Time truly does fly, doesn’t it? It felt like just yesterday that we somehow managed to put together a website and carved out our own little place on the internet. October, 7 , of 2015 is when we officially launched and opened with a review of Proto Raider. It was a small game made entirely with ASCI characters and was the exact type of unknown experience we yearned to talk about.
If you’ve clicked on that Proto Raider link, you’ll have likely noticed that our writing style is much the same. We have liked to include a picture after every paragraph from the start. The only real difference is the lack of a rating or score at the end. Initially, we felt that what was said in the review should inform the reader as to whether they’ll like it or not. After much discussion, around a year later we hired an artist to make some assets for us including the logo, icons, and a thumbs up or down rating system.
Funny thing that, we ended up using exactly none of that. We used a logo somebody336 made in around ten minutes and opted for a five-star rating system instead. The simplicity of them better suited our vision for a no-frills function over style look and feel to the website. That undoubtedly amateurish presentation got us all nostalgic over how the 90’s internet was like, causing us to keep the look to this day, for better or worse.
Back to the topic of rating games, the main deciding factor in including it is the ability for a reader to scroll down and have an idea if they should even bother to read the review, by knowing our opinion at a glance. That does put an over-importance on an arbitrary rating just like we originally intended to avoid, but it ultimately outweighs the negative, in our opinion. For as flawed as a title may be, the saying “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure” is all too true here. Do not hesitate to try a title we issue a bad score to if it sounded appealing to you or be ashamed to say you enjoy it.
336GameReviews is still run by two people. Those being somebody336 the insane computer nerd and Sr. Tortilla, the slightly less insane computer nerd who has recently made a Twitch Channel. We will have more to say below, but as to not drag things out, we want to thank you all very, very much for taking the time out of your day to read our content. It has honestly been more of a success than we ever imagined it would due to our love for covering both the old and incredibly obscure titles out there. Imagine our surprise when we had not only a sizable number of people show up, but an incredibly diverse group from nearly every country, be it Indonesia or Peru.
Sincerely, we thank all of you whether you have just stumbled by or have been a long time reader. We’ve shot past the days of our first months where we were thrilled to even get a few views in a week, but we appreciate you visiting our little slice of the internet as much as ever.
Our Future
We are entirely self-funded and are writing out of passion for the games/tech industry. It is fully intended to keep this site going until people will have no idea what a TI-99/4 computer is… which is probably right now, actually >_>. Jokes aside, there are no issues on keeping this site running for the foreseeable future. For the sake of full disclosure, currently, our only form of income is via our DLsite affiliate link which nets us a few bucks each month. Even if it somehow became much more than that in the future, the integrity and opinions of this site will not be dedicated by the all mighty dollar.
As of the past few years, we have unintentionally been focusing an overwhelming amount of our content on the modern PC. Some of our consoles categories such as the Sega Saturn and TurboGrafx-16 lack a single review. Even the Amiga, ZX Spectrum, and Commodore computers lack any content. That is something we hope to change soon. More hardware coverage is also planned.
Recent Changes
This year started off strong on the content side of things and gradually lessened. The entire month of September saw not even a single post. That is directly related to the Covid pandemic that has thrown a wrench into most of our lives, no doubt. We have not abandoned this site nor has our passion run dry. It is just that on top of all the chaos, the both of us are “essential workers” and have had little in the way of free time. We hope to be back in full force soon.
More direct changes have been to the menus on the header. We’ve cleaned it up and added a Sega tab to find all their consoles in one spot. The News section has also been removed as neither of us has used it in years, nor really plan to as we prefer hands-on time with a preview rather than reposting marketing blurbs about a title. Not to mention we are a bunch of hipsters that usually get around to looking at games long after they released 😛
We Have An Anime Site?!
Oh boy, where do we start with this one. On October, 29, 2016 we created a website called Weebs Weekly. It was meant to be used to exclusively review anime as to not mix them with the video game feed of this site. Somehow we believed we could watch and cover an entire anime at least once every week… the last post was in May… of 2017. That was a bonafide failure, though not one we intended to give up on. We still own the domain rights and year after year, keep renewing it.
Will we finally start posting content there again and rise like a phoenix? Your guess is as good as ours. The motivation is there, yet not with enough force to actually go through with it. As it is now, it is pretty much a Berserk fansite of somebody 336, since a good portion of the 16 overall posts are related to it. It is an interesting bit of our history nonetheless that we thought we should share.
Adult Content
Here we have the most decisive subject to date. Somebody336’s first Visual Novel was in fact an ero named Saya no Uta. The fact that there are brilliant video games in the adult realm was not news to us. Yet it is a pretty taboo subject to talk about anywhere aside from forums or Discord servers dedicated to them and are seen as lesser to traditional games by many outside of those circles. With the complete freedom we possess, it was decided that why on Earth are we censoring ourselves when we actually want to cover them and bring attention to some criminally overlooked gems.
That discussion took place after the disaster that was our anime website occurred, so making another site was not something we were keen on doing. Joining someone else’s site as writers to post about that type of content was considered too. That set-up was inconvenient, leaving us with mixing them in with “regular” games here. With our heavy focus on lewd PS Vita titles in our early days and later on trying our hand on anime shows, our audience was thankfully open to it. We still want to get around to having a way to hide all the adult stuff, however, but 2020 is going to 2020.
Our Beginnings Reviewing Things
Seeing our relatively poor grammar, it should come as no surprise that neither of us started out trying to become a journalist or joining a field of work involving tons of writing. Our inspiration was quite strange. It was seeing the GOG review scores and tons of people rating games 5/5 solely for nostalgia. We wanted to provide a more unbiased view of the classics, as well as to delve deeper into a game’s mechanics and quirks. Luckily for us, we were in a little Gamefaqs group that allowed us to use their private site for that purpose and give us feedback. That eventually got us to a confident enough state to actually start writing Steam reviews for less biased feedback on our writing than what our friends would tell us.
The idea of our own site was always in the back of our minds, until one day, we finally pulled the trigger. That act opened up a world of possibilities and freedom, as well as a whole lot of trial & error from everything to our content to more technical matters. Kind of silly considering written media was well on its way out in 2015, with Youtube and Twitch already being the go-to places for game reviews/content. The upside being that with our chosen path there is no need for censorship or dealing with either of their obtuse nonsense that could randomly kill your channel.
What’s With This Post?
This blog-like type of post is very unusual for us. It’s the first time we’ve published something like this as we are all too content working in the background and attempting to keep this site purely informational. For our five years of operation, we’d thought it’d be fun to let long time readers or those that are just curious on some behind the scenes stuff instead of our usual deafening silence. Or maybe it was just a ploy to post memes ;_;
As always, if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions, we are always happy to hear.
Cheers to another five years and thanks for sticking around!
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