The staff do still interact with the community and defend their opinions, except now it happens in the comment sections of the pieces they post. This is probably a consequence of how media websites as a whole have developed over the years, that everything has to have a comment section to invite and encourage immediate discussion. I think the change in staff presence in the community you describe could be due in part to the prevalence of comment sections over the site. Staff will always be interested in interacting with their readers and seeing what people think of what they write, if nothing else it's a means of getting feedback and becoming better at their jobs. However, now the feedback is brought straight to them, whereas I imagine before they would have had to go to the forums and look for it, finding and posting in other threads that caught their interest on the way.

Although the forums here on gamespot are clearly not as active as they once were, the comment sections still seem to be full of activity. Frankly I think forums in general are dying out on websites like gamespot because comment sections take the discussion away. Before, when gamespot posted a piece of gaming news, people would make a thread in the forums to discuss it, now they'll just use the comments section on that piece instead. Gamespot staff have no reason whatsoever to look at the forums now, all the feedback they need is in the comments. Likewise most of the visitors to the site don't need to look at the forums for discussion. Even if gamespot attracts hundreds of new people to the site every day with its content, I can't think of much reason why those people would need or want to look at the forums. I wouldn't be surprised if the kind of decline in activity we're seeing on these forums were happening on many other similar sites too; for younger people who are newer to the internet, forums are not the primary means of discussion they're used to.

The other thing to consider is that big social networking sites like facebook, twitter and reddit mean that people who want to discuss gaming news don't need to do it on this site at all. If they're already using facebook, they'll just subscribe to gamespot's facebook page and post comments on the stories linked there, or post them on their own wall and have a discussion amongst their friends. Same with reddit or twitter, they are big websites and many people have accounts on them, so people who read an article on GS and want to discuss it can just put it on there and have a big old chin wag their rather than signing up to GameSpot. I think it wouldn't be out of the question, though would be very unlikely, for gamespot to streamline at some point in the future and get rid of its community features entirely to focus its resources on news and other content it produces, with more open-access discussion threads on those, as well as an increased focus on reaching out to users of social media sites (they're already using fb and twitter and experimented with reddit). The nature of social media and how people discuss things on the internet is changing, becoming centralised on the few dominant websites that nearly everyone uses. Discussion forums like this one are out of date and I think they will only decline further.

All food is organic, people who seek it out have been horribly mislead.

Good riddance to the level system I say. Farming points and emblems became a terrifying obsession for some users.

I know the game sold well, I also know people returned it to atari and caused them problems. Presumably they too thought it sucked. I still don't get why. What exactly is so horrible about it? Not saying it's a great game because I can see how it's not to everybody's taste but I don't see anything wrong with it either.

That being said I can understand how someone playing it when they have absolutely no clue what to do can think it sucks. Good thing there was an instruction manual that explained everything, did anyone bother reading that? I've no idea how detailed it was but supposedly it explained enough. For my part I'm familiar with all of the game's mechanics and it is perfectly playable and I can't find anything wrong with it. It's not that exciting but just being a bit boring isn't a particularly big crime.

Bottom line is the game worked without issue, was playable to the end and offered some challenge, yet people still rank it alongside games like superman 64 that unlike ET are full of glitches and are borderline unplayable even if you do know what you're doing.

I absolutely hated trevor at first but he quickly grew on me, which is pretty good considering I'm normally indifferent to the characters. Most of the main characters are portrayed to be nice people in some way but then go around killing loads of innocents and stealing, so to have a genuine madman to do that as seems a bit more logical.

I have played it and I really don't see what's wrong with it, it's sort of fun. It's not broken in any way at least. There's little doubt that it wasn't financially successful and contributed heavily to the video game crash but that doesn't mean it was a bad game in its own right.

However I don't know how it would have compared to other atari games at the time. I can play other atari 2600 games now and compare them to ET and find that none of them seem that good, but back in ET's day, people may have thought differently.

I still don't get why people think this, the game itself wasn't that bad, certainly no worse than most other atari games.

Exciting news though, I wonder what else they dumped down there. I saw a picture of someone playing the game at the site, wonder if it still works

what has the world come to when a 20 day old roll call has only 77 posts

Because most tvs are black. Most tvs are black because it goes with everything and a black tv will struggle to look out of place in any home decor environment. Then again there was that period in the early 2000s, when preferences in interior design shifted to more simplistic decoration with brighter colours; archaic black boxes looked out of place amongst lavender wall paint and laminate floorings, adorned with dried sticks in pale brown vases; thus the preference in television aesthetic design tended toward modern silver schemes, reflecting their position in the modern home as CRT TVs reached their technological peak. Thus, during this period, remotes became a much brighter shade of grey, a scheme which is sliding out of fashion once more as new televisions on the cutting edge of technology prefer to portray themselves as sleek machines of the future, and only a glossy black remote is acceptable.

Eh look on the bright side, last time they re-designed the site (2006 I think) the whole thing was down for weeks while they updated and it was very buggy for months (or even over a year) afterward. There were major outages lasting days at a time and it was barely usable during that period. This time they just did a quick transition overnight and the end result is mostly usable with few major bugs from the onset. There are things I don't like about the new design either (I find it a slower than before) but if the worst you have to complain about is stacks, then that's pretty good going. They've certainly done a much better job this time around.