Slashdot Mirror
Gamecenter Gets Fragged
Banjonardo writes: "Cnet's Gamecenter, for years one of the greatest sources of gaming news and the most reliable source for good ratings, is quitting the business. The story is that since Cnet acquired ZDNET, they're gonna go with Gamespot now. We'll miss them." Useful, fast-loading Web site replaced with nested-tables monstrosity, story at 11.
the best gaming site is here
slashdot just keeps getting blacker and blacker and... ps i promise it isn't goatse.cx or what ever that god awful site is...
this is about how it is in the US, fewer tellers, 1-$2 fee's for withdrawl's from cross-bank ATM's.. I've now noticed that I get double-charged for cross bank stuff.. the bank that is making the transaction hit's me, and now my bank hit's me. I might have to switch to wells fargo. sorry USbank.
the only nice thing to come out of this, is that electronic transactions are much easier.. I had a small local bank, not a regional bank before, and they had no web site, and no ATM network. everywhere I went, I was paying ATM fees, and I had a limit of 12 ATM transactions a month.. before I got charged fees. that was the worst I've ever had.
You obviously didn't read the review for Tresspasser I nearly got kicked out of the lab when I read this one the first time, and I can still remember some of the lines years later.
My problem with Gamecenter was that they seemed to give "famous" games a couple of points automatically. For instance, Mechwarrior III got an 8/10 while Heavy Gear II (a decidedly better game IMHO) got 7/10.
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://validator .w3.org/check?uri=http://validator.w3.org/check?ur i=http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://validat or.w3.org/check?uri=www.slashdot.org
;)
Wow, it works!
--
Computers are useless: they can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Well, I used to work for gamecenter, just preface.
I never really cared much for their content, I mean, I don't much care for articles about games, reviews, etc. I have other sites that I feel are more in tune with my thought process. But the one thing that Gamecenter had was more hardcore articles. I mean, they have articles on how to overclock your computer, how to overclock your video card, etc. When I worked there I did a ton of testing on Voodoo 2 overclocking. How far could I get each card before it started to fuck up.
Well, Gamecenter will certainly be missed. I hope everyone I knew who still worked there has other options and places to go.
-Serfer
Hell, half the reason for reading a review on a game you've pretty much given up for bad (Daikatana) is to see which reviewer will spill the most blood during their piece.
I would say that slashdot is pretty much a nested table monstrosity
Doesn't it always seem as if mergers end up hurting consumers rather than helping them? I'm sure from an economics standpoint there's something to be said for economies of scale, leveraging assests, etc. But I have yet to see the truly positive aspects of mass corporate mergers. c|net acquires ZDNet and we lose a great game site. My cell phone company morphs into Cingular and suddenly has no record of me being a customer. Fleet buys out my bank and suddenly my free student checking account is $10/month and I have to pay $2 to speak with a teller (in person or over the phone). Nynex becomes Bell Atlantic becomes Verizon, and all I notice is that it costs more to use a payphone. And of course in all these cases I'm overlooking the workers whose jobs are "no longer necessary." I realize this whole argument is rather cliché and early-nineties, but I'm honestly wondering--has anyone's life been improved by the last decade of megamergers?
I'm surprised nobody else on here caught this in the letter at F*ckedCompany that somebody else posted here, but SmartPlanet's employees are getting the axe too. But somehow they twist it around to say:
But creating courseware and handling customer maintenance as well as developing courses, is extremely resource intensive, and not a core focus of our business. We feel that by focusing on our core strengths, we can actually make SmartPlanet even more successful than we have to date.
Huh? How do you lay off most of the staff and at the same time make it more successful? Unless most of the staff was involved in sending out the spam I usually got from them, I can't quite understand how that would work.
Part of the original strength of SmartPlanet was knowing that the people behind the tutorials actually knew what they were talking about. SP had guys with doctorates teaching the classes, and when you interacted with them, you walked away with the impression that they weren't just holding paper certificates they got through the mail. These were smart people.
So now they're going to downsize to a few monkeys and make it a better site? Huh? Hope my company doesn't take that same attitude.
What's your damage, Heather?
The only thing Gamecenter had going for it was a pretty good layout. The content was absolutely god-awful bad. I felt the page was a constant embarrassment to CNET and had really been wondering when they were going to pull the plug.
An interesting note, with the merger GameSpot is hiring a total of ZERO of the Gamecenter editorial staff.
GameSpot does have a pretty assy layout but their staff has a clue which I value quite a bit more.
-Steve Gibson
-Steve Gibson
Shacknews.com
heh i hope gamespy is the next to go. they treat their employees like crap, and they have very little respect for anybody else. the guy who runs gamespy, mark surfas, goes by the nick of "Bastard"... so much truth there...
gamecenter wasn't all that. biased opinions, dumb reviews and comparisons (pokemon vs. quake?) and painful loadings. a lot of the game sites are going the way of the dodo, i hope some of the real ones aren't next..
