Hello aspiring gangsters of ROBLOX, WoodReviewer here. Normally on ROBLOX, games fall into one of two categories: actual games and showcases. Actual games are, well, games, and showcases are just neat places where you can look around. While games tend to have simpler maps to allow players with weaker PCs, and now tablets and XBones, to play without much lag, showcases tend to go all-in on detail to the point where even players with the most powerful PCs will see their GPU usage spike as they observe chairs made out of 200 bricks littering the place.

This is not to bash either type of place; showcases are useful for showing off how bad the creator is with wood grain in as many bricks as possible, while places have the player enjoy the experience while  the bad wood grain is lurking in the background. My point is, there is usually a fairly large gap on ROBLOX between very well built showcases on ROBLOX and games that are interactive for players. Today I am looking at The Streets by SharkWorl. It is a game that takes the detail of most showcases, and incorporates gameplay mechanics to create a hybrid of the two place types. Normally this is when most ROBLOX game reviewer would praise the game for what it does. And so would I, if it had proper wood grain.

ROBLOX is still a strange place to me. People can make first person shooters with destructible glass physics, pirate games where the boats can be blown to bits, and large scale zombie survival games,  yet devs still are unable to create proper table legs that have the proper vertical wood grain. Same for chairs; the easiest way to check to see if a game creator cares about wood grain is to run to the first chair you see and check if the chair legs are correct and incorrect.

Moving on from furniture legs, lets look at some other examples of improper wood grain. One of which is this shed, which has a bunch of boards on it. This shed in particular was featured in my blog post on endorsed models, but instead of the outside being made of wooden planks it was regular wood. The game creator simply changed the wood to wooden planks, but kept the bad horizontal wood grain, which is still improper with the material as wooden planks.

Continuing outside of buildings, another issue are the electric polls, all of which have improper horizontal wood grain instead of the correct vertical wood grain.

And the wooden fencing scattered around the map. Despite the boards being vertical, the wood grain on them is horizontal.

But not all the issues here were just outside. Or inside, like this door, which separates the inside from the outside. Doors should have vertical wood grain for most of the front face, but this door is made entirely of horizontal wood grain. This causes the door to become likely to snap when slammed shut.

Want another example of something that is neither inside or outside? How about this window. The horizontal pieces on the top, mid, and bottom are correct, but the vertical pieces are incorrect, with horizontal rather than vertical wood grain.

And, in one last example,  this boarded up house has improper wood grain on all of the boards the cover the windows. This won’t do much to keep people out as a simple push could caused the wood to collapse.

But enough with that, onto the inside. I already showed the chairs, tables, and crates inside that have improper wood grain, how about some structural support beams that have horizontal instead of vertical wood grain?

Or some no-so-safe safety railing supports with improper wood grain?

Or some larger, even more important, structural support inside of the hair salon?

Want more examples? I have some, but they are mostly repeats of previous ones. This includes slight variations of chairs have improper wood grain, some different tables, different doors, and some other wooden supports. Of course if I include those these blog post would get too long and I would ramble on pointlessly even more than I do normally. In truth, besides for the wood grain, I do like where The Streets is going. I wish more non-showcase places would start to push the boundaries a bit more on how places look, or that more showcases would push interactivity in games more so there is more to do than just walk around for 5-10 minutes and find one or two secrets.

But, more than anything, I hope that one day both games and showcases will start using proper wood grain.