Let’s do a bit of deductive reasoning here. The basic gameplay of the Pokemon games hasn’t changed since the first titles in the series were released in the mid ’90s. This reviewer, presumably a Pokemon fan who’s played those older games to form a basis of comparison, claims that the current game sucks. By that reasoning every Pokemon game ever made sucks!
I’ll leave it to all of you to connect the dots that our poor reviewer couldn’t.
Spoiler alert from the comments on this review
Note that he still felt compelled to buy and read the book despite his apparent hatred of the series.
Everybody loves The Far Side, right? The comic was one of the most popular features on the funny pages back when that sort of thing still mattered in the late ’80s and early ’90s. Surely no one would leave a one star review for Gary Larson’s hilarious magnum opus, right?
Recall that Amazon reviews are supposed to cover the product itself, not the travails of some schmuck with an imaginary medical condition. Here’s a choice quotes from Wikipedia regarding Multiple Chemical Sensitivity just to give you an idea of how truly overwhelmingly ridiculous this review is:
Blinded clinical trials have shown MCS patients react as often and as strongly to placebos, including clean air, as they do to the chemicals they say harm them. This has led some to believe MCS symptoms are due to odor hypersensitivity or are mainly psychological.
One of the things that made the Warcraft series so revolutionary in the mid-’90s was that it was one of the first and best modern Real Time Strategy games to hit store shelves. The whole point of the series was that you clicked around the screen and sent your guys to do battle in real time while the computer was doing the same thing on the other side of the map. This was revolutionary in a genre that, because of technical and design constraints, had been dominated for years by turn based strategy games where each side takes turns placing their units on a grid.
Basically what I’m saying is that the whole fighting other players and computers in real time was pretty much Warcraft’s reason for existence up until 2004 when Blizzard switched the series from Real Time Strategy to Soul-Sucking Time Sink with World of Warcraft.
I don’t ask for much from people leaving an Amazon review. If you didn’t like the game then that’s far. But could you at least try reading the damned box to make sure you’re buying the right type of game before you go online screaming to the world about how much it sucks? Is that too much to ask?
Imagine that. Photoshop is one of the most complex pieces of software on the market today. It’s so ridiculously complicated that people go to college for four to five years and study nothing but Photoshop for their degree and they still come out not knowing everything about it. People have devoted their entire careers to learning the intricacies of this program and how to push it to its artistic limits.
But one old dude who totally knows how to use Word couldn’t figure it out in one night so he gives it a one star review and drags down the average. Maybe MS Paint would’ve been more his speed.
This guy could’ve saved himself a lot of trouble if he’d just done a little research first.
Before I show you the screenshot for this post I need to give a little summary about common programming books.
There are Learn To Program books that do exactly that. They cover a language with varying degrees of detail and difficulty.
There are Cookbooks which have code recipes for implementing various programs. They serve as inspiration for some programmers. Others just copy and paste the code and slap it into their program wholesale.
Finally there are Language References. Lots of programmers know and use several different languages in the course of their career. A lot of these languages use similar syntax, but the exact details can change from language to language. Thus there’s a booming market (though not as booming as it once was with the advent of Internet language resources) in reference books that allow people to brush up on the core language syntax.
I’d like to highlight and emphasize that these books usually cover core language stuff before presenting you with the following screenshot:
So the reviewer admits that it’s a good reference for the language itself. That’s what something like the Pocket Reference is supposed to do. No more, no less. If it’s doing that job then it should have a five star review slapped on it and the reviewer should go on their merry little way.
But no. The pocket reference, a book that’s about 1/3 of an inch thick, doesn’t have much information about Python libraries. Keep in mind that adding that information would change the book from the inexpensive Python Pocket Reference to a much heftier and more expensive Dead Tree Encyclopedia of Standard Python Libraries.
Our hapless reviewer is dinging a reference for not being a cookbook. Talk about completely missing the whole reason for the book’s existence.
I’m mixing things up for this entry by bringing you a five star review that was just downright perplexing. Observe.
Is this guy seriously trying to imply that everything Hitler did should be excused because he made the trains run on time? And further implying that history has unfairly judged Hitler because of that whole messy mass murder thing? Really?
This just goes to show that sometimes a five star review can be even more idiotic than a one star review.
Also note that the tags along the bottom indicate the pro-Hitler reviewer is also a fan of Ron Paul and the Tea Party movement. I’ll let you draw the appropriate conclusions.
© 2012 One Star Wonders · Proudly powered by WordPress & Green Park 2 by Cordobo.
Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional | Valid CSS 3
