Talk:The Sims 2: Bon Voyage/GA1

GA Review
The edit link for this section can be used to add comments to the review.''

Reviewer: Generalissima (talk · contribs) 17:59, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

I intend to review this article. Should be able to get to it within the next week. Thank you for your patience, and great job improving content on the Sims series. --Generalissima (talk) 17:59, 8 November 2023 (UTC)

General Thoughts!
Oh, hey @Vaticidalprophet. A bit overdue, but here I go. It's a pretty good article! I've read through your other Sims articles and they're of a good quality, and this one seems pretty par for the course. Let's get cracking on what needs touching up.

Images
All is good to go here, as there is only one image and it is a Fair Use cover image for the product. Wish it could have a screenshot of gameplay in one of the vacation areas (a la in Pets) but I understand that it might be difficult to find a good image.
 * I was thinking about this, and eventually managed to find one. BV is the one EP I've never really interacted with so I didn't want to load up my whole game and start playing vacations just to grab a screenshot, and a lot of available screenshots weren't particularly distinctive or looked like they were probably promotional rather than in-game, but I eventually managed to find a decent one. Vaticidalprophet 02:28, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Looks good :3 Thank you! Generalissima (talk) 04:26, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

Prose
Let us take this section by section (as I tend to do these things.)

Lede
A little short for an article this size, no? I'd expand it a little bit with information about gameplay features. Does the expression '"mountain" region' fall under WP:SCAREQUOTES? Other that, seems good.
 * I've managed to expand this one a little (still one of the shorter in this series, but it's a trickier one to compress). Vaticidalprophet 02:21, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Good job, looks good-to-go. Generalissima (talk) 04:26, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

Background and development
As always, you're pretty good at cooking up a background section. All is good to go here. You could probally get away with adding a note after the "final expansion released for Mac" clarifying that FreeTime and Apartment Life not being released, cause that'd be a fun tidbit that would save me SECONDS of time looking over on the main Sims 2 page to discover.
 * Mmm, maybe. I think the navbox makes it reasonably clear, though? Vaticidalprophet 02:21, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * OH yeah, navbox would obvs clear that up. Generalissima (talk) 04:26, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

Gameplay
I can only imagine that The Sims 2 Bon Voyage: Prima Official Game Guide is an enthralling read. In all seriousness, this is a pretty well put together section. You did a good job distiling down the (vaguely underwhelming) gameplay features. Really vibing with the blue link on 'woohoo', as well as the clarification that Bigfoot cannot be romanced. All's good.

Soundtrack
They got Damian Marley for this? Dang, that is really interesting. Might be worth putting in the lede!
 * In the new, expanded lead :P Vaticidalprophet 02:21, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Good! Generalissima (talk) 04:26, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

Reception and legacy
Okay, this is a good section but I really don't see what that block quote has to do with the rest of the section. I am not here to read about this woman's boyfriend being stingrayed. I am here to learn about a poorly-recieved Sims 2 expansion. I like block quotes as much as the next editor, but I think it'd be best to use a more focused review for that spot.

Otherwise good distiliation of reviews, good explanation of the SecuROM controversy. Side note though, do you know what the first EA game to use SecuROM was? That might be worth mentioning, because my partner and I were reading through this thing as we were reviewing and neither of us were able to discern if this was the first EA game to use this or not.
 * I'll take a look at that question. And I guess a look at the quotebox (pls allow quotebox). <b style="color:black">Vaticidal</b><b style="color:#66023C">prophet</b> 02:21, 26 November 2023 (UTC)
 * This is a weirdly difficult question for something that should have a simple answer. Attempts to find it are dominated by the Spore controversy, despite that very obviously being the wrong answer (for one, BV came out before Spore). I think BV looks to be one of the earlier major EA releases with it, possibly the earliest, but past "earliest in the Sims series" I can't pin down any sort of timeline here. In all likelihood, the actual-first is something where it wasn't particularly commented on and no one cared yet. <b style="color:black">Vaticidal</b><b style="color:#66023C">prophet</b> 08:17, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

See Also, Notes, etc.
Great use of See Also, for how many times EA does this exact expansion pack concept. Also thank you for including the average hard drive capacity from back in the day, that's actually really good context.
 * I was actually thinking about that one -- I was wondering if someone was going to challenge the note, but I was reading the review and thinking "wow, 20gb is pretty insane for a single game's mods in 2007, isn't it?". This was surprisingly hard information to find -- consumer-focused websites tend to upsell larger storage than the average person has, and it's not been the subject of much focused academic study, so "what was the average person likely using in the mid-late 2000s" took a while. <b style="color:black">Vaticidal</b><b style="color:#66023C">prophet</b> 02:21, 26 November 2023 (UTC)

Closing thoughts
Yeah, that's a good article! Just a couple little things to clean up and then I think we will be good to go. Apologies if there are any parts that are incoherent, I have been up a while. - Generalissima (talk) 06:15, 24 November 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your changes! It looks like all is in working order now.
 * thank you for your work! :3 Generalissima (talk) 17:03, 30 November 2023 (UTC)