I actually liked the old way of embedding the flash a lot, but I am not against a new layout. However, this layout does have its problems, a bit too many of them if you ask me.
First off, the current layout just does not work at 600x800 and looks really crammed in 1024x768. I don't see what can be done about this without completely redoing the design again and that's probably not considered. Maybe it's possible to steal a few pixels here and there and add to the sides, it would probably make it feel better at 1024x768. Being able to choose a different layout (not necessarily the old one) might resolve this problem all together, but I would not want such an option for my site, I guess, so I can't advise you to do that.
Then there's widescreen. It has been mentioned a hundred times in this thread, but I think it is important enough to mention again: Authors should have the option to disable widescreen for their flashes.
Next I want to talk about autoloading and a closely related concept: the close button.
I think that a lot of thought went into the decision to make flashes load automatically, as you don't strike me as the kind of people to make such a decision hastily. However, autoloading everywhere and all the time is not the right solution I think. This has been mentioned a lot of times, but what I consider the biggest problem with it, has only been said properly a very limited number of times. I can't "save" flashes for later now. Say I am looking for a tower defense game and see a number of promising flashes, now I can no longer open all of them in tabs and try them out one by one. The disappearance of the close button looks like it was just an oversight to me.
I'll come with a proposal for solving this in a moment, but first I will keep on "whining" for a little longer.
Someone put it quite nicely earlier in this thread (sorry, I don't feel like going through it all again to find out who it was): The author deserves more than just a footnote. I don't think putting the flash info below the flash was a correct choice. Putting the author comments and reviews all the way down is not something I would have done either, but the flash info is obviously in the wrong place, I think.
The back button does not function correctly. When dimming a flash, one needs to press back once extra in order to go back one page from where he or she started. I'll get technical on this one right away.
Seeing that the ads are in iframes, they disappear and the url of the main page does not change, I blame the changing of the ads. I haven't looked into it, but I suppose you are changing the src attribute of the iframe, which causes it to be a new entry in the history of your browser. Even if this is not the case, you are modifying something of the iframe that causes it to be a new history entry. One could instead access the content of the iframe directly and change it using innerHTML (or the W3C html-changing functions) and not leave a history entry.
The last thing I want to complain about is pop-up blockers blocking the "play in pop-up" button. While I was looking for the reason of the last problem (it would need a reason, usually you'll have to do difficult things to do the exact opposite), I found that the three buttons at the top where actually a flash file. Now I know that this is a flash portal, but there are correct and incorrect uses of flash. Most things other than what could be submitted to the portal are incorrect use of flash (barring some exceptions such as using flash to play a sound). Besides, I don't see any reason at all to make these buttons a flash file. And as it happens, once these buttons are done in html rather than flash, it's a piece of cake to make a pop-up blocker not consider it something that needs to be blocked.
So, that's enough complaining. Before I continue to my suggestion, I would like to highlight something another user said:
Adding the author's name to the title bar of a flash would be nice.
Alright, as to how I would do it. It sounds like swapping the suggestions and the flash info box would do a lot of good in terms of solving the author not getting due credit. However, I think I can do better than that and leave them as they are and solve a couple of problems at the same time.
Personally I think it would be best to collapse the area that is taken up by the flash and the suggestions to - say - a 100 pixel height area. This area would feature a very large play button and possibly some other nice stuff. This way all the things that were pushed down, aren't pushed down so much. When clicking the button the flash and the suggestions would fold into the page much like the write a review-box does now. A close button would remove the flash again, but probably it should leave the suggestions, as this would be the moment at which the suggestions would be most relevant. Possibly it would be good to move things around a bit so parts can move up even though the suggestions are staying in their place, but I am not sure whether I would go with that or with simply leaving the area where the flash was open.
What I have not addressed yet is the idea that outsiders will like the autoplay. Somewhere in the thread the option of using a GET variable for this (?autoplay=true). This sounds alright, but is not, as people will copy the url of a game they like when digging it and not add that variable. So I came up with the following: autoplay unless the HTTP_REFERER is newgrounds. This way incoming links will have the benefit of autoplay, while if you start out at newgrounds, you won't have flashes autoplaying.
With this system in place, I think it would still be good to implement an overriding GET variable, so links in weekly mails can be done such that autoplay is off.
One could argue whether the flash info and the suggestions should be swapped when autoplaying. In the end I think it would be best not to. These incoming users are the ones that the suggestions box is most important for, and I think that authors can stand not being in the spotlight in this case. However, it is easy to argue in favor of swapping them as well.
Well, that's my eight thousand words (or two cents) on the new view. I hope you can do something with my suggestions, and if not... too bad.
