I should start with the disclaimer that I'm not much of a social networking kind of guy. I like Twitter because I don't need to offer up much in the way of personal information, and I can follow the comments of friends and interesting people easily. Facebook doesn't serve much of a purpose for me; in fact, the only reason I have a Facebook account is because I accidentally completed the account creation process while trying to figure out if an automated "check your address book" system was the reason my dad had been getting spammed with Facebook invites. I've since glanced at Facebook occasionally, but I have all of five friends on there. Five. I don't see a reason to network with hundreds of people I don't know or care about, since that seems a tad insincere.
That said, I like the new social networking additions to Xbox Live, but I really wish more effort was put into better integrating Facebook, Twitter, and last.fm into the service as a whole. Simply having them as stand-alone applications smattered across the NXE interface cheapens their existence somewhat, and really makes me think Microsoft rushed these ideas out, or wasn't all that interested in them to begin with.
Let's start with Twitter. The interface you launch into is fine for an external interface, but how about giving the option to tweet in the middle of a game by opening up the guide? I'd even be interested in the option of having a Twitter-colored notification pop up, much like for achievements or friends signing on, any time I receive an @ reply through Twitter (though that would be an incredible nuisance for anyone with a mass following).
I understand there are future plans for Facebook integration with Facebook connect, but I'd like to see a lot more integration for Facebook than Twitter. Wouldn't those notorious Uncharted 2-style Twitter updates work better posted as automatic summaries on Facebook? I'd be all right with my Xbox reporting to Facebook that I broke a certain gamerscore barrier or beat a game, along with other significant accomplishments. Furthermore, with the emphasis on Facebook's photo albums, I'd love to have the option to post any pictures I took in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, Forza 3, or any other game directly to albums on my account.
As for last.fm, I think everyone wants to be able to use that feature outside of the application. Plain and simple.
Certainly a lot of these ideas would require game developers to jump on board and force Microsoft to retool the NXE interface. I think the lack of any of that shows just how poorly Microsoft planned out these features. Is that a shame? Absolutely. I still think there's a lot of potential in proper integration on consoles that would increase the value of both these internet social networks and Xbox Live at the same time.
(I have no comments on the Zune marketplace. I still avoid watching movies ever since my eyes gazed upon the Rollerball remake.)
Week 1 surprised me in that I'm actually making progress on my summer list, and not letting the Internet distract me from my Xbox 360. I'm satisfied so far! My completionist fury picks up where it left off, with...
Project Gotham Racing 4
or
The Boosting Session From Hell
Last week I discussed my ability to use two controllers at once to nab an achievement while hurting the hell out of my hands. I think this week rivals that pain.
I was hoping for a lot of this...I had a "boosting" session scheduled for July 4th with seven other players. Typically, these groups are really handy for achievements that require playing modes no one would normally even touch. In our case, the main goal was the Team Domination achievement, awarded for a whole four-person team finishing ahead of all the other team's players in a ranked team championship. Considering how difficult it is to find four people (or even one person) on the ranked playlists at any given time, gathering a group for the explicit purposes of this achievement was a must. It's not exactly how I'd like to earn these achievements, but once a game's multiplayer has been practically abandoned, what choice do you have?
Well, you could play normally and leave the achievement unearned, but that's no fun. As someone who's pretty used to badgehunting in certain MMOs, I have learned to enjoy torturous levels of tedium!
Anyways, our time for the meeting was 4 p.m., so I fired up PGR4 at 2 p.m. to try for a few unrelated achievements. Right as I'm about to join a match, the group organizer sends me an invite. OK, this seems fine, maybe he's looking to do a few achievements on the side as well.
Nope!
...and instead, I got a lot of staring at THIS. Grr.The next two hours involve me sitting in a player lobby waiting for everyone else to join. I can barely communicate with the organizer, who appears to be from the Netherlands and speaks broken English, and I don't want to quit out for the fear he might misunderstand that I want to do something more fascinating than stare at a listing of players for two hours, and replace me with another willing participant. What's worse is that he seemed to misunderstand the concept of time zones, as I hear him muttering repeatedly about "fucking retards" not showing up when there's still an hour and a half before the set time.
