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1-4-2026: Brave New Year

Ho ho holy shit, what a start to the new year. What could I possibly be referring to? It is a mystery.

My personal holiday was uneventful. I had a double-dipping of Christmas because some of my relatives were out of state. Had