@drshilliams: yeah unfortunately we use typekit to serve our fonts and can't control what gets served first. Also the size of svg fonts are usually anywhere from 2x to 4x the size. :(
paging Windows Chrome dev team! Fuck they have the worst font renderer in the world. They have a perfectly fine font rendering solution on windows called DirectWrite and still they have not updated to use it. There is an issue tracker out there somewhere with like a billion people waiting for them to implement it. They keep saying soon...
That being said, yeah we need to take another pass at making Windows Chrome font adjustments for all the sites again. I'll look into making that Live Show box wider.
Achievements are probably not coming back. The amount of scraping of websites needed to do this was super intense and we needed a dedicated engineer just for that. Since we have no idea what the new platforms will allow us to grab we just couldn't take the risk.
As for quests, well I loved them and have always pitched to bring them back. But again it's a question of resources. I'd rather have engineers improve what we have before moving on to big features. BTW I think the new video player on gamespot is performing much better. I am eager to get it running on Giant Bomb. We will never be YouTube and our 2-4gb video files make it difficult to work around but we should be making improvements in time.
Hearing you loud and clear. I've said it before and I will say it again but Giant Bomb is an incredibly complicated site. The ridiculous amount of associations going on between wiki, users, news etc is mind boggling. There are most definitely parts of the site that need some love and I am more than painfully aware of these things. I think search while not perfect works pretty well for what it's best at. Finding games and adding links to games in the wysywig. It's actually kind of awesome that users have the same exact editor as our staff. The reason we took the code button out some time ago was because it just wasn't safe to leave it in. No matter how many checks we put in someone was always going to be able to inject some nasty code into it. Also having our data be
normalized helps for future upgrades. Forum search on the other hand is not great I agree. Wiki traffic on the site is pretty significant. Actually it might be the highest percentage of traffic on the site. Hmm what else? Categorizing of videos is actually something we can do. I'll harp on someone to do it. I hate to keep blaming our lack of staff but it's definitely an issue. But again, we hear you and believe me when I say what bothers you probably bothers us as well.
The closest thing we have now is the HTML 5 player, which allows you to buffer video and also skip ahead. YouTube sometimes has the best of both worlds by allowing their auto streaming service to buffer for a much longer time. Last time we checked they weren't actually doing it for all their videos though. Anything over a certain time limit actually seemed to get a cap on how much you could buffer. This make sense for most providers as allowing an unlimited buffer gets real expensive when people don't watch the entire video. For gamespot we just increased the amount of buffer so I think when the player comes over this should help on GB side. Also fwiw it's worth YouTube seems to actually switch between streaming and HTML 5 like progressive without the user knowing. We've always kept everything separate because so many of our videos are super long and finding the right player for each person seemed to be better left to the user. This could all change in the future but so far this has been the strategy.
So thought I'd chime in and give a little perspective. GameSpot definitely shares a ton of characteristics with Giant Bomb and for good reasons. Given the shared platform I decided about 6 months that instead of completely trying something new I'd like to evolve what Dave and I did here on GB and take the opportunity to build something that would make working on both sites simultaneously a real possibility. Our team is tiny. The entire fronted design team consists of 4 people. 3 of us are designers and CSS HTML guys (Brandon, Jesse and I) and one JS/CSS/PHP engineer (Regina who played that game from china with Drew). The engineering team is a bit larger but I'll leave that for another day. But even without trying to make excuses about us being a small group and the countless 12-14 days over the last few months we have put it, I still think evolving the giantbomb look was the way to go. The animated h264 videos found on the reviews are pretty awesome (Check out LOL and GTA V) and the new larger article templates are a welcome update. The 404 page is pretty amazing. The game was written by Ian and the design work was done by our new designer Jesse.
So what does this mean for GB? Immediately we are going to work on merging the new branch of our platform back into GB. The video player will get a nice update once we iron a few more bugs. I know you have heard this before but honestly, the player got a complete rewrite. The UI of it will perform much better and any issues we have will be mostly based on network speeds and the enormous video files GB puts out. We will also take all of the CSS performance tricks we have learned and apply them. These sites really push the limits at times. Being responsive and also wanting to make them fun and somewhat attractive takes quite a bit of CSS! After implementing all of this we'll see about giving GB some design love.
As always I really appreciate the support you have all given me and everyone else. I still identify myself as a Giant Bomb guy and always will.
Drew and I are definitely interested in doing this as well. Right now the big hangup is that I will be on the east coast November 1st for one of my best friend's wedding (I know, how rude of him not to check the Extra Life dates!). Trying to see when I would be flying back to be able to make this happen. We may have to do it on the 3rd if we can do it, which is obviously a bummer since part of the excitement is being able to do it with all of you.
I just finished this about 20 minutes ago and I think it deserves all the praise it has been getting. The Quick Look ran into the one terrible bug in the game* (which I hope gets resolved soon) and there probably isn't any real way to showcase the games narrative without some huge spoilers. The gameplay can be a little awkward but I think it has more to do with the difficulty in actually controlling two players at once. Its like the biggest slurpee brain freeze ever at times. The puzzles in the game are not super difficult so if you are not into emotional charged dark narratives and don't find joy in simple tiny side quests then this may not be for you. It's also a pretty quick game.
* In chapter 2 if you can't grab the key from the guard then you unfortunately have to start the whole chapter all over again. Simply resetting the checkpoint does not fix it.
As much as we went back and forth on those color schemes I never took offense that he completely went awol and went with Baller Time. That whole creative process obviously lead to something awesome. When he walked in with those pair I figured he should just have my job now. I am trying to think of an episode where you could clearly see those shoes on his feet. It may have been the one where he ragged on me for having size 10s (in a pair of New Balance 556s), but not really sure.
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