Game Usagi 3.1.5.4 rev7 Release Candidate

April 25th, 2012 by

While we may be kidding in this post’s title, the recent changes to Game Usagi are no joke.  Over the past couple of weeks we’ve slowly rolled out a ton of enhancements to the Game Usagi experience to make your visits here more streamlined and enjoyable. Remember to clear your browser cache so that all of the improvements display correctly and let us know if you have any issues or ideas for ways we could further improve. If you’re interested, check after the jump for a list on what’s new both under and above the Game Usagi hood.

 

The most obvious change that Game Usagi has undergone is that we’ve grown an extra 140 pixels wide to a whopping 980px.  The Kubrick WordPress default theme that Game Usagi was based off of back in 2007’s default width was a mere 740px, so we’ve come a long way.  Optimized for the large aspect-ratio screens that now surely outnumber the old square ones, Game Usagi has more junk in its trunk in all the right places.

 

Our second most obvious upgrade is our new menubar along the top of the site.  Not only is it overall much prettier than its predecessor, it has the greatly improved functionality of not only linking you to the category archive for the system when you click it, but also showing you the 5 latest posts in the category so you can quickly see what’s new around Game Usagi.

 

Many users informed us that Game Usagi would hang a bit when loading the Facebook “Like”, Twitter, and Google Plus buttons over every post on the home page.  We’ve switched our sharing theme up in AddThis to now provide all of the convenience with essentially none of the loading issues.  We’ve included our top five most-used sharing options above every post by default and you can use the plus button to access any of over 300 other sharing methods/sites should you require something else.

We’ve expanded the long-standing pagination navigation feature that we’ve had on our home page for a while now to also include category archives and searches so that they’re much easier to use.  We’re also working on further streamlining the search function, so watch this space for news in that regard.

 

Finally, we’ve done a lot of code, image, plugin, and asset compression, optimization, and minification.  Game Usagi has more features than it ever has and it still loads significantly faster than in the past.  We’re done the big UI improvements for now, but we’re constantly working behind the scenes to make Game Usagi the best it can be, so thanks for being the reason we do what we do and we look forward to putting the new Game Usagi through its paces during this year’s E3 press conference.