Review Source addition possible?

Hi I am new to the UVL and was just wondering if Atari ST Review magazine could be added as a source? It was a UK based magazine active for 35 issues from May 1992 until January 1995. Am looking forward to being able to share some of my information with the community.

Just found my answer on the forums and have added it as a source myself. Sorry should have read the forums before posting.

Hi and welcome. There are still many magazines to add thats for sure. If you want to add the reviews themselves and connect them to the games, thats be done by going into a game page and click on the three little dots in the up right corner and click on "new review".

Thanks for the welcome. I wonder if you could tell me how the Image links for the reviews are done I can see that they are stored on cloud links but not 100% clear on the right way of doing that on here.

If you mean the links to "nx...", well this is my personal cloud share (which I mainly use for the whole purpose of putting up review extracts for UVL).

The common method used by other editors is to link to an archive.org link, which supports linking to a specific page of a magazine. E.g. archive.org/details/atari-st-review-001/page/68/mode/2up

So everything is external, which is a bit of a problem because you never know when it might no longer be available. For example Archive.org was hacked a couple months ago and offline for some time. And I don't dare to think what happens if my cloud hoster changes something so that I need to re-link everything.

In the end its just fine to add reviews without a link to an external source.

I have loads of magazine snippets in my gamebase which I have offline which I could upload to cloud storage like you I notice that your provider offers 1Tb for 4.3 Euros per month which is very reasonable but for the time being I will try and find Archive.org links and use them. I might go down the cloud road in the future though. Thanks for your help.

Btw where did you find the Silkworm review from issue 30 of "The One for 16-Bit Games" magazine? Its one of the magazines I already went through and when something gets added to such magazines I always wondere if I missed something and re-check. But I still can't find it.
archive.org/details/theone-magazine-30/page/n49/mode/2up

I couldn't find an archive.org link to that magazine at the time but have added it now from your link. It is on the Price is right budget section on page 84 and easy to miss.

Oh, the budget section with a different scoring system. Maybe I had seen that back then and decided against because of the combination of re-release and other scoring system. At least the 1-5 stars can be translated into 100% system. If they get added I might do all of them. I will check other issues as well and add them. Either all such reviews are added or none. What I don't like about it most is the fact that these 5-star = 100% games come up on top of the top rated games of the magazine, because in 1-100 the 100 score is very rare if given at all. And a budget re-release of a good game might get 5 stars but the game would not be 100% in a 1-100 rating (it was rated 86% before in the magazine as full price title).

I checked The One a bit further. With issue 30 they introduced a small section with 1-5 star rating budget re-release titles. This continued also into the "The One for ST Games" and "The One for Amiga Games" magazines which started shortly after that (issue 32). Around 5 budget titles per magazine. Someone else added reviews for the ST and Amiga editions of The One (Ritchardo). He also entered the budget games and converted them to 1-100 rating. So to keep in line with that tradition I will add the missing budget releases of The One issues 30 and 31.

Yes I can understand that and I was unsure whether to add it due to the different review system but decided just to translate the star system to percent but it is far from perfect as reviewers very rarely gave a game 100% and especially for a budget re-release it seems daft but also seems a shame to skip lots of reviews just because they have a different scoring system to the rest of the magazine.

Hello Neepie Lantern, welcome.
I noticed you added a review to Little Computer People www.uvlist.net/game-39718 with a vote of "Unscored"
We did not foresee this possibility, and it counts as a "zero" score that messes the overall score of the game.

I'm open to discuss about how to handle these cases, but for now please don't non use that kind of score.

This was another one I was unsure about and I think maybe there should be a way to add unscored reviews perhaps but I understand your feelings and I will remove it as per your wishes.

Thank you.
We handle magazines without scores, but I've never seen a score-less review in magazines with score.

Score systems are strictly tied to a magazine id. Thats why you see some magazines split into "Great Magazine (001-020)", Great Magazine (021-035) when the magazine switched their scoring system we had to make new magazine ids. If they use several different scoring systems inside one magazine the main scoring system is used. If the non-main scoring system can be re-calculated to fit into the main scoring system (as in The One), then its possible to include them. Not long ago there was an update that finally allowed for magazines without scoring system to be added. But in the few cases when a magazine mixed a few unscored reviews in its bad luck. I experienced this a lot with educational games. Magazines sometimes have a review section with score system for normal games but non-scored reviews in an edutainment section. Those edutainment games are in UVL, but its not possible to add the reviews in these cases.

Ok thanks for the information and please let me know if there are any issues with any of my submissions as I want them to be as accurate as possible and I will just ignore unscored reviews in magazines with a scoring system from now on. Am still learning what is and isn't correct so please forgive my errors

Sadly there is. One very bad example is the French magazine Micro News
www.abandonware-magazines.org/affiche_mag.php?mag=8&page=1

No reviews till issue 6. No scores until issue 13. So the first are non-scored magazines. With issue 13 the problem begins. I don't speak French but as I understand it they put the "top reviews" in an extra section. A few big reviews of the best releaes of the month. But... non-scored. And a following section reviews the rest of the games with a review system.

Also I think that French magazine Tilt had an adventure game review section that had nice big reviews, but non-scored in contrast to the rest of the magazine.
An example here:
www.abandonware-magazines.org/affiche_mag.php?mag=28&num=349&album=oui
At page 122 starts the SOS Adventure section. And I think we see big reviews of some adventure games first. Without score. And then not all adventures. The short adventure reviews on page 128 had the score system again. Strange and sad in our case but it is what it is.

How about reviews from buyers guides which are quite often contained in magazines and are usually just a few words and a score? My guess would be not to add these as that would just add clutter and they aren't really full reviews as such. Just found an example in ST Action for the Ninja Warriors March 1993 and contains a score of 85% and 4 lines of text. Should I just ignore these or add them? Also should I add reviews from Multiformat magazines such as The One where the main review is for the Amiga but it also contains Atari ST and PC as sub sections? Is it just the Amiga one you want to have? Sorry for all the questions just wanting to do things properly

I would not add them. These are not real reviews. It feels like a summary/abstract of the games reviewed before with the same score from the magazine. I don't think it adds something useful. Its like a reminder "look here back then we reviewed the game with score x and we still recommend to buy". And in issue 60 they are repeating the very same mini-reviews collection again.

Edit:
Sometimes a magazine starts its first issue with many small reviews of the games from the last few months. These can be added, because that does not feel like "duplicates".

Reviews I also don't add:

When a publisher uses the same review twice. For example there was a monthly German magazine called "Amiga Magazin" and they had a small games review section. They also released a (yearly?) publication "Amiga Play". That basically contained all the reviews from monthly Amiga Magazin. I checked it and found nothing original. So I did not add the Amiga Play magazine at all.

Review scores as part of compilations. I normally do not add them as well. Magazines sometimes review compilations. The final score of a compilation never gets into UVL because they cannot be broken down to single games. However sometimes magazines also give the single games inside the compilations its own review score. So far I ignore these and don't add them.

Ok thanks for the help will take on board what you have said. I am finding very few omissions or opportunities to add anything as you have been very thorough and have done a great job with the Atari ST stuff. Not looked beyond there yet but I am impressed and must have been a lot of work.

I removed the Hammerfist Atari ST review in Zero issue 8
archive.org/details/ZeroIssue08Jun90/page/n48/mode/1up

because its an Amiga only review. Zero is a bit tricky. It lists Amiga and Atari ST as format, but the blue "A" is for Amiga review. ST reviews are red and MS-DOS is green.

Ok that is fair enough I only want to add Atari ST reviews must have thought that one was Atari ST but I now see it was reviewed as Amiga with ST as a release format also.