So almost two hours burnt at a lobby screen waiting for people to join. There wasn't even anything interesting on TV to pass the time, being July 4th and all. Could it get any worse?
Oh yes.
PGR4, and PGR3 for that matter, have one of the absolute worst matchmaking systems I've ever dealt with, especially when very few players are looking for a specific match. In PGR3, it took 15 minutes to match me up with two friends when we were assuredly the only people looking for a specific ranked race. I expected that the system wouldn't be any better this time around, and its ineptness did not disappoint.
Cue a ten-minute waiting session full of complaints and anger, followed by racing. Sure, we got the achievements, but man. The effort it took just to make the whole process come together was a hilarious clusterfuck in itself. There's nothing like staring at a game's matchmaking system in awe when it can't figure out that 4 + 4 = A FULL MATCH.
Sometimes boosting for achievements feels just as satisfying as struggling to earn achievements via normal means. This is one such occasion.
Zombie Wranglers
or
How To Make a Boring Zombie Game
OK, so maybe this wasn't a good week in the fun department. If you're one of the 17 other people on Giant Bomb who's actually played Zombie Wranglers, you can sympathize with the mediocrity I had to struggle through.
Zombie Wrangling: It's adequate at best!I ended up winning Zombie Wranglers over Twitter, through a random guess at a certain Microsoft employee's trivia questions. I wasn't exactly gunning for it, but I was bored, put in an educated guess for the year of one of the shuttle launches, and boom. Free game. I wasn't expecting the greatest game in the world, but I also didn't think someone could screw up a zombie game this much.
Basic concept: zombies run amuck in a city, and you have to shoot them or vacuum them up while collecting items or completing side tasks. Repeat ad nauseum for twenty levels. It might've been more interesting with more fluid controls and more lenient aiming, but as it stands, half the time you're running away from zombies to get a clean shot, and the other half is shooting and hoping you don't miss due to the bad controls.
Heck, I can't even recall the storyline. There were zombies, something wacky and "hilarious" turning people into zombies, then you fight a doctor and some ending song with horrible sound levels plays. It's all rather confusing, but thankfully the single-player achievements were easy enough. After finding someone who had the multiplayer achievements, I finished this game and ran. About the only reason I'll pick it up again is if I feel like adding to its wiki or helping someone out with its achievements.
I didn't mention this game has achievements with scores that don't end in 0 or 5, did I? Yeah. That's certainly encouragement to get 200/200. It's not that I mind having an uneven gamerscore, but I sure as hell don't want to have to explain that I played this game to get all abnormal in the first place.
Scene It? Box Office Smash
or
Scene It? I Haven't!
I finished up last week with a decent trivia game about movies. That's something, I guess.
If it's wrong to love these awesome little buzzer controllers, I don't want to be right.Look, I don't know anything about movies, OK? I haven't been to a movie theater since I went to see the remake of Rollerball. I can't go back. It'd be like walking into a dark alley to be stabbed by the same crazed hobo again. It's scarred me for life. I have nightmares about that horrible 20-minute nightvision scene where LL Cool J dies.
That said, I just had to try these nifty buzzer controllers. I've been playing alone, off and on, making educated guesses about movies I've never seen. Surprisingly, this game's still mildly playable that way!
It'll take a while, but I'll get all 1250 points from Scene It? in due time. I just have to get lucky with certain topics, like knowing which of ten movies [insert actor/actress here] has been in. I'm not even sure I could name five movies any given actor or actress has been in.
Now, if only Scene It? released a game about TV trivia, I might have a chance. Then again, it'd probably be about Seinfeld, Friends, Sopranos, and all those other shows I never cared about...
Week 2 Stats
Starting Score: 16500 End of Week 1 Score: 16820 End of Week 2 Score: 17195 Weekly Gain: 375 points! Total Gain: 695 points!
