Friday, August 28, 2009

Videogame Websites: Performance Review

Gamespy:

Oh Gamespy, you used to be my source for gaming news and reviews. The fall from grace has been quite sad actually. You're now like the once well respected friend who shows up to a party, dressed shabbily and already absolutely wasted. Nobody can understand you and everyone just wants to get away. Oh, for what exactly is wrong, one might just take a gander at the main page. With the little "news" bar which contains about...3% news and 98% stupid articles. Notice the math doesn't even work out. It's that bad. Now it's just all joke articles and opinions about this that and other. Honeslty, I don't care what an editor's Top Ten Atari 2600 games are. It doesn't matter.

The joke articles aren't even that funny. Case in point the game design process or the fake CoD:MW2 special edition. Both of which got blank looks, then small shakes of the head from me before I navigated away from the page, lest someone think I was willingly there to be entertained.

Gamespot:

Gamespot, you honestly only have to check once a month. That's close to about how often it is updated with actual information. And with every gaming convention, the news bar should not be filled with stories from just that con. There are other things going on in the world of gaming, I assure you. I've found them. I'm not even getting paid to do this sort of work and I'm better at it. Hell, my blog updates more often that Gamespot. That's saying something considering I haven't updated since the end of the Stanley Cup Finals.

I could go into the whole Kane and Lynch fiasco, but I shant. Since every gaming website partakes in those shenanigans of giving games reviews based on ad revenue. This is nothing new, and to those who were shocked by it I say this, "Really? Are you serious?" They probably are not serious. That being said, Gamespot is actually the most reliable of the three that are being discussed today.

Also they own gamefaqs, and that place is pretty useful for the most part.

IGN:

The huge conglomerate. They even own Gamespy. They also never learned the lesson of less is more. The main page is harder to navigate than...a city with really hard to navigate roads. We'll say it's like a peasant from medieval times trying to navigate modern day New York City. It just won't happen. Sure it's fantastic they do a lot more than games, but it gets tiresome trying to find something. Anything.

Also, the damn page takes over an hour to fully load I'm pretty sure, don't quote me on that though, I've never waited for it to be fully loaded. It is absolutely covered with links, pictures and all manner of tomfoolery that make it look more like the aftermath of a clown car explosion and less like what might have once upon a time been a gaming website.

Oh, and all those afformentioned links, over half of them refused to load most of the time. In fact I've never gotten a link from outside the side, linking directly to a review or some such, to work on the first try. That's sad.


So basically it seems like as the popularity of gaming goes up, the quality of it's websites goes down. What the hell is with that? Thanks society for ruining things. Again.

1 comment:

kls said...

sad story - fix it, sam!