Fucked Company has the letter sent to CNET employees about this. It's always a delight to read of the misery of others.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Interesting point. I'm not sure whether I agree about readability or not, but just wanted to add a bit of trivia: in the empire's premiere Word processor, there's actually an option to get a white-on-blue color scheme. That was put there, way back when, at the request of a certain Jerry Pournelle (of Byte fame, among lots of other things). If I remember correctly, Jerry required this to switch, because that was the color scheme of the word processor he was used to. Can't remember the name of that (probably ancient) program, though... OK, that's all from the meaningless-trivia dept, go back to whatever. ;^)
main(O){10<putchar(4^--O?77-(15&5128 >>4*O):10)&&main(2+O);}
On the topic of reviews...
:-) and the reader reviews can be helpful as well. www.dailyradar.com, www.gamespot.com, www.pcgr.com... that about covers my gaming needs.
I have to agree. I stopped reading Gamecenter a long time ago, mostly because I never seemed to agree with their reviews, so I didn't have much faith in them when they did finally get around to reviewing something. Gamespot is much better (but I still buy my PC Gamer in print
sig fault
As much as I think competing sites makes for better service, I think it may also be good to have one uber site to visit for game info rather than bounce through a few that may or may not have what you are looking for.
I guess that I want to point out that before you start shouting your message of doom you give things a little time to settle in.
I can't help but be on the shouters side just a little though, the small time i-net companies (cnet and zdnet are not small I know) are dying off rapidly.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
It's a loss, no question. The current business model of hiring 50+ employees to work on a content driven, ad-financed web site is over. It doesn't work that way. Ad income is just too flaky, and too little to support even a 30+ employee company unless you're a huge portal, like Y@hoo, and even then, it's a shaky future. Get 4 good techs in a room to create/manage a game related site... rely on user feedback for major content... get inside the industry through experience... that's a profitable game site. Oh, and you need an admin assistant to deal with the real world; 5 people on the payroll. No big deal. The demise of the .com world is overbloating and dreams that blew off reality. Egos clashed with reality. For source, just look at the head count at any major e-tailor who's screwed. Big numbers there.
It will all balance out, like a porcupine shaking off it's quills.
Right. No, your other right. No, the other other right.
I rarely game and rarely shop for games. But the one thing I liked about gamecenter over all the other sites I saw was that you could sort the game reviews by their rating. I don't want to read every review for a given catagory of game. I want to read about the top few. Why can't other sites figure this out?
If Chaos Theory has taught us anything, it's that we must kill all the butterflies.
"Useful, fast-loading website replaced with nested-tables monstrosity, story at 11."
You're just upset because Konqueror /Mozilla can't render it correctly? ;))))
"Mary had a crypto key, she kept it in escrow, and everything that Mary said, the Feds were sure to know."
Why is it that popular web sites consolidate when they're bought out? Two sites may provide similar services, but serve distinctly different types of users, especially in terms of "look and feel." When a site is eaten up by another, the company simply loses audience share and revenue. If the lost site was not profitable, then why did you acquire it? If it was profitable, why did you abandon your established users? Did you really think they would move to your other property simply because pointed the old URL to your preferred URL? Silly Rabbit!
I read both of those sites relatively frequently, but even now I couldn't tell you the difference between the two.
--
you know when I first saw that comment, i thought "everyone uses nested tables (even slashdot), how bad could it be..."
I guess I'll know when it finishes loading...
I don't think anyone here would be bitching about nested tables if Netscape wasn't such a POS. It's a shame that IE is the only browser that can properly load a web page these days.
Doesn't phase me, Gamecenter lacked personality. I never saw a scolding, blatently honest review on there and sites without negative reviews have no credit in my book. Obviously not every game is good. I recommend sites like http://www.shugashack.com and http://www.firingsquad.com.
----- sXe
I hate to be the bearer of unpopular news, but Gamespot has much better content than Gamecenter. A quick search for a hard-to-find game on C|Net rarely finds a hit, ZDNet almost always has info. I agree that it's unfortunate to see a good site disappear, but it was never great. And fast page loading don't mean squat if the content is lacking...
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along with multitudes of slashdot readers, i will be very sorry to see this site go, espically when it had just recently made it into my link bar. i stopped by the other site mentioned in the article, and i noticed that it did have a heavier layout. myself, i prefer the simpler ones, but you never know, with the aol-time warner merger, i have a feeling that pop-ups are going to become the billboards of the information superhighway.
Cogito Eggo Sum, I think therefore I'm a waffle
At least gamecenter.com had a black on white colour scheme. It was a hell of a lot easier to read than gamespot is.
Sorry to see it go.
No, I did not read the f***ing article!
Are you suggesting this was the original blue screen of ecch?
Not A Sig
From the I-submitted-that-first! dept.
The problem with capped Karma is it only goes down...
SIG: HUP
Another one down, and another one down, another one bites the dust!
--
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
anyway, gamespot has and always had better content, plus they allow user reviews, some of which are much more honest than the reviews of the staff members who rarely have time to spend playing a game all the way through. i found Gamecenter game and equipment reviews cursory.
i haven't even bothered looking in Gamecenter since early 98...
p.s. i can't believe people still say things like "this site has too many tables". ummm, upgrade from lynx please this is 2001.
