Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Games Entertainment

Gamecenter Gets Fragged 57

Posted by michael from the it-was-lag! dept.
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.
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Gamecenter Gets Fragged More

Gamecenter Gets Fragged

Comments Filter:

  • best for gaming (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    the best gaming site is here [slackersguild.com]
  • slashdot [w3.org] 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 [gamecenter.com] 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.
  • 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
  • Admit it. Deep down inside, we all like to see a bad title get ripped to shreds at the hand of a reviewer with a sarcastic bent.

    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.

  • pot kettle black (Score:4)

    by glen ( 19095 ) on Friday February 09, 2001 @10:53PM (#442316)
    I would say that slashdot is pretty much a nested table monstrosity

  • More of the same... (Score:4)

    by zdryer ( 22042 ) on Friday February 09, 2001 @10:35PM (#442317) Homepage
    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 [fuckedcompany.com] 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.
  • 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
  • Banks in Australia are under fire for a similar thing. Over here if you use a competing bank's ATM to take money out of your account you are charged a free ($1-$2) for the 'cross-bank' transfer. Apparently the banks made $650 million on this last year!

    Meanwhile they're closing down physical branches as fast as they can. The one's that are open have 1-2 tellers no matter how many thousand people are queued up. Banks really suck.
  • Well, I've got one even fscking better...I went to a gas station, and decided to use the ATM there. Same state, same bank. But the damn thing charged Me, a customer of that bank to get money out using that ATM. Bank One sucks badly.
  • 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..

  • On Fucked Company... (Score:5)

    by shadrax ( 50923 ) on Friday February 09, 2001 @10:45PM (#442324) Homepage
    Fucked Company has the letter [fuckedcompany.com] 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 [microsoft.com]'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 [jerrypournelle.com] (of Byte [byte.com] 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. ;^)
  • "We feel that by focusing on our core strengths, we can actually make SmartPlanet even more successful than we have to date."

    Unfortunately they don't mention what their core strengths are in the letter. They essentially tell us it's not creating content or dealing with customers, which seems quite insightful, but what is it they're good at? Corporate acquisitions and downsizing?
  • On the topic of reviews...

    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 :-) and the reader reviews can be helpful as well. www.dailyradar.com, www.gamespot.com, www.pcgr.com... that about covers my gaming needs.
  • Not that I am making any predictions on what will happen, I think there is some hope. I hafta think that with the merger they will take the best from both groups and put it together. We can all hope that the good design and content of the site that dies will be grafted on to the site that lives and we will end up with something even better than either was on its own.

    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.

  • 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.
  • "Doesn't it always seem as if mergers end up hurting consumers rather than helping them?"

    Mergers are to help make more money, not help customers.

    "But I have yet to see the truly positive aspects of mass corporate mergers"

    You dont own shares in the companies concerned, therefore there are no positive aspects (for you)
  • 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?

  • "Useful, fast-loading website replaced with nested-tables monstrosity, story at 11."

    You're just upset because Konqueror /Mozilla can't render it correctly? ;))))

  • 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!

  • you know (Score:3)

    by nomadic ( 141991 ) <`nomadicworld' `at' `gmail.com'> on Friday February 09, 2001 @10:31PM (#442335) Homepage
    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.

  • Meh. (Score:5)

    by strAtEdgE ( 151030 ) on Friday February 09, 2001 @10:43PM (#442338)
    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.

  • 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...


    ---
  • 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.

  • ugh (Score:1)

    by yem ( 170316 )
    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.
  • Are you suggesting this was the original blue screen of ecch?
  • Now I can say I"ve been screwed over by /.!

    From the I-submitted-that-first! dept.

    The problem with capped Karma is it only goes down...

  • Gamecenter said, emphasis added:

    (I'll bet you didn't know, for example, that 90 percent of Gamecenter was still produced as flat HTML--using tools and techniques that have been around since the Web was born.)

    Well, in my view, that's reason to keep it and trash the other one!

  • Another one down, and another one down, another one bites the dust!

