case this high tech board confuses you where I wrote Gamersclick Paragraph 3 and then phpBB inserted the word quote; that's one of the quotes I am talking about. If you notice, I just quoted you. So the content in question is actually on this board. Now I don't know how Mark has the forums setup, so maybe you can't see the gamespot quotes unless you pay, but I just assumed they were available to be viewed by everyone.Hmm, okay, we'll keep an eye on Nicholas' writing. Then again, I don't have access to Gamespot's for-pay stuff, so maybe I had better leave the journalism watchdog stuff to Chet.
While this would excuse using the same game title. Each of the first three paragraphs have the exact same theme and use some of the exact same phrases and words.My guess is that Nicholas read other reviews and was influenced accordingly. Plus, they are reviews of the exact same game.
And your reviewers are influenced not by their own experience of playing the game, but by other reviewers? Might I suggest your French little buddy actually play the game next time so he could let the game be the major influence in his writing?
I have no idea what EIC means. If it means the guy who doesn't have access to the web and can only be contacted by some secret method when one of your writers plagiarizes another site, I guess he is the man. While I understand a giant corporate site like yours has a policy on plagiarism and has rules you must follow when it is brought to your attention, I thought posting here would have been sufficient. Should I email you in triplicate?However, if it seems like too much of his stuff resembles published content, private message me or something and I'll have our full-timer EIC-type look into it.
Chet
This issue is being dealt with accordingly. We do not condone plagiarism at GamersClick. Sorry to Erik for this incident. It will not happen again.
I had a couple of reviews I wrote for Gamepower stolen. The guy didn't even bother to paraphrase. He just cut and pasted them and his put his name on them.
That's brutal. I mean, how hard is it to just play the damn game and write your own thoughts down? Somebody needs to write an application that scans various sites' reviews and ensures that it isn't plagiarized... dunno how it'd work, but it would be nice to have.
By the way, the review has been pulled, but the way our programming currently works, it actually just pulls the links off of our site, but the review stays up. We're re-writing that code to make sure the link can no longer be reached at all.
Chet, sorry if I wasn't surly enough for your tastes. My problem is that I'm way too forgiving. Fine, I don't like conflict. Call it a personality flaw if you like. Probably something I should work on. In any case, none of your damn business. :D
Maybe I wasn't clear. I was referring to the ability to check for a pattern of plagarism moving forward. Plagarism is extremely serious accusation, so it's important to be certain before you start levelling it at people. Witness the whole playola debate and the trouble that's caused. Granted, the example you provided is certainly damning. Even so, I'm not the right person to deal with it. Tom is, and he has.It is not in the pay section and I quoted the paragraphs in question, but way to start right in with the flimsy excuses.
Oh, and EIC stands for Editor-In-Chief, not that he's actually EIC, but only that he has way more free time to follow up on this sort of stuff. I'm also passing the buck because I'm not getting paid, nor do I have permission to pull other people's articles. Yeah yeah, I know, excuses, but not like I can do anything about it anyway. I should probably just shut up now...
- Alan
MY EYES!
In the name of Kibo, WTF is that font on your website? I went into the NWN review and I thought Mozilla had broken on me. Check it in ie6...nope, still there. What is that monospaced font crap? Are you in the Army or something?
Wait, found it: font style="letter-spacing : 1px"
You picked a decent font with decent built-in spacing, then mutated it into something wrong. Printing old Wordperfect files through a postscript driver generates more readable text than that.
Hey Murph: The article itself isn't terrible, in fact, I cut/pasted it to my own website and put Chet's name on it. One question: how much time did you actually spend with the NWN toolkit?
Of course it's serious, it's not like he bought the article and was making his 'one legal backup.'
Is the guy fired? More importantly: would you say replacing stolen text with a stolen trademark more ironic, more edgy, or neither?
/jeep/
The font spacing is weird. But I gotta say, I was impressed with the GamersClick site design (graphics, layout, and so forth). Which is very rare for me. Most sites look totally generic techo (lame) or forgo any pretensios to design altogether.
"a stolen trademark more ironic, more edgy, or neither?"
You mean "Jeep?"
Reference to AMC-Jeep or Popeye's animal sidekick?
So the original article is now replaced with a different review of the same game by another author? In other words, two people from this website were actually playing this "game" at the same time, or the person who did the second review played the game in its entirety and wrote up a new review in a matter of hours? Well, I hear the game is short, so I guess that's possible, but it's all very... odd.
This thread makes my case for no editing of forums. Think about what you are going to say, say what you mean. Live with it. (nothing personal to you Alan, I just hate forums that allow edits)
I think this new review is my second favorite review of a game where the reviewer avoids actually talking about playing the game. I am always suspect of any site that doesn't post screenshots.
I have always wanted to write a parsing engine that just takes 3 reviews of any game and mixes them into an original review. I think what got me over the original review is not that it was lifted, but it was lifted so poorly. Mix it up.
