Mobygames has been quietly updating its design over the past month. The result with a new logo seems much more optimized for tablet use than the old site, which was better optimized for widescreen use. On the main page, items on the left hand side of the page have been put at the bottom of the page. The functionality is still there, however.

Sure, its a far cry from the abomination of September-December, 2013, but the redesign is typical of website design today, keep everything within the center of the page surrounded by large borders. The old Mobygames site would use as much width as your screen could provide. A few sites like Wikipedia still do, but most sites today stick their content squarely in the middle of the page. I am not saying that this approach is not without merit. Tablets benefit from this approach, but also multiple window users also enjoy the benefit. However, the wikipedia adaptive-width approach is the best in my opinion. One can use the left and right sides of the screen without making the site seem cluttered.

Of course, at least the new site looks something like the old site. I have not noticed any mass exodus or expressions of dissatisfaction like September 2013.

I agree that using percentages instead of pixels is best for flexibility. I once argued this point with someone that was a student majoring in publishing that tried to insist that a fixed width should be the only standard. His argument was based on a fixed number of characters wide for best readability. He could not quite grasp the concept that the number of pixels will vary according to the size of font that the user has set in his browser to view the page.

Moby's new layout is not too much of a departure from their old style, functionality or performance.

Great Hierophant wrote:

I am not saying that this approach is not without merit.

Are you saying it is without merit, then? ;-)

Whatever issues the original design had, they could've been amended with a few tweaks and fixes. This newly updated layout isn't the end of the world, and after some adaptation I can mostly live with it, so I've been carrying on as usual while offering (constructive) criticism on the forums... one or two of my suggestions have been adopted, as were many others made by users, so they're clearly listening at least.

That said, this new design sure has its problem points. The wasting of screen real estate is compounded by this new trend towards spacing everything out - wider margins, larger line heights in paragraphs, bigger fonts, and more padding around everything, with the end result of forcing you to scroll twice as much as before for the same amount of information.
Things like the article section being retired also rub me the wrong way, but the biggest issue for me is the colors... I dislike the bland (and blinding) white color scheme, which replaced the light (but still visually distinctive) default theme of old. To make matters worse they got rid of MobyDark, but I've fixed that part myself, at least for now.

I'm happy that the important functionality is all there and that the site is still relatively lightweight, without a megabyte of useless scripts bogging down every page load. On the other hand, it would be nice if they stopped messing around with the cosmetics, and started concentrating on fixing bugs and improving functionality - but what do I know; I'm one of those quaint and archaic folks who visit sites for their content, not their design, and catering to such a silly demographic is bad business these days. ;-)

Couldn't find a more appropriate thread to ask about Mobygames, so excuse me in advance if I should have posted this elsewhere although it is about current site.

Googling for example about "mt-32 dos games" or "cga dos games" I got results from Mobygames and a link of the form mobygames.com/attribute/sheet/attributeId.....
I thought this functionality is really useful, been able to produce lists from Mobygames with games having specific properties. So I tried to find it from within the site, with no success.

In case I'm just blind, can anyone provide some brief instructions on how to perform this kind of search in Mobygames?

Of course you can make a new thread. We're allowed to do that, you know? 😉

As for making lists... with the example of "MT-32 dos games", you can just search "MT-32" from the site, go with the result "Sound Devices Supported : Roland MT-32 (and LAPC-I)" and then select the platform "DOS" afterwards (faster way).

Or alternatively you can browse the games list ("Games" link on top), select platform "DOS", then on the next page, "Sound Devices Supported" (under Tech-Info) and then find "Roland MT-32 (and LAPC-I)" down the page.

Aaaaah that's exactly what I was looking for! I had visited multiples times the "first" search screen looking for the desired properties, but never thought that if I select a platform additional properties will appear in another screen, thank you so much.
You see now why I didn't want to open another thread? 😀 It would have died already!

Well then we can always go off-topic afterwards, that too is allowed in Milliways! 😁