I’d like to welcome all of our readers, editors, past writers and future visitors to the third major version of Broken Joysticks! It’s hard for me to imagine that this site has been going strong for over four years now – It seems like only a little while ago that our founding staff (myself included) were brain storming ideas for the name of the site when it hit me, as I stared at a broken PlayStation 2 controller on my coffee table.
Over the past four years we’ve delivered over 3,200 pieces of written content to the site, attended 2 major conventions, launched our YouTube channel and a Sunday night twitch talk show. None of this could have been possible without our dedicated readers and excellent editorial staff who continue to deliver some of the most insightful and diverse written content I’ve seen in my 11 years writing about interactive entertainment.
So this new design might not look all that different from our old one. It takes the simple visual design principles from Broken Joysticks 2.0 and gives everything a fresh coat of paint. Alongside this significant visual upgrade the new design integrates our twitter feed right into the sidebar, provides visitors to our front page with visually pleasing transitions between slider items and brings our back-end up to date.
Our reviews policy will also be changing going forward – alongside the + / – aspects system we introduced in last year’s design update we will also be re introducing scoring to our reviews. When we conceptualized last year’s update it was at a time when major sites, much larger than ours, were moving away from numbered scores and we felt that this was a good move. In hindsight not having a 20 point scale with multiple sub-categories does make reading reviews easier to digest but the they still lacked a certain visual punch. We’re still working out the details but rest assured that some form of scoring metric will return, along with a visual cue that will help inform readers about the quality of the games we review.
Also if you’ve ever wanted to contribute to the site, we’d love to hear from you. Send a short introduction email to PR@BrokenJoysticks.net and someone from our management team will get back to you as soon as we can. There is always room for breaking news, thought provoking editorials and unique takes on your favorite games. With E3 fast approaching, there is no other time to show your burning passion for interactive mediums.
So please mind the dust as we continue to fix the odd bug here or there. With three weeks until E3 things are looking up!
Great work to our web designer, Kirk for doing such a fantastic job.
Here’s to another year of excellent coverage,
Rae Michelle Richards
Co-Founder, BrokenJoysticks
