I didn't really get to explore this site very much when it came on last night (mostly because it was so late), so today's my first full day making my way around Giant Bomb, and I'll say right off the bat that it is addictive as all hell. First off, the social networking element (adding friends, making blog posts, creating your own gallery, and generally customizing your profile to the hilt) adds a hell of a lot more flavor to the whole experience than other gaming websites. The forums are a bit disorganized right now (and un-moderated as far as I can tell), but I'm sure all that will get sorted out.

The real meat and bones of this site is the user-generated wiki contributions. Being able to add screenshots, game summaries, and all the little extraneous tags like characters, locations, "hamburgers," etc, gives the user a real sense of ownership; that's innovative site design as far as I'm concerned. I've made a couple contributions so far, but apparently you need 1,000 wiki points before you can make submissions without a moderator having to approve it, so I'm going to be making truckloads of submissions over the next few weeks.

All in all, GB is off to a fantastic start.

More to come as the day wears on...


UPDATE: GB needs to let us add forum signatures. Also, the "my collections" button is still greyed out for me every time I try to add a game to my list...anyone else have this problem? Other than that, this site is shaping up really nicely. The only "front page" feature that's missing is a bona fide news section. Otherwise, I'm pretty much certain that this site will take the gaming world by storm (maybe it already has).

All right, I've got a ton of submissions pending approval, and a ton more to make (I'm seriously gonna end up spending the rest of the evening on this site). Until the next update...!


UPDATE 2: Here's a tip when you're adding content, especially if you have uploaded and are now trying to organize a gazillion screenshots into one gallery. DO NOT do them all at once. Take the screenshots and add them to your desired gallery in small batches because this site is still glitchy, and if you try to do over a hundred screenshots at once (like I did), a whole bunch of them will get left out and you will have to manually add each one to the gallery. In fact, don't even upload everything at once, even though it may be tempting to do so. Upload and organize your content in small batches. Trust me, it will save you a ton of aggravation...I'm speaking from experience here.

Anyway, I've literally got hundreds of contributions pending right now. GB says it will take 24 hours at the most to get approval, so hopefully by the time I wake up tomorrow morning, most of my stuff has been approved and added. All in all, it was a good day's grind. More tomorrow...


Update 3: I've spent that past few hours literally uploading 300+ screenshots. I'm really going to bed this time...