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!