One last thing about gamersclick - what is with the sexism and Murph's wife getting stuck reviewing girl games? Mall Tycoon? Well girls looooovvvvvee shopping...
Chet
Dude, if you could write some sort of AI that could just look at three screenshots and write a review based on that... well, you'd save 90% of all game website owners a lot of time. :-)
There's a market for it.
What is with having a contest to win a game that's not due out for 4 or so months?
Christ, that's almost what a fansite would do.
Most games reviewed by women are puzzle games, games with animals in them, or the $19.99 Franklin-Mint-Collectors-Plate-Tycoon crap that none of the guys wanted to review. Sad but true.
And the reason for this is...gaming's a male-dominated hobby. Yes, many women like computer games, but they represent a tiny minority as far as I can tell.Most games reviewed by women are puzzle games, games with animals in them, or the $19.99 Franklin-Mint-Collectors-Plate-Tycoon crap that none of the guys wanted to review. Sad but true.
Men and women do seem to have some innate differences, and one of them is testosterone levels, and computer games seem to appeal to higher testosterone-leveled people.
I'm kind of suspcious of the OFP Resistance Review on that site...
from Gamespot
"Requiring the original Operation Flashpoint to play, Resistance incorporates all the patches so far released for the original game and also includes a number of other significant upgrades. "
from Gamersclick
"Gameplay wise, Resistance requires the original CD to be playable and incorporates all of the currently available Flashpoint patches into one huge file."
from GS
"While Resistance deserves credit for taking such a cinematic approach and often succeeding, some problems mar the storytelling. Sometimes the cutscene direction can look pretty clumsy or resort to hoary clichés like focusing on a sped-up clock to indicate the passage of time. The cutscenes also suffer from long load times, and the scenes themselves can be overly lengthy to the point of tedium. "
from Gamersclick
"While Bohemia did a great job at dramatizing the storyline and putting it all together the whole ordeal becomes quite tedious after being forced to wait for what seems like an eternity (for all of you who care this was on a 2.5GHz machine) for the cinematic scenes to load. The scenes themselves are way too long and most of them could have been shortened substantially without any drastic effect on the quality of the storyline itself."
from Gamespot
"On the other hand, you'll sometimes spend time filling crates or trucks with all the guns and ammo you can scavenge, only to find to your dismay that none of them are accessible in the next mission, after all."
from Gamersclick
"It means you must scavenge for your weapons and load up trucks, crates, whatever you can find with that. Supposedly the weapons carry over from mission to mission but often I found myself frustrated at the fact I couldn’t access the weapon cache I had worked so hard to gain in the previous mission. "
I dont know, it sounds like a copy cat review (which I never knew existed in game reviews til this thread!!!!) without any original comments ... and the funny thing is I think the Gamespot review gets it wrong with OFP Resistance anyway.
etc
She thought it looked like a game she'd enjoy. She was horribly wrong, but we had no way of knowing...One last thing about gamersclick - what is with the sexism and Murph's wife getting stuck reviewing girl games? Mall Tycoon? Well girls looooovvvvvee shopping...
But she did that one because she wanted it, not because nobody else would take it. Just FYI.
Glad you hate the site, Chet. And equally glad that you've visited it so much. We appreciate it. :)
In response to Jeep's question, I will openly admit that I didn't get to spend as much time with the toolkit as I would have liked. I'll sit here and make up excuses about deadlines and yadda yadda if you'd like, but it wouldn't do any good. I'd spent a decent amount of time with it, and made some little mini-modules and stuff, but I probably wouldn't call it comprehensive. Am I proud of that? No. Would I have preferred to wait to post the review until I'd had more time? Yes. It just didn't work out that way.
I just wanted to say that I don't think you copied reviews Murph or that anybody else on Gamersclick did! Its that guy who did OFP Resistance and that Tsunami review... though I read his reviews for Dungeon Siege and Freedom Force and they seem to be like he played the games. I liked Au's review of AoW2 and yours for NWN. Bah, I have way too much time on my hands......
etc
Thanks. I never felt the finger pointed at me this time. Wumpus must have been busy today. But thanks just the same.
And Turner must have more time on his hands than anyone else alive. Yes, he actually plays those games, and he cranks out more reviews than anyone else around there has time for.
But, he's also getting paid to do it, so...there ya have it.
Maybe he's using Gamespot reviews as guidelines. If he did, I suggest he use Computer Games reviews instead! Though then he'd be late i guess.
etc
Like they used to say in the 80's: "no duh". Also like they used to say in the 80's: "cool beans", "grody to the max", "where's the beef?" and "ohmigodilovesimonlebon!".
Rad post.Like they used to say in the 80's: "no duh". Also like they used to say in the 80's: "cool beans", "grody to the max", "where's the beef?" and "ohmigodilovesimonlebon!".
Here's an even bigger scandal:
According to this review on plastered-with-Tsunami-banner-ads Gamezone, Tsunami 2265 is
8/10!an enjoyable treat that shouldn't be missed
I think this is one robot that's going to turn into... Oscar!
Posting Permissions