P r e s e n c e    o f    t h e    F o r c e

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decipher.com

The big D's page itself. This page is SWCCG's offical home in cyberspace, and is a veritable mine of information. Also, it holds information upon other Decipher products such as Star Trek CCG, Young Jedi CCG and some Murder Mystery games (?!).

One of the major benefits of viewing Decipher's pages is that all the information there is straight from the horse's mouth as it were. This is probably the first place you'll find Errata, Rules Changes, Clarifications, FAQs and other newly-breaking information.

Decipher also have put up the image of every card in the game - yes every card in the game. Simply by looking at Decipher's site you can find out what even the most obscure card not only does, but also what it looks like and how rare it is.

Decipher have also provided the players of their CCGs with Bulletin Boards and also access to the SWCCG Palace (another reason why I should get my personal PC connected to the Web instead of using the free access on the Uni's public workstations). Here lively discussion abounds, but is kept from going over the top by means of the reasonably new Registration system.

Another section on the site deals with tournaments. This is very useful as you can find your ranking within your region, and worldwide. You can also see what tournaments are coming up too. An interesting sideline is to look at the rules and guidelines the T.D.s get from Decipher (no, it's not personal, they have to do it that way...).

Decipher has not though managed to pull off the perfect site however, despite a recent revamp. Whilst the site itself looks okay, it can sometimes seem to take an age to download. Due to the manner in which many pages are constructed, the viewer cannot simply stop the page loading when it has reached the desired section. Defendable, but still annoying. As well as this comes the slow pace of updates. Some sections appear woefully out-of-date, and others change only periodically. Also, it seems that with all the information on store, Decipher seem aching to throw it all at you at once. Many pages are confusing, with too much information within. The font is also annoyingly small upon occasions - I obviously don't have the same size monitor as Decipher. The colours can also be a pain too, as the fairly good idea of colour-coding some areas appears to have resulted in a mish-mash kalidescope on some pages, which is hard on the eyes.

Overall, whilst Decipher have set up a great store of information for their game, their site isn't dynamic enough on its own, relying upon sections such as News and the Bulletin Boards to liven the place up. Considering many other corporate Web-Sites out there however, it could have been a lot worse, despite an occasional tendency to overkill. Informative and secure, the mighty D have produced a reasonably good job.