By Max Van Kleek
Every month, PC GAMER magazine feeds its enormous computer gamer
readership with the latest game reviews, reviews of gaming-related
software and hardware, and strategy tips, hints and tricks. Its accompanying
CD-ROM is also packed with everything the computer gamer population
wants - playable game previews, software demos, and preview screenshots.
By building a huge subscriber base, PC Gamer magazine has propelled
itself into a hugely influential status with respect to the initial
success of new game titles. Game software publishers have, as a result,
found it essential to get good reviews, advertisements, and demos
in PCGamer.
Unlike its print publication, PCGamer.COM, the website, offers little
more than a column of reviews that reflects the current issue of its
print magazine. Instead of building a prominent online web site to
back their print publication, it seems that PC Gamer has outsourced
this task to an independent web site devoted to gaming, The Daily
Radar (www.dailyradar.com).
The Daily Radar fills in the online void, with features sections devoted
to individual game platforms, downloadable demos, reviews and online
forums.
Unfortunately, the transition from PC Gamer online to the Daily Radar
is not a seamless one. First, the high-quality, thorough and consistent
articles characteristic of PC Gamer reviewers stand out next to the
shallowness of the reviews written the Daily Radar's amateur game
critics. For example, while PC Gamer's articles might introduce a
game by providing a historical background of the game's setting, articles
in the The Daily Radar might express how cool things look in the game,
and digress to personal information about how the reviewer's relates
to the game. It is difficult to imagine that devoted PC Gamer readers
would tolerate the mediocrity of most of The Daily Radar's material.
The few articles that are available on PC Gamer's site, meanwhile,
are well written, and quite interesting. One article this month focuses
on "The Future of Gaming: 2006", in which industry technology
experts are interviewed to reveal emerging game-related technologies.
The article focuses mainly on increasing computational power and improved
graphics, interviewing engineers at Intel designing new CMOS technologies
that could yield faster, more advanced microprocessors, ultimately
expanding the possibilites for pc games. The article conveys the idea
that with better, smoother graphics, comes a qualitatively better
gaming experience - by being able to provide fuller immersion to convey
greater emotion. The article does not seem to convey that this viewpoint
could be debated - that many would argue that even the 'ancient',
primitive, text-based interfaces characteristic from the Zork era
of gaming in the early 80's provided realms and worlds to explore
that were, on the whole, not particularly different from the full-screen
3D rendered games of today. Yet, it remains optimistic about the possibilities
inherent in increased computational and graphical capabilities. The
other major technology advancement addressed in the article deals
with bringing "real" games to handheld devices, such as
the Palm platform. The article describes how NVIDIA is reportedly
working on bringing their graphics power to portable devices, and
software companies are working out issues with bringing massively
multiplayer games on wireless networks. These technologies could bring
pc games out of monolithic PCs and into our pockets and our lives-
possibilities that do seem very exciting.
The quality of the articles not withstanding, the PCGamer.COM site
itself technically suffers from several problems, particularly for
being a online site devoted to reviewing the cutting-edge, adrenaline-packed
games. The web site's Javascripts and heavy graphics increase the
load time and browser instability which cause visitors to have to
occasionally reload the pages multiple times. A tremendous aggravation
associated with having to do this deals with the barrage of little
popup windows that each PC Gamer page spams whenever it is reloaded.
Where, on many sites, having even a single popup window is usually
shunned since it tends to irritate surfers, PCGamer.com's sites seem
to randomly choose between 1 and 3 additional windows to pop up at
random times when visiting the web site. These windows contain either
banner ads, or are large windows replete with a web form pressuring
the user to order a free trial edition. As a result, visiting the
PC Gamer web site seems to make one feel as if they are engaging in
an battle with their web browser - an experience that is, I believe,
to be purely unintentional.