We’re Finally Leaping into the Modern Era

4 minutes of reading / By /

As of today, we’ve officially been around for seven years. It may not sound like much, but it certainly feels like a lifetime ago, with how significantly things have changed both on the web and in our daily lives. 336GameReviews was started as a love letter to the old net, when websites didn’t have rhythm or reason in their layouts, UIs, and color schemes. It felt like the wild west with an equally tangible sense of wanting to explore the unknown. Thankfully, we didn’t take it that far, as we soon discovered what a miserable experience our first layout concept would have been on mobile. As uniform as the web looks these days, it is for a good reason.


You may have noticed a decrease in the amount of content we’ve been putting out in the past few months, and the reason for that loops back around to our original vision. Our website felt archaic, sloppy, and most importantly, too slow. Despite all this, we somehow garnered an increasingly growing following, and while we had the content, your user experience was something we could improve. It was time to put down the controller and start tightening up the foundation of this site. As you may imagine, this was a less enjoyable process than creating content, yet it provided more than fruitful results.


That said, let me list the improvements we’ve introduced this year.

Audio Reviews

This was by far the most time-consuming addition. We manually added a podcast-style voiceover in every review we’ve written. That was over 700 reviews, and with our long-form factor way of doing things, it was well over a million words of work. All of it was well worth the result. You can now listen to our reviews while in another tab, download them for later, or just read along. The sheer accessibility of having an audio version of our content made this inclusion a no-brainer.

Website Speed

Nobody enjoys waiting for a website to load, so this was another area where we heavily focused our time on. Accessing the mobile version, in particular, was a test of patience. We have now achieved parity between the two, which was far overdue, while greatly increasing the responsiveness of both. A single second can seem like an eternity when waiting, so now, no matter how you access this site, it will be a far more snappy experience.

Progressive Web App

To spare you the technical details, a PWA is basically a way for your browser of choice to store a website on your device. It will appear like a native program/app, with the added benefit of being able to be downloaded directly instead of searching for it through the IOS or Google Play Store. The benefits of installing it on your device are to notify you of any new reviews or if you have a dodgy internet connection. It caches any page you visit, meaning it can be viewed or listened to entirely offline. You can install our app for the PC through the icon in the URL bar, or by clicking on the ‘add to home screen’ slide if you’re on mobile.

View Picture on the Same Page

In the past, clicking on a picture would open it up on a new tab to show its full resolution. That would take one out of the reading experience. Now when you click on a picture, it will load on the same page in its maximum quality. This makes going through a review seamless, as everything is now accessible from a single tab. Right-clicking on an opened image still lets you download it at its best quality. None of the functionality was lost. It was all just made more accessible, which really was a theme in the things we improved this year.




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It was challenging to update our website and post consistently, but now that we have finished up on the technical side of things, we can focus on bringing out content. I’d like to sincerely thank everyone that has stuck around with us over the years and those that gave us a shot in the first place. Despite the recent lack of reviews, we’ve still seen an increase in views. You, the reader, are the difference between this site being a source of information versus a glorified online diary. We will continue trying our best to be worthy of your attention and hope to continue seeing all of you in the future.

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