Designs Gamers Like?

Something that really bugs me is the excessive promo-everywhere design style that permeates all gaming websites. Gamespot, IGN, Gamespy, they all seem to incorporate the same HTML elements: huge “skyscraper” Flash banners, three-to-four column layouts with text crammed into it, embedded images galore… all things that seem to drag my browser to a crawl. Granted, I don’t have the latest machine out there (it’s two years old) but I think this is part of the problem — see, I’m a console gamer, that’s also because I am a Mac user. I’ve separated my needs for a device to play great action titles from my needs for a user-friendly and well-designed computer to do work on. But I feel like these sites play to the PC gamers out there first and foremost, and PC gamers are notorious for keeping cutting edge machines, ones that could double as professional graphics-lab renderers and genome crackers, all over-clocked and freon-cooled. When you build to this audience, almost any page works, no matter how overloaded and burdened with multimedia it is.

What I want is the Google of gaming websites, something that tells me exactly what I want to know about a title, without a design that turns my poor Lappy into mush. Yahoo! Games is, sadly, too simple, and GameCritics, a fave of mine once highlighted in (the now defunct) Shift magazine, is a labor of love and as such reviews titles out of their own pocket, which is to say it’s not terribly comprehensive. Still they give me hope, since as gaming becomes the real mainstream, someone will eventually appear and provide a site for older gamers like myself.