Not having kept up closely with the gaming blogosphere and press for a couple of months, I just woke up to the fact that GiantBomb is now completely amazing in almost every way.
Maybe the firing of Jeff Gerstman from GameSpot and the subsequent staff exodus was a blessing in disguise, because the site they’re putting together now beats, in concept, pretty much any gaming site out there at the moment. It is really clever in its combination of wiki-style community-driven content, such as game pages, screenshots, trivia and game guides (published under Creative Commons), with editorial content by its paid staff. Video reviews are neatly integrated into the surrounding page layout, with the reviewer standing in front of the game footage that illustrates his point. They use a nice straightforward 5-star scoring system (no half stars) that as far as I can tell doesn’t include any of that sound / graphix / tilt / replayability scoring nonsense.
Poking around the wiki area reveals lots of obscure user-contributed tags, particularly in the concepts area, such as Wihelm Scream, Showing Half a Face On Box Art, Bromance, Breast Bounce and Mustache (As a Gameplay Mechanic). I’m sure you can find funnier or more interesting ones easily. Also check out the icons for Memory Loss (funny), Emergent Gameplay (again, funny) and Episodic Content (harsh!). The character page for Max from Sam & Max is appropriately linked to such concepts as Insanity, Interspecies Duos and Extreme Violence. Basically, I love this site.
I’m a bit sad that they’re still only getting a million visits a month, as they claim on their media kit page. That might sound like a lot but it isn’t. For instance, my site AdventureGamers.com gets about 200k a month, and that’s a pretty niche site. I hope these guys gain some traction.
I got really excited on this blog once about Great Games Experiment, a social network for gamers. It sadly failed on many fronts and never hit anything near a critical mass. But it seems GiantBomb kind of incorporates the good bits from GGE, the good bits from WikiPedia, and the good bits from GameSpot. It’s like the kind of site I’ve always wished existed, and now it does. It still needs some fleshing out but the ideas behind it seem completely solid so far.
My name is Marek Bronstring and I'm Head of Content at Sega. You're looking at my mostly dead game design blog. I think this sidebar needs some more text so let me tell you what my top favorite animals are: 1) meerkats 2) 
A million visits a month is a pretty substantial amount, and a very good sign of their growth.
If you want a comparison, Eurogamer was only hitting 1.8 million per month as of late 2007 (link), and a million a year before that — I remember them making a big song and dance about each milestone.
I must admit I hadn’t looked too closely at GiantBomb before, but I’m subscribed now having seen it does seem to be a site well worth keeping track of!
Ryan Williams
November 30th, 2008
Man, how could they have excluded Gabriel Knight III from the list of mustache games. Hmm… maybe I should register and go fix it.
Erkki Lindpere
November 30th, 2008
So, I did that and was really surprised how easy it was to edit stuff.
Erkki Lindpere
December 1st, 2008
Ack, fix the link! (You forgot to put .com)
Hans
December 1st, 2008
Ryan, you might have a point there. There’s a difference between visits (GiantBomb) and unique visitors (Eurogamer) though. GiantBomb might be doing alright but I don’t think it’s anywhere near Eurogamer, 1UP.com, or God forbid GameSpot.com. But, anyway, I guess my only point is that I’d like for them to grow.
Oooh yes, Gabriel Knight 3 has a legendary mustache. The mustache that killed a genre. Or something.
Hans, I just fixed the link. Thanks for pointing out.
Marek
December 2nd, 2008
I am so steeped in adventure game history that I actually sort of expected the page “Moustache (As a Gameplay Concept)” to be a list of Gabriel Knight 3 and nothing else.
Chris Remo
December 5th, 2008