Glad that you guys seem to be enjoying "Gamespot Wii" (or at least visiting it in some way). Please let me know of any suggestions that you have for the site, it's something that's built entirely for "you" - and we want to give you what you want :-)
In response to some issues / questions:
- No videos: The Wii browser only supports flash 7, all of our vids are encoded in codecs that require flash 8. So we're working on recompressing a lot of video, and getting a new player up and running. This is annoying, and is Adobe's fault for not releasing a Flash SDK for flash 8 or 9. Downside is that the vids are not going to look as good.
- no forums: it's hard to read text on your tv and the way the wii handles typing is realllllly poor. So we're going with content that is short and simple, and trying to keep the interactions fun (game rating, paging though news stories) rather than tedious. But there is plan in the works to bring community features to the Wii site, as it'd be a great place to interact with other users. We just wanted to get something up there and see if people liked it / used it :-)
- Why maintain 2 versions of the site? 2 reasons:
1 - Your TV is a muuuuch lower resolution than an LCD. So in designing the site, we had to standardize on very large font sizes. We didn't want users to have to zoom in and scroll around all over. It should be an easy to access and use site, even when sitting on your couch across the room. Also, the TV doesn't handle high contrast as well as a computer monitor, so the standard gamespot design is hard to read, and breaks in some places because the Wii browser only has one font face.
2 - It's fun to do new stuff :-)
Anyhoo, if you have questions about the site, post em here, or hit me with a PM. The Wii site is my baby, and I want to make it as useful as possible for you.
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