81–90 of 95 posts
I have fond memories of Planet Quake and also Blues News (for the latest scoop). I remember it spawned a whole bunch of other planet sites. I think some of them became part of GameSpy (or its parent company). I probably moved on by then.
I remember spending hours and hours on FreeArcade.com, playing a lot of Java Applet games. I seem to remember my favorites being "Wiz3" and "Tailgunner", but there tons on there. Once I was fourteen or so, I discovered Newgrounds and (along with SomethingAwful) that ended up being where I spent most of my time online. Even though a lot of the games were kind of crap, I still thought it was cool that people made these…
Video game sites back then were cool, yes. Now do video game fan sites. These have in so many ways been replaced over the years by generic ad-ridden wikis but back in the day games often had crazy interesting fan sites for specific video games. So many unique designs and layouts were done for those niche communities and so many of those designers and developers went on to do really cool things in the future. What an…
gamespot itself is definitely different than it used to be but the gamefaqs subdomain has remained nearly identical to how it was in the late 90s early 2000s
Video game sites back then were cool, yes. Now do video game fan sites. These have in so many ways been replaced over the years by generic ad-ridden wikis but back in the day games often had crazy interesting fan sites for specific video games. So many unique designs and layouts were done for those niche communities and so many of those designers and developers went on to do really cool things in the future. What an…
Yep, I remember https://www.esreality.com/ from the Quake 3 era. It's really cool to see it's still up and looks about the same. Other Quake related sites that I remember: Still looks how I remember it: https://web.archive.org/web/20010125112300/http://www.quake3... , Such memories haha: https://web.archive.org/web/20050131033734/http://www.shackn... The archive page has broken and misplaced images from the site's ol…
It's sad that RuneScape is not on this list, yet it is on their site - https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/?s=runescape
Video game sites back then were cool, yes. Now do video game fan sites. These have in so many ways been replaced over the years by generic ad-ridden wikis but back in the day games often had crazy interesting fan sites for specific video games. So many unique designs and layouts were done for those niche communities and so many of those designers and developers went on to do really cool things in the future. What an…
The generic, ad-ridden wikis are everywhere, unfortunately, because the terrible service they provide is free. However, there are also lots of passionate people who pay to host their own MediaWiki servers, and then communities that populate it with accurate information! I think they deserve special applause for providing a really cool service that we mostly take for granted. Some examples: https://bulbapedia.bulbagar…
Another one I still actively use that isnt a fandom mess (besides Warframe) is the wiki for Guild Wars, which is still hosted by the developer.
Video game sites back then were cool, yes. Now do video game fan sites. These have in so many ways been replaced over the years by generic ad-ridden wikis but back in the day games often had crazy interesting fan sites for specific video games. So many unique designs and layouts were done for those niche communities and so many of those designers and developers went on to do really cool things in the future. What an…
The problem is that Fand*m makes finding results from the decent wikis unreasonably hard, I end up having to use extensions like https://getindie.wiki/.
Also, Discord all but killed the concept of a video game fan site...
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Yep, I remember https://www.esreality.com/ from the Quake 3 era. It's really cool to see it's still up and looks about the same. Other Quake related sites that I remember: Still looks how I remember it: https://web.archive.org/web/20010125112300/http://www.quake3... , Such memories haha: https://web.archive.org/web/20050131033734/http://www.shackn... The archive page has broken and misplaced images from the site's ol…
I think there was also planetquake. Loved these sites and frankly, they are beautifully designed. It shows the age, but apart from not being accessible and not being able to scale, the UI was really structured and easy to navigate. I miss these communities.
I still have around 20 PSDs of all of the different Quake clan / gaming ladder sites I put together back in the day.
I think that's why these sites all looked unique. The design started with a blank image in Photoshop because you used to slice up the PSDs into images and stitch it together in code afterwards.
Today you can easily design a site without ever touching an image editor since it can be all CSS rules.
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I think the older games and mods are still pretty playable if you can get over with the slightly janky control. I recall TH has nasty jump traps which almost turned me away back then. I wish I could relive the golden age.
Heck yeah. Remember when new games came out and you were actually genuinely surprised/impressed, over and over? For years in a row? Those were great times indeed. Sure, there were a lot of crappy games, but overall there were so many crazy awesome moments. Newer stuff is very iterative by comparison, IMO.