Starting Completion: 69.25% End of Week 1 Completion: 70.01% End of Week 2 Completion: 70.04% Weekly Gain: 0.03%. :( Total Gain: 0.79%!
Can't say I care at all about cell phone games. While I'll certainly accept that their quality in general is probably getting better, I really don't consider a cell phone a worthwhile gaming platform. If I want to play games on the go, I can always carry a Nintendo DS with me.
I'm currently between cell phones, and can't say I'm suffering at all without one. When I get around to picking up another cell phone, the only functions that currently pique my interest are keylock/keyguard, the ability to text (which I'll never use anyways), and maybe the ability to use a Twitter app (which I'll also probably never use due to cost and unwillingness to stroke my own ego).
For me, that makes cell phones a non-gaming utility more than anything else. For now, I'd prefer they remain that way.
Just over a week ago, I answered Giant Bomb's question of the "day" and talked about increasing my achievement scores in a bunch of Xbox 360 games I've neglected or otherwise haven't completed to my satisfaction. I feel it'd be appropriate to write about any progress I make on a weekly basis.
It's important to clarify that I'm looking to improve my achievement percentage, rather than just my gamerscore. I could buy a bunch of new games for easy achievements, but I'd much rather work on my completion rate with what I already have. Call me cheap, but I enjoy completing games to the point where I know there's nothing else I can accomplish without an insane amount of dedication.
Anyways, onward to the tales of progress!
Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts
or
The Joy of Ragequitting
I was already finished with the main story of Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, and considering I thoroughly enjoyed it, purchasing the Lost Challenges DLC was a given. There's not a whole lot to say about the DLC in general: It's tougher than the previous challenges, I cursed a lot over some of the more annoying tasks, and all the single-player tasks were completed in a day or two of sporadic gameplay.
Right, that was quick.I'm seriously surprised this slow car caused a ragequit. Only Nuts & Bolts' multiplayer achievements remained, and I was expecting the absolute worst. Ranked matches where I have to win by large enough margins to pull off some arrogantmaneuvers? Finding someone who actually had the DLC and beating them in multiplayer? I figured that I wouldn't find any opponents in the first place, and that I'd have to join a boosting group of some sort to get achievements.
I didn't expect that I'd get every multiplayer achievement through ragequitting.
The whole ordeal started out rather oddly. In a match type that encouraged naval battles, I decided to try for the achievement of winning with a custom vehicle, and made the mistake of picking a boat with severely underpowered weapons. Finding out all my opponents had opted for planes didn't help quell the sudden feeling that I was utterly screwed. The round seemed hopeless, as I struggled to find a way to shoot egg cannons upward, while dodging deadly barrages torpedoes and lasers raining down on me from the sky.
I had already accepted my loss when, with a minute to go, two of my three opponents got fed up with each other and quit, leaving me to realize the third opponent had been flying off on his own and accumulating quite the negative score. Victory for PsEG, 0 to -6!
This plane isn't that fast, either, and it still caused ragequits. My strange luck continued. An opponent realized the default vehicle for an oval "drag" race couldn't hold up to even the most basic custom racer, and quit after a single lap. Same for a sumo match where I brought a rather vicious vehicle to the fray. Even an underpowered jet car with wings frustrated a crowd of people two turns into a race, mere seconds after I had passed for the lead and dodged their weapon fire.
The ragequits were glorious, and I now proudly stand with an S-Rank in Banjo-Kazooie. My advice for anyone that might be reading this? Don't ever give up in an online match, especially not during a race. You never know when your opponent might make a major mistake or lose their connection.
You lose 100% of the races you don't finish, right? Not counting poorly conceived ranking systems where disconnects don't harm your standing, of course.
