AT&T and Comcast launch recycled gaming portals just for us

1:57 AM on 12.27.2006   |   Niero

21 comments

So I'm flipping through the latest issue of EGM on my ivory throne when I spot an advertisement with a couple that looks like Kutcher and the lesbian from that sacrilegious Mandy Moore movie. She's "got the latest tips & tricks at the AT&T blue room" while Ashton's doppleganger "Got vaporized" in his  Summa-brand socks. For a second I thought about flushing it, but then I couldn't go back to Hsu & Chan on my next meditation. That, and EGM magazines don't exactly flush very easily. That's potty humor. Moving on.

The premise of the ad is very silly though, especially if you're extremely bored and overanalyze it. First of all, it's hard enough to get decent looking women to read mainstream gaming sites. Who the hell's man-handed girlfriend gets gaming tips from AT&T?  The kind of weirdos that buy crap third party controllers, I guess! Please join me as I review these ISP video game web sites.

Ok, so we have the AT&T Blue Room. For some reason, it's actually green. Very green. It's like a Mountain Dew of gaming sites. I can't find blue anywhere on the page. So much for branding. What's worse is that their gaming web site is just a tab on a larger media portal, and not a pretty one either: www.attblueroom.com/gaming

Apparently AT&T's geezers have decided that this whole "emerging gaming industry" is probably something they want to pay attention to and hired somebody to build them a turnkey gaming portal. It's not bad for the broadband AT&T customer who can't figure out how to change their home page and just wants to see old gaming content served in a constrictive pop up that isn't supported by Firefox. The main feature is exclusive content on a game that's sitting on the shelves at Blockbuster right now. Hmm.  Exclusive to those upper echelon with $3 and transportation of some sort, I suppose.

As expected, the Gaming section of The Blue Green Room has "Tips & Tricks" for a whopping EIGHT mainstream games and all of the high definition Happy Feet wallpaper downloads you could ever wish for ... as JPGs in Zip files. I'm getting so angry I can feel my veins forming a pentagram on my forehead. I've looked into advertising on EGM and it costs tens of thousands of dollars. To drive gamers to this? Most of you could build a better gaming guide on a post it note. Please stick to telephones from now on and leave us alone.  2/10

This vile site reminded me an ad I saw recently somewhere by Comcast. The rival ISP's effort is a proper domain called GameInvasion.net which looks very impressive at first ... until you realize that the entire web site is more or less like an orgasmic and slow way to browse the stuff you've already seen at IGN (most of the previews and article are from their network) and their news section is an RSS scrape of Gametab's home page, also part of IGN. It comes so close to being a proper gaming site ... but then [advice censored as I want them to fail]. Instead, it's like a 90's era multimedia CD-Rom with web-enabled screenshots and movies. You're better off reading IGN directly so you can skip around faster. 6/10 (That's better than Twilight Princess to some)

So there you have it, my reviews of ISP's gaming portal web sites. Stay tuned kids as next week I'll be reviewing big oil's entry into the ringtones market.