Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2007 > October > 11
Thursday, October 11, 2007
AMD launches gaming portal… for why, I don’t know
I hate to bag on a local site. It’s not really my thing, you know. I like to accentuate the positive. Fill the world with joy and rainbows. I am known to eat delicious ice cream and smile while I do it.
But I’ve been poking around AMD’s new gaming portal Web site, which, in an inspired bit of branding is called “AMD GAME!”
It was developed locally by a company called Design Reactor and when you first visit to the site, you see a nice graphic for “Team Fortress 2.” This is a great game and a very recent one, so you hope that the site will have up-to-the-minute news and other content to keep you coming back.
Unfortunately, the content is wrapped in a bubble of marketing and branding so thick that a young John Travolta could live in there, free of disease.
Here’s the third “Latest News” headline from the front page: “AMD and SAPPHIRE to Showcase HD Gaming Innovation.” Wow! Newsy!
There are some feeble attempts at building community. You could join an online chat and create a profile for yourself by logging in. But I’m not sure why you’d stick around. At the top of the Community Page is an interesting looking link to a developer’s diary for the game “Call of Juarez.” When you click on it to read the article, it spits back, “Sorry, could not find the requested article.”
On a page of featured games, there’s a box that goes with the highly anticipated PC game “Crysis,” that says, “Image not available.”
The “Image not available” also appears, more disturbingly under the area of “Images” for multimedia related to the game “Blazing Angels 2.” Why even put the game there if there are no images for it?
The reviews on the site also seem incomplete. No review of “Quake Wars; Enemy Territory” or “Team Fortress 2?” The reviews that do appear (the most recent one is of “Stranglehold”) are not attributed to any particular writer or Web site. Should we trust these reviewers? It’s hard when we don’t even know who they are.
The site’s mascot is a computer-generated action lady (guess how much clothes she’s wearing) named Ruby. I’m guessing she’s supposed to be responsible for the site’s content. If this is so, Ruby should spend more time updating and writing and less time jumping away from fireballs.
If this were a test Web site or something somebody had put together and I just happened upon it, I’d be a lot less critical. But the site was pitched to me by a PR person for a possible story. In the PR pitch, we find this information: “This is certainly one of the toughest markets to impress. Gamers are demanding and expect solid interactive design with a massive amount of relevant features and content, which AMDGAME! delivers…” said Leon Papkoff, CEO of Design Reactor.
Unfortunately, I have to report that in comparison with even the lowliest of gaming Web sites, the site has much less than a “Massive amount” of content and right now is more broken and incomplete than a marketing site for a major gaming company should be.
I’m not sure who this Web site is for, but there’s nothing there that makes me want to visit again. I couldn’t recommend it to any serious PC gamer. Or really any casual gamer, either.
Who wants ice cream?
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