Virtual-ON
or
My Day as the Glass Joe of Robots
Having earned a full 1250/1250, I moved on from my daily grind as bear and bird to frantic fights with giant mechs. A month or so ago, I won a copy of Virtual-ON when Major Nelson dropped a few Xbox Live codes into his chatroom while flying to E3. Playing games obtained with little to no effort will be a recurring trend, I assure you. I am cheap to a fault.
It all looks like a blur to me.Anyways, Virtual-ON has perhaps the easiest single-player mode I've ever played. Upon dropping the difficulty down to very easy, the only tactics necessary for victory involved learning how to move the mech, dashing, and firing at anything looking like the enemy mech. As a person who considers himself inept at fighting games but skilled at repeating the same tired tactic to death, I had no trouble whatsoever. Only the Japanese fanatics in multiplayer stood in my way of an S-Rank.
Oh, wait, the multiplayer achievements only require playing ten ranked matches, not winning them. No problem, then!
It's a lot easier facing players with hundreds of matches under their belt when you don't care about beating them. These matches had some of the most pathetic tactics I've ever employed in a fighting game. Dash right, fire rockets. Wait. Dash right again, fire more rockets. Dash...left, fire more rockets! I'd also open several rounds with a powerful laser blast that usually caught the enemy off-guard and cut their health in half, which usually ensured that they beat me with only half their health remaining.
I was fully expecting a 0-10 record, but an unsuccessful Japanese player showed up for my tenth fight, allowing me to pull a stunning upset, and retire with a 1-9 (1 KO) record. I also ended up earning my first negative rating for not having enough skill. For once, I agree.
PGR4
or
Why My Pinky Finger Still Hurts
There's not much to talk about this week regarding Project Gotham Racing 4. Its multiplayer is quite desolate, so I've had to join a group looking to boost achievements. More on that next week.
I did, however, manage to nab the game's only split-screen achievement by myself. The "Back It Up!" achievement requires both players in a split-screen match to finish 1st and 2nd against at least one AI opponent while reversing across the finish line. The only way for me to complete this normally would involve inviting a friend over for the sole purpose of accomplishing the achievement, and let's face it -- that'd be awkward as hell, not to mention a little sad. Well, sadder.
Fast forward to me struggling to hold two controllers in my hands, keeping one car stable on an oval track while my pinky finger holds down the throttle on the bottom controller for the second car, which wall rides around the track. Ten laps and several stretched-out and aching fingers later, I had the achievement.
Perhaps my effort was excessive for just ten points of gamerscore. I keep telling myself it's the memories and experiences that'll stick with me to make this all worthwhile...not to mention the arthritis.
Week 1 Stats
Starting Score: 16500 End of Week 1 Score: 16820 Weekly Gain:320 points!
Starting Completion: 69.25% End of Week 1 Completion: 70.01% Weekly Gain:0.76%!
NEXT WEEK:
PGR4 and the "fun" of organized boosting
Zombie Wranglers and the "fun" of games that aren't fun
More attempts to find fun and not "fun" while gaining gamerscore!
One constant in my life these days is college. Over the summer I'll continue attending a few business classes, since I'd quite like to avoid spending too many more years in school. There is no longer time for indecision on a future career in my life.
That alone isn't a very interesting answer. It's intentionally vague, too! I should probably talk about something gaming-related.
Provided collegework doesn't become too menacing (and by all means it shouldn't), I'm looking into going back to play a bunch of older games and rack up achievements I've missed in them. To say Giant Bomb's new achievement ranking system isn't factoring into this decision at all would be an outright lie. I've earned almost 70% of the possible gamerscore I can earn with all the games I've played, and I'd like to get that figure closer to 75% overall. Failing that, I'll settle for a few more S-ranks and a few less C and D-ranks.
What can I say? I like being a completionist and getting as much value as I can out of my games.
Anyways, here's a broad summary of some of the more pressing tasks I'd like to accomplish before a wave of new releases hits:
Finish the multiplayer achievements in Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, then deal with the DLC. I am not looking forward to having to play Klungo Saves The Universe.
