The most amazing games site (spong.com)

Member Name: DoctorDee

Product:	spong.com
Date:	23/10/02 (504 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Comprehensive, Interesting, Great News

Disadvantages: Some (lots of) data missing, Smae pages have lots of images

SPOnG is the most amazing games site I've ever seen. It attempts to catalogue every game ever released on every platform... another review here criticises it for having lots of titles listed with no information, but I think that review misses the point. SPOnG is a site built by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, and the people who run the site actively encourage visitors to the site to contribute. Most of the gaes they don't have content for are old 8-bit games, and while SPOnG might not have any information on a lot of these game, neither do most other sites.

But what SPOnG does do, as well as providing a repository for enthusiasts to contribute that data, is it puts it in context. There are some excellent single-platform gaming sites, but SPonG creates links between developers and publishers and creating softographies for each individual coder, artist and musician, and letting you see what games a given company or individual has been involved with across platforms. It's a little known fact that today's computer games industry was created when a group of programmers, tired of never being given any credit, split away from Atari to form Activision. Ironically, 30 years later we are again in a position where the people who actually make computer games are often not given the credit we deserve, and SPOnG seeks to redress this.

Unlike other sites SPONG covers every game released in the UK, rather than just cherry-picking the big releases. They also cover soem US and Japan only releases, but don't have much information on these titles.

The site has excellent competitions, with great prizes, and their news is probably the best in the Industry. In recent months, they have broken several big stories, like the sale of Rare to Microsoft and the new backlit Gameboy Advance 2. Ironically, SPOnG is often so early with the news that they are criticised on bulletin board for "creating rumours", but 9 times out of ten SPOnG's
rumours of today are everybody's news tomorrow.

There have been a large number of high-profile games web-sites that fuelled by dot-com money, flared up and disappeared in a very short time. SPOnG has been around for years (I don't know how long, but as long as I can remember) and it seems to be here for the long-haul. It's good to have something you can count on.

SPOnG even has a groovy "skinning" system, which lets visitors decide how they want it to look, including a rather cool Matrix style skin called "greenscreen". If you are into computer games, SPOnG is well worth a look.

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