2beegames.com has, since May 1st, become IndiePub, but haven't bothered to claim indiepub.com domain, or indiepub.co.uk, or .net, or.. well.. whatever.


For the past month or two, they've been banging on and on about their all-new coming soon site, and how amazing and new it'll be. They were originally going for a nice bright yellow theme, with all nice sparkly-ness, and instead seem to have settled on kind of dull desaturated brown/orange theme, along with a complete identity change.
Still, their main features that they promised are apparently there. Somewhere. If you can find them.

Here's what they've added, straight from their "New" page.

Regular news and articles : Something that everyone promises on every website ever, (see AGameAWeek!) and hopes to god they can keep up with. Fingers crossed!

Experience System : One of those "Karma" things where people spam the crap out of the system in the hopes of getting a bigger score. Over at Socoder, I've a "Do it NOW" thing going, where if someone stops being active, their little scores start to drop. And shitty forum posts don't count. Hopefully the new 2BeesInDePub version will be just as good, and won't end up with older members lording stupidly high ranks, whilst releasing bugger all, over the newer talent who actually do the more interesting things, but haven't yet scored 17 bazillion points.

Asset System : If you draw a massive logo for a game, (or.. um.. a DVD Case ) or make a great theme tune or something, and want to show it off separately, you can list it as an asset. You can then attach it to the game and have the two linked. Neat idea.

Simple Play : If this works, it'll be fan-fucking-tastic. Apparently MY games will work in a little Java box, right in the browser. I still have my doubts, and have yet to see it in action, but.. Fingers crossed!!!


But for every upside there's a downside. (There are more downsides, but I felt it fairer to stick with the 1:1 ratio.)

Be aware, the site is still fresh, so they may be forgiven for a few of these faults. They have had it in Beta for about a month, and probably way more than that, but whatever..

Fucking Middle Click, Damnit : Middle clicking, via whatever the hell crappy javascript bollocks they've used, refuses to leave the current tab alone. If I sit on their homepage, and decide to middle click each of the news items, the first middle click will open the news in a new tab, AND open it in the current tab, thus fucking up my browsing experience completely.

But wait, there's more!!

New Topic : The "New Topic" button (which isn't loading, so shows the generic "No image" icon) doesn't work, and returns a 404, thus leading me to have to post this rant here, instead of on their forum.

Hang on, not done ranting...

Showcases : The area that you showcase your work, and the place where people go "OMG! Great Game!!" by looking at THE SCREENSHOTS.. Except, of course, there are no bloody screenshots. None, zip, nada. Obviously they've used the space for the all-important "Play Game" thing, but since that's not there, it leads most of the games to look like.. um... Well, like this..



Ooh, fantabio!

No New Games : Their fantastic frontpage no longer lists the newest games AT ALL, and their game list page only lists the last four. That's a deathly plummet from 12 to 4, and it's just not bloody well on. Without people clicking the tiny "Newest" link at the top of the game list page, all the new stuff is all going to disappear into a big vat of nothingness, and people will all end up playing the old "Top ranked" stuff over and over and over. It was already an issue when none-members came along and downranked games into oblivion, and it'll be more of an issue now that you can see jack all in the first place.
Handy Hint, that great big "NEWEST" header should be a link to the same place as that little tiny "newest" link at the top of the page.


It seems somewhat ironic that a rather good website has been replaced by a bit of a shit one... on May the 1st . .. . AGAIN!!! Exactly like how BlitzCoder got fucked over by CodersWorkshop, and killed half of it's community in one foul swoop.

Moral of the Story : If it ain't broke, yada yada..