Find remnants of humanity that might actually play PGR3 and PGR4, and get multiplayer achievements for both those games. PGR3 will be a tremendous challenge, since its multiplayer makes ghost towns look crowded.
Get good or lucky enough at Peggle to finally beat someone by over 100k in a party game. That probably means I need to learn how to score over 100k on a consistent basis!
Finally collect all the bloody hidden orbs in Crackdown. Maybe I'll be able to coerce my old teammate in Crackdown to jump into finishing time trials on psychotic with me, too!
Find out why I'm so bad at Pac-Man C.E., and fix that matter right proper.
Enter Test Drive Unlimited, find the handful of people who still play that, and beg them to let me win in multiplayer and club races. I suppose I could find normal people willing to help with that, too, but that's a lot of effort.
Maybe finish GTA IV. Not terribly psyched for that idea. It takes far too long for me to set up for missions.
Maybe run through the campaigns of both Gears of War games at higher difficulties. I only touched Gears of War 1 once for a co-op playthrough on the easiest difficulty. It was one crazy six-hour stint. I probably owe the game more attention.
Maybe play that Undertow game Microsoft gave out as an apology for downtime? Ehh. Maybe not.
Will I complete this all before I get the urge to buy new games? Of course not. It'll be interesting to try anyways, though, not to mention it'll keep me away from soul-draining addictions like MMOs.
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As I finally reach 1,000 points, I can't help but sigh in relief that I will now be able to unleash my finicky self on entries, fixing annoying errors with no delay. In all fairness, I'm somewhat surprised by just how often people half-ass article entries, writing a weak blurb and nothing more. I'm surprised my entry for guns has survived a week intact, considering I'm the polar opposite of a gun fanatic and made it sound as yuppie as possible. Heck, I got a huge amount of my points by revising a veritablecrapload of entries for cars in the game Live for Speed, since someone just threw up a picture and car specs copied straight from the game, and thought their work was complete. For shame! Original detail is almost always possible.
That's my advice for anyone not at 1,000 points yet: Capitalize on the laziness of others. An article is more than a quick blurb and some images, people.
Points aside, I've read through some of the overview articles others have posted, and I can't help but wonder if some of the trivia that's brought up is actually true, or simply BS made up in the hyperactive minds of Giant Bomb users. I totally plan on covering some of the more humorous inaccuracies I'm finding at a later time.
For now, I'm going to move around the site pretending to play the role of the evil copy editor, preventing users from posting incoherent crap on games they never really played. Away!
Let me step aside from the commentary on the site and its issues, and instead talk about the lengths I go to for recalling information on old games.
My memory of ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS CLOUDY MOUNTAIN Cartridge (I get a kick out of typing the whole name) is rather foggy, as I haven't played it since my childhood. The Intellivision dominated so much of my early youth, and my father and I would often wake up early in the morning to play games of Lock 'N' Chase or Burgertime. It was the only game console my parents ever used or understood, and they'd play many of the games I played as well.
I was in the midst of writing up some text for the ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAyouknowwhat let's just call it AD&D, and I really didn't want to dig out my Intellivision to answer a single measly question.
I don't know why I thought it was a good idea to ask someone with a foggier mind than mine, but I ended up asking my father if the blobs in AD&D were instakill upon contact.
Five minutes later, it's a family conversation. A conversation over the lethality of digital blobs from a 1980s game. I think we concluded that since
Yes, they're instakill.blobs are slow and can't be killed, they were super deadly. Oh, and my mother brought up how much she loves BurgerTime. I think she's required by law to do that every time I mention the Intellivision. It's a dormant addiction.
Cut to the next day. The AD&D text is submitted and pending. The Intellivision is out of the auto parts crate it's so elegantly stored in, despite my best attempts to resist its pull. I was desperate for screenshots of Diner and Bump 'N' Jump. I wasn't about to grab images from elsewhere on the Internet. No, I was going to do this *right*.