    --
  • 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
  • This is actually a much better approach to layoffs than what many dot-coms have been doing. Check out this article from Salon [salon.com] for some stories on how not to do layoffs. I'm sad to see GameCenter go, and I hope that GameSpot changes a little to compensate, but I'm glad that they're at least making their job cuts in a responsible way and helping people find new jobs.
  • 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. :)
  • Yeah, I don't know any site like that. =)
    *cough, cough*
  • provided that the management isn't incompetent, of course Well that's the real rub isn't it? Most companies, once they reach a certain size, start carrying around management deadweight, and can't ever seem to get rid of it.
    -
    The IHA Forums [ihateapple.com]
  • Amen.

    And I would have stopped coming here -- after all, I was trying to read slashdot on things like a Performa 6116 using Netscape 3.0, and a Powerbook 230 running Nestcape 2.0, and even Lynx.... it was awful. There was no way I could read comments if they got over 100.

    Then I discoverd "light mode" in the preferences [slashdot.org]. I've never gone back. And I don't have to put up with the so-called color schemes!

    --

  • Gamecenter Gets Fragged?? (Score:3)

    by James Foster ( 226728 ) on Saturday February 10, 2001 @03:27AM (#442352)
    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.
  • Consider GOD for a moment. No no no, this is not one of those "who would Jesus hostilly take over" posts. I'm talking about the Gathering of Developers.

    GOD is, after a fashion, a merger. It's a merger of a component of the development houses (the publisher portion, often publisher-negotiator) into one large group to provide funding and such, blah blah blah.

    After playing their games for a while now, how does the /. community rate GOD? I'd say they've done a very good job so far. They've definitely altered the way a few things work in the game publishing biz.

    I'm not going to lapse into giving a huge list of examples, but instead say that mergers don't always hurt. They tend to with large companies, mostly because those companies get so wrapped up in their internal affairs that they forget that part of their business is, well, business. But that's not always true. Any time that a merger takes place between two companies with similar needs but different resources, things tend to improve (provided that the management isn't incompetent, of course).

  • The killing off of the editors (Score:3)

    by mourningb ( 247245 ) on Friday February 09, 2001 @10:43PM (#442356)
    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?
  • ...makes gamespot a monstrosity.

    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 /., 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!!!

    So in the words of Red, SHUT UPDUMBASS!!
  • Yeah Gamespot's layout is a bit on the heavy side, but given the redundant nature of these two sites, I'd much rather see Gamecenter go than Gamespot -- GameSpot just plain has better content.

    GameSpot's longer features (I especially liked their story on the rise and fall of Trilobyte. See here [zdnet.com]) 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.

  • Re:More of the same... (Score:4)

    by chuqui ( 264912 ) <slash@@@chuqui...com> on Friday February 09, 2001 @11:28PM (#442360) Homepage
    > Doesn't it always seem as if mergers end up hurting consumers rather than helping them?

    Not always, but one thing I've noticed is that once a company gets too big, it stops wanting your business, and only wants your money.

    I'm planning on swapping banks for just that reason. The reason they are going to lose me after 15+ years is simple: when I was out of state on a trip, I went to an ATM to get monoey -- an ATM run by the same bank I bank with. And because it was out of state, they charged me a fee to take money out of my account -- using own bank's ATM, just not in my home state.

    That's being interested in my money, not my business. it's not the only way they've proven it, ti's simply the last straw. So I'm going to move to a smaller bank that deals with customers, not spreadsheets.

  • 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
  • There are better gaming sites. For Playstation, you'd be hard pressed to beat IGN's PSX site [ign.com]. On the left hand column are links to all their other sites.

    If you want tips, cheats or reviews, then head to GameFAQ's [gamefaqs.com]. 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.

  • 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... ;)
  • I believe GOD is now shackin up with Microsoft to produce an anti-christ.

    Don't believe me? Take a Look [xbox.com] for yourself!

    I traded my ambition for a warmer place to sleep.
  • ...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).

Slashdot Top Deals

It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.

Close