--
j u l e s @ p o p m o n k e y . c o m
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
Banks have lost something like 90% of their business over the last 30 years. :)
See, back in the old days banks held the loans for everything! They had everybody's checking accounts, savings accounts, etc.
Nowadays you go to Merril-Lynch for your Roth-IRA.
You go to Morgan Stanley for your mortgage.
You go somewhere else for that college loan.
And you can go somewhere else for your other investments--CDs, Mutuals, etc.
And you use a credit union for your checking account.
Banks have sucked for years now. Just now that they have lost ALOT of their business they've devised these schemes to suck even more(i.e. ATM charges, high checking account fees, stop payment fees increases, you name it), and try to make a buck.
Banks are merging like crazy because they are dying. I don't know about little credit unions being swallowed by larger banks--my credit union has been serving my state since 1922. And the big banks drove me away from them with their shitty policies! I actually got my CU to *refund* an overdraft fee that I (legitimately) got nailed with when I pointed out that their policy was confusing.
--Chris
Yeah, I don't know any site like that. =)
*cough, cough*
Shouldn't that be a telefrag since Gamespot took their place?
Editorial Staff William "Creamy Smooth" Harms, Executive Editor
[...]
Add to your cart
Cute.
Yeah. It's right. Gamecenter, like all of c|net, has been always a fast load, and I liked very much that fact. Yet, GameSpot had much more content, and has all of it online and always available. For example, GameSpot has the free Game Guides, something that is a sure bet for driving traffic to the site. The bottom line: I hope that GameSpot can add the content of Gamecenter to their own, and (hopefully, but with a grain of salt) take some clues in web design from them.
-- Look to the Rose that blows about us--"Lo, Laughing," she says, "into the World I blow..."
It used to be that Gamecenter had extremely interesting and poigniant editorials. The editors had personality, creating within the mass that was Gamecenter several small subcultures.
A while ago, they squelched the editors (except GamerX, whom they kept on as a much-toned-down reflection of his former self, to provide blurbs and sidebars).
The Top10 lists that Gamecenter does are one of the few vestiges of their former "interesting" status.
What happened? Did people lose interest in the editorial lines? Did Gamecenter Corporate decide that they wanted a homogenous front?
In my opinion, they killed off Gamecenter a long time ago. This is merely making it official.
...overall belt tightening throughout the business that will enable us to prioritize the allocation of our resources.
Wow.. i don't think i've ever seen a sentence that said so little in so many words. I mean, what the hell does that mean?
See Sig append. Append Sig, append. Good Sig.
...makes gamespot a monstrosity.
/., gamecenter, _and_ gamespot for a very long time. The true looser here in terms of technology and site performance is clearly, hands downn and without any doubt, SLASHDOT!!!
OK then, just what the f is this site?
I see nested tables everywhere...
Give my frickin intelligence a break would you and find something real to criticize rather than prove that you are an absolute blithering moron.
BTW, I've been visiting
So in the words of Red, SHUT UPDUMBASS!!
No Comment.
GameSpot's longer features (I especially liked their story on the rise and fall of Trilobyte. See here) elevate the site beyond the normal review crap.
The only thing I ever found interesting about Gamecenter (IMO, of course) is they had some good "top 10 blah of all time" type articles, but so many other sites carry such similar content that I can afford to live without it.
I going to say I'm sorry before I say anything else b/c I already now that I am commenting off-topic... But what the hell is with the first 3-4 posts... Two Charecters? 2!!... What an informative post.. Ahh... Sorry.. This really bugged me and now I have posted off-topic... Ahh... This is confusing me now... I'm going to bed...
--- My Karma is bigger than your...
------ This sentence no verb
If you want tips, cheats or reviews, then head to GameFAQ's. This is by far the BEST games related site on the net for anything other than game news. Hell, very few other sites deal in ALL platforms and even have translations up for Japanese import games.
Always a shame to see a well known site go down, but Gamecenter is no big deal. As for it's replacement... BLEURK! Nested tables are the work of Satan.
Synchronized cocks!
aww.... search engines which index pages now have to remove all references to gamecenter... so i guess the guys who got "phased out" aren't the only ones complaining... ;)
...black-on-white for everything else? I know this is slightly off-topic, but has anyone noticed that this particular text-background color combo (which I greatly prefer, since it's much easier on the eyes) prevails for sites of a certain flavor, i.e. gaming, hacking, etc., but for nearly everything else (Slashdot included) it's black-on-white? I'm guessing there's some sort of atmosphere the web people want to generate--maybe "cool" for the gaming and hacking and whatever, and a professional "pen on paper" look for corporate and news sites? One thing I've noticed, though, is that a lot of personal websites are white-on-black, or some other light-on-dark combo. Is this for coolness, or do they actually realize that it's easier on the eyes? I really think that needs to be more common, even in applications (except maybe in word processors, where you really are simulating a piece of paper).
The coolest voice ever.