Somewhere along the way, I had forgotten that hooking a 29 year old console (in bad condition, no less) through an RF switch to a low-end TV tuner was about the worst possible way to get in-game screenshots, just short of paying a Kindergartner to finger paint what they saw on the screen.
Then again, it is an Intellivision System III. It replaced the original Intellivision we owned, which died when I beat a kid three times my age at BurgerTime and he decided to bash the system in using its own controller.
So I decide to jump into AD&D so I can test the blob deal once and for all. While doing that, I find out that bats, which my submission claims do minimal damage, don't appear to do any damage at all. I even find a second bat and let it hover around me with the first. By modern day terms, I'm herding the cave and tanking these bats hardcore. The Night Stalker bats would be embarrassed to be related to these weak AD&D cave bats.
I also found out spiders aren't really deadly either, but steal arrows pretty well, and rats are more deadly than I thought. Man, do I need to edit that submission if it clears.
The lesson to be learned in this disjointed ramble? Don't assume about old games, play them again before writing something up. Also, don't get into trying to contribute for retro games unless you have a lot of time or patience.
I'm letting the bat hover around my guy in the background still. He's like an adorable pet that might get around to doing something vicious one day.
2 Comments
I'm both surprised and grateful for the response to yesterday's "A concerned bomber" blog. I was expecting it to sit there unnoticed, like all the blogs I've written for other sites. Needless to say, it's nice to read all the good responses, and a definite plus for Giant Bomb.
That said, yesterday's post didn't explore any possible solutions for the image issue, and some of the other problems currently going on with this site. It's only fitting to look into that today.
Currently, screenshots are worth three points (one each for the game, the screenshots gallery, and the system screenshots gallery), and box art is worth two points (for the game and the box art gallery). Using this scoring system, it takes 334 to 500 images to reach 1,000 points.
My initial idea of a solution for the situation of image spamming was to drop all image submissions to a flat one point, regardless of how many galleries they fit in. Certainly such a move would put more emphasis on the writing portion of Giant Bomb, while discouraging image spamming by requiring another 500 to 666 images to reach 1,000. Is this fair for someone who may not be very good at writing, and wants to take screenshots and scan box art of rare and hard-to-find games? For that matter, how important are screenshots in comparison to the text in articles?
Both questions I cannot answer definitively.
Another idea that's run through my head is capping the number of screenshots a single user can submit to one gallery, or reducing the points from two or three down to one after so many images. However, this likely flies in the face of Giant Bomb's intent, and discouraging information overload probably isn't a good idea.
There aren't any easy answers when trying to judge how much effort goes into screenshots. While it's certainly not as difficult to moderate images compared to text (as a few of you pointed out), it's nearly impossible to know what the submitter went through to get an image. Did they fire up a game console and use some form of a TV tuner or capture card to take pictures? Did they scan boxes themselves? Did they use Google to find relevant images from other sites?
Again, no easy answers.
One feature I would like to see is the ability to mark images in the same gallery as duplicates. The submission queue's created this issue, and perhaps in a few rare cases two users might submit the same image to separate pages or categories, unaware of each other's work. I envision a system where a user who finds duplicates clicks to edit one, uses a "Report Duplicate" feature to search the site and grab the other one, and submit the images to mods for review. If indeed the two images are alike, the higher-rez or oldest-submitted image remains and uses the galleries of both images.
There's also talk on other blogs about the possibility of letting users see content in the submission queue for a page, to prevent unnecessary repetition that's plaguing many popular games. I think that would be interesting, but I'd settle for a message telling me someone's already waiting in the submission queue for the overview write-up. Maybe something like, "WARNING! Luchadeer already sees a submission pending for this article. Do you still want to continue?" In addition, I'd enjoy the ability to edit my articles waiting in the submission queue, even if it means sending them to the back of the line. I ended up making a few crucial errors regarding the enemies of AD&D: Cloudy Mountain, and it's bothering me a little. More on that another time.
