Okay I'd like to do something i don't normally do and rant about the fact that the Wikipedia article for Smash Hit is bad. I would like to remind you that this is a featured article so we should expect it to be really good!
For anyone not familiar with the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwPXtgw0MR4
Smash Hit is a 2014 rail shooter video game developed and published by the Swedish indie game studio Mediocre.
So I see we're off to a great start. Calling Smash Hit a "rail shooter" by itself might technically be true, but it's also an endless runner and that feels pretty important to mention, doesn't it? Oh yeah, and there's the fact that your projectiles are metal balls and you're hitting abstract glass targets. That's a lot of nuance that's just lost right off the bat.
I understand that the "policy" is that there should be only one genre in the lead, but sometimes rules should be broken and I think this is one of those cases where at least adding that it's an endless runner would be super helpful.
Through the game's 11 levels, the player takes a first-person perspective, shooting metal balls to destroy glass obstacles.
Okay, firstly, the game does not have 11 levels according to anyone with a brain. There are 11 main checkpoints, but there's also an Endless mode (which is its own level) as well as the starting checkpoint (which is generally not counted as a checkpoint, but is a level) making 13 main levels in total.
This is pretty basic information that is verifiable by just looking at the game with your eyes. While the "Reliable Sources" do state the game has 11 levels they are either just plain wrong or really outdated (the game has had 13 levels since the 1.2 update which came out shortly after release).
Additionally, the player can shoot up to five balls at once by smashing a consecutive sequence of crystals and gather power-ups that are activated for a limited amount of time.
Okay, I feel like talking about power-ups which are a pretty generic video game thing probably doesn't need to be the third sentence in the lead and could probably go under something like "Gameplay", but whatever. This is the first sentence that doesn't contain anything very objectionable to me.
I'm going to skip a bit because it's alright until we get to this:
A virtual reality adaptation of the game was released for platforms in 2015 and 2018.
What fucking platforms!? And why are there two years? And fucking of course the game was released for platforms, most video games are!
Okay, now going down to the gameplay section.
As the player advances, dynamic music plays in the background.
The page for dynamic music defines it as:
Adaptive music is music which changes in response to real-time events or user interactions, found most commonly in video games. It may change in volume, arrangement, tempo, and more.
This is not true. The music is static, although the levels are made of small pieces called "segments" which are randomized which might give the illusion that it is. Then again, it's literally not true, and you can hear this by just playing the game. I also checked the sources and none of them say this so I'm not even sure who thought this made sense.
I'm going to skip the next paragraph because I literally do not care and also it elicits an "okay, I guess" reaction from me. It's also because we start off the next one with an absolute banger:
Smash Hit has 11 levels, each with a different appearance.
Wow, not only have we repeated a factual inaccuracy from the lead, but we've also added the most useless appendage to a sentence that I think I've ever read! Of fucking course the levels have different appearances, they're fucking levels and I think it would be obvious since quite a few games change the appearance of levels between them! Seriously, you don't need to state that.
But if you think that wasn't enough:
As the game progresses, the levels become more difficult.
Holy. Shit. What the fuck!? I can't believe this! The LEVELS in the VIDEO GAME get MORE DIFFICULT as you PROGRESS THROUGH IT!?!?!?!? WOW THAT'S AMAZING!!! And also something that most video games do normally and probably doesn't need to be mentioned as it's basically an assumption - it would only be notable if that were not the case.
By default, the player starts at the beginning of the first level; however, a one-time in-game purchase allows the player to start from the beginning of any unlocked level and sync progress via a cloud system such as iCloud.
This sentence seems to be allergic to the word "checkpoint"! Like seriously, just say "A one time purchase allows the player to restart from checkpoints and sync progress between devices." Why is this sentence so damn obtuse?
After its release, Smash Hit introduced three different game modes, including a training mode, as well as two multiplayer modes: versus, where two players compete on the same device, and cooperative, where two players complete the game together on the same device.
Okay I don't like the way this sentence is written. Was it really impossible to say that mayhem and zen mode exist? And why is training so notable? Training is like pretty obviously the least loved of all the game modes (it's just removed randomization and some more balls) so why is this one specifically mentioned yet the others aren't? And that's not getting into why the multiplayer modes get their own sentence nor why "on the same device" is said twice, it's so clunky.
Instead of using OpenAL or OpenSL audio application programming interfaces, he opted for creating a custom mixer to fully control the game's surrounding effects and audio processing.
No, it does use OpenSL on Android and OpenAL on iOS, it just avoids using them for mixing. Which is I guess what it's technically saying, but it's not what a casual reader would take away with the way it's written. It's a subtle mistake for someone who isn't familar with technical things to make but it's again a factual inaccuracy at worst.
I'll mostly skip the following sections because they're just more of the same bullshit, but I'd just like to add one more thing:
Computer scientists Margherita Antona and Constantine Stephanidis reported that no differences in difficulty were seen between the mobile and virtual reality versions of Smash Hit
This feels like an excuse to cite some irrelevant study, and that's not mentioning that difficulty is subjective.
And these are just the more egregious examples. Most of the article is just written very poorly and obtusely. I actually did try to improve the article - and I will admit that while I may not have done the best job I don't think the appropriate response to that was to revert the edits then lecturing me on policy and reinstate "some" edits, citing that this article is "featured" as the reason things shouldn't be changed as if it's not flawed as fuck.
Also don't take this as some kind of anti-Wikipedia stance, I love Wikipedia as a concept and I think it's one of the best things humans have ever done, and I think most articles are at least genuinely trying to be good. It's just annoying to have something I love (or well have loved in the past but that's a story for another time) have such a turd article about it, and then for that turd to get considered "featured" and have all of its flaws blatantly ignored.
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