amingReport.com provides gamers with a steady stream of role-playing game news, commentary and gossip by successfully merging Slashdot's relentless pursuit of geek news with the comic-stack arguments of a thousand gaming stores.
The site's members, who submit stories to the editors for possible posting, generate much of the site's news. Home-page stories are posted daily and are then stored in an extensive archive that's browsable by lists of the "Top 25 Read Stories" and "Top 25 Commented Stories" as well as categories for all of the major gaming companies.
Much of the site's content focuses around Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, d20 and other role-playing games, but there's also news about collectible games (Star Wars TCG, HeroClix), strategy-war games (Lord of the Rings), board games (Risk 2210) and even electronic game aids (OpenRPG). "The Non-Gamer Report," written by Maddie, the wife of a gamer, and "Inside the Game Store" by the owner of someone crazy enough to run one, are two of the site's half-dozen or so specialty columns.
The discussion boards are more than just breeding grounds for d20 flame wars. Designers—both from Wizards of the Coast and other companies—frequently post, and one, Ryan Dancey, of Organized Play and Open Gaming License fame, even hosts his own forum, where he dissects d20.
— Ken Newquist
Site of the Week—July 22, 2002
uman efforts to explore space have created a rich and compelling history, one that is made complex not only by its tales of human courage and ingenuity, but by its extensive technical lore. Rocket specifications, launch histories, failed experiments and new achievements all form part of this exciting story, making for an intimidating body of data. How can someone new to the topic hope to sort through it all?
The answer is to let the Encyclopedia Astronautica do all the work. An exhaustive compendium of data on space-exploration efforts worldwide, it contains everything a researcher could want: astronaut biographies, comprehensive listings of spacecraft, a timeline of discoveries, flights and records set by explorers—even inventories of ship payloads for most spaceflights.
The challenge for any site containing so much data, of course, is in making it accessible to users. To that end, Encyclopedia Astronautica has a search feature, as well as an alphabetic listing of topics. It doesn't stop there, though, offering specialized indexes on rocketry, space programs and astronauts. Finally, its chronology goes back as far as 1911, and has a "This Day in Space History" feature that lets users track events on particular dates of interest.
While it does have a decent number of pictures, Encyclopedia Astronautica is a largely text-based site, with fewer images than a visitor might expect. The best place to see photographs is within the feature articles, which cover topics like superguns, an account of a Soviet Star Wars program, devices built by rocketry pioneer Robert H. Goddard and a listing of space missions that never went forward. These articles are laid out with a selection of relevant images and are cross-linked to other entries within the encyclopedia.
Finally—for anyone who isn't sated by the reams of information provided on this terrific site—the page offers links to late-breaking news stories and a number of recommended books.
— A.M. Dellamonica
Site of the Week—July 15, 2002
oda once said, "Always in motion is the future." It's a sentiment Projections takes to heart, as it rates Hollywood's efforts to predict what tomorrow might bring.
Movies are judged on three criteria: futurism (how complete, coherent or innovative a future is), entertainment (how much the reviewer liked the film) and plausibility (how likely it is that the film's future will come to pass). All of the site's nearly 100 films are rated on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the best, and many have write-ups expounding on their virtues (or lack thereof). In addition to being sorted by ratings, films are also grouped by more than two dozen topics, including cybernetics, antigravity and the ever-popular flying cars.
The site's creator, Josh Calder, is a futurist by trade and works for a consulting firm in Washington D.C. His marks are generally right on—Gattaca and Blade Runner dominate the "futurism" category
while Aliens, Terminator and Star Wars top the "entertainment" list. The "plausibility" section may cause more
arguments: while Deep Impact makes a convincing case for a comet hitting the Earth, is Close Encounters of the Third Kind really as plausible as Contact?
Projections augments its offerings with a page of Web links dedicated to the study of futurism, as well as a few notes speculating on topics such as space travel, cloning and alien life. Fans of early 20th century science-fiction films might be disappointed by the site's post-Star Wars focus, but overall it gives an effective view of the future as seen through Hollywood's lenses.
— Kenneth Newquist
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