Finally, I'd like to point out Kowalski's entry about making it to 1,000 without massive image spam. He really put his focus over a lot of pages, which is something I haven't done myself. Then again, I probably won't end up making it to 1,000 for another month, as my work ethic is generally slower than most people. For me, article writing is 33% typing, 50% pacing around in thought, and 17% distraction.
Good luck with the submission queue and the trek to 1k, everyone. I'm hoping today's the day my Astrosmash article is accepted-oh, what do you know, it was accepted as I was writing this. Fancy that.
So Giant Bomb's been up for about three days now, and I think I've refined my initial opinion about the site a bit.
The scope and depth of Giant Bomb still dazzles me. It's a thrill to try and find useful original info for older games, though it makes me wish I hadn't thrown out most of my game boxes a few years back -- they sure would be useful scans to fill in some graphical blanks on the site.
I've had 6 edits and 16 images approved, with 22 edits and around 24 images pending for anywhere from 10 to 67 hours. I don't want to complain about the moderation process, since I understand it takes time to deal with 12,000 monkeys at 12,000 keyboards.
I am starting to see a few concerns, though.
First, the most minor issue, which is really just a gripe of mine. Getting game pages without box art to display newly-uploaded box art properly is a pain. Take a look at NASCAR Racing 2 for a good example of a screw up. As of this writing, you should be seeing an ugly back cover, rather than the slightly more elegant front cover. As elegant as NASCAR-based subjects get, at least. I've tried working with the release info to see if that will encourage a change, but like most of my edits, it's pending.
This brings me to the issue that bothers me the most, of which I'm not sure of a proper solution. Images appear to carry far too much weight in regards to points, and since they often pass through moderation quickly, uploading a crapload of images is the easiest way to reach that wonderful 1,000 point marker that will keep us from having to wait so long for write-ups and changes.
Allow me to provide an example. There's an excellent write-up for Fire Pro Wrestling Returns, with plenty of detail and insight, and it appears to be entirely original writing. I've never played a Fire Pro game, since it looked so generic, and that article makes it seem a bit more intriguing. The writer gets over 300 points for all that, and I say it's well deserved.
Now take Live For Speed. At the moment, there's really only screenshots on that page to speak of. I contributed three of those for nine points, since I own the game and wanted to at least bring some illustration to the page before doing a write-up. Another poster has since added a whopping 90 or so screenshots, getting over 270 points for their troubles. The problem is, it's not really trouble, as all of their screenshots were taken directly from Live For Speed's very own screenshots page. In fact, some of the screenshots they uploaded to Giant Bomb are duplicates of one another. You wouldn't even need to know anything about a game to pull this off -- simply knowing the official site's URL and having the patience to mass download/upload images or screens would suffice.
I'll try to leave any ethics issues alone, as I imagine non-watermarked screenshots might be fine with the Giant Bomb staff regardless of their source. We're still looking at about 270 points for simply nabbing screenshots from an official page and re-uploading them to Giant Bomb, compared to 300 for an original (hopefully) write-up describing a game to its finest details.
At the very least, it bothers me that images are worth so many points, and quick-firing screenshots is such an easy way to earn points. This also means that some of the first people to make it to 1,000 points and break free of moderation may not deserve it as much as those working on decent write-ups, or might use this fast-track method to start mucking with pages as they see fit. I just hope they're simply competing to get more points than anyone else on the site, and don't have any sinister intent. Otherwise, the Giant Bomb staff are going to have their hands full.
Maybe I'm wrong. I'm still concerned.
I'll save complaints I had about the forum population for another time, since that's a valid complaint for just about any website. Instead, I'll resume making mediocre write-ups for retro games no one's likely to notice. That's my stealthy tactic to get to 1,000 points!
So far, the site looks really nice. The layout is good, and all the remains is for people to add a huge amount of info for games.
In cases like these, it's the company Giant Bomb keeps that will determine how it fares. I hope the site gets a lot of intelligent fans who care about decent writing, and leave any fanboy-ish anger at the door.
Here's hoping that happens, and this site thrives. I'll do my part not to screw it up.
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