Civ City: Rome

This computer game that will be released shortly hired a team of designers who go by the name ROKKAN to create a promotional website for the game. They won an award for their website in the Horizon best Flash website category.

I'm wonder why though. The website doesn't offer any new approach to creating a Flash based game website. This is a very standard affair with nothing any more interesting than a few dozen others that I've seen.

Again though we find ourselves waiting silly times for content to load. I just can't seem to find justification for the load times on this website as there isn't all that much to see after each loading period.

This is the typical loading bar, a pillar being constructed. You get to see this a lot on this Flash website.

I do quite like the background movement going on, for instance in this shot the people are building on the left hand side of the screen whilst you read about the game contents.

OK so while the website isn't fantastic at any stretch of the imagination it does look all very professionally created with a very unified style that seems to tie in perfectly with what the game itself offers. This maybe exactly what they were after, but it all just reminds me of the old Age of Empires website + game which makes the entire product look dated and as if it offers nothing new.

Medieval Total War

While the Civ City may not have created a very impressive website there only seems to be two main approaches to creating game website's. Either a very heavily Flash orientated approach or in my opinion the much more desirable HTML website with Flash to back it up visually. A good example of this would be the Medieval Total War website. Although it's not a stunning example of interactive design is achieves perfectly a highly and easily updatable website that visually is more than enough.

You also see a lot less loaders on this example. What content does need some loading is also content that isn't essential to the viewing of the website. This is my preferable direction in a website.