No. I don't like polybomb, at all. (Or, rather -- I don't see how it is any improvement upon what is already here, in which case, what is the point of all the work?).
I thought GiantBomb's redesign was going to bring something new to the table, but it just looks like it's a late answer to The Verge, Polygon, and all the other 2012 sites that are adopting the same stupid square-blocks design that they claim may look bad on desktops, but great on tablets (which is also bullshit, they look just as bad on tablets). It's big on pictures and giant text and small on content. It takes way more real-estate to give me far less information (which is impressive, because I didn't think you could fit less information on the top half of a page than the current GiantBomb did). Compress that shit. Get me as much information as quickly as possible. Don't make me scroll five pages down to see something and don't take up 50% of the entire screen with a giant promotion for one single article and the giant photo-banner behind it.
The "twitter" shit takes up way too much space, too. Actually, it shouldn't even *exist*. If people wanted to follow those twitter-shitters (sorry, gang, but your twitter feeds are just really obnoxious and inane and not even interesting to those who practically stalk you -- much less the rest of the community), they would follow them directly on twitter. What a waste, spending so much screen real-estate on a constantly updated twitter feed.
Also, PICK A COLOR SCHEME. Either be black or be white. Frankly, I'd kind of like to see the site's color brightened up. It makes it more airy and nice. But the current page is an eye-killer. The top half is completely black, then the rest of it is bright white, except for the "coming up" block, which is totally black again (and therefore hard to read, amid the giant white background of the rest of the page).
Then, there's a ton of blank space underneath "top releases" that just seems to have gone to waste.
In short, try and be your own thing. Don't just mimic what other supposedly popular hipster 2012 websites have done. Have more respect for your users, too. Despite what the game industry and journalists thing, your audiences are not stupid. We don't need this USA TODAY-ification of all our content. We can be drawn to information and read things without having to be drawn to it by giant murals and pictures that say "hey, mouth-breather, here's something shiny".
And yes, this was a "negative" comment, because this is the stuff I want to see addressed. Blowing smoke up everyone's asshole isn't going to accomplish anything and this is probably going to impact how I/we consume the site's content for the next three to five years.
You guys shouldn't be following the lead of other sites. You should be setting the bar. Remember when your site's design slowly caused the rest of the gaming internet to reconsider their designs? Look at what GameSpot used to be. Now look at it. Very GiantBomb-esque. The idea of content being king and bringing the user information and quick navigation trumped all the advertising and mouth-breather-bait of the other sites.
I expected that's what I was going to see from the redesign. Instead, I just see GiantBomb being the one to play "follow-the-leader". While that doesn't seem to have resulted in an atrocious steaming pile of crap, I certainly don't feel inspired by it. In fact, I find the waste of space and indulgence in 2012's trend of "LOOK AT THESE GIANT IMAGES AND THEN FIND THE CONTENT SOMEWHERE FURTHER DOWN THE PAGE, MAYBE" more annoying, than anything else.
I'm also not sure it works on a black-themed website. This design almost works for Polygon and The Verge, because they are a white-themed site. That makes the giant waste of space and over-dependency on stupid images feel airy. The same style on a black-themed site comes across as claustraphobic.
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