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BASICS
BASICS; Sites Keep Up With Games and GamersSee the article in its original context from
December 7, 2000
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Section G,Page
11
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AT 8 o'clock on a weeknight, you can often find Fernando deGroot in his bedroom, browsing game sites on the Web.
On a recent Friday, he was checking out his favorites -- GameFan, Gaming Age, GameSpot and IGN -- and spending about 10 minutes with each. Mr. deGroot, a 19-year-old from San Francisco, has been a gamer for ''10 years, at least,'' he said, and rates what he reads on the Web as very important to making up his mind about which games to buy. Of those four sites, IGN is his favorite. ''They cover release dates,'' he said. ''They cover overseas information. They cover a lot of fields.''
''Cannon Spike,'' he said, ticking off games for Sega's Dreamcast that he had seen reviewed on IGN that day. ''Sonic Shuffle. Test Drive LeMans, just to see what it was like. Skies of Arcadia. It got over a 9 -- a 9.2, I believe -- which is a really good score.''
Based on what he had read online and heard from a colleague at the EBX software store in downtown San Francisco, where he works as a salesman, he was thinking of buying Skies of Arcadia -- a role-playing game in which roguish but sympathetic airborne pirates prowl giant land masses suspended in the sky.
For computer and video games as for almost anything else, the Web is a vast, shifting storehouse of information and opinion. Game sites vary from encyclopedic online magazines with staffs of professional writers and editors to mom-and-pop operations; idiosyncratic, personal takes on the industry; and fan sites devoted to single games or lines of games.
Visitors to these sites can find out when a publisher reaches an agreement to release a game, when new designers are added to a game's development team and when a game ''goes gold'' -- when its final version is mastered onto a golden CD and sent to the duplicators. They learn about this young industry's colorful past and glimpse its future. They can read early appreciations of games that haven't yet appeared. They can find strategy guides for individual games and even learn how to cheat at games that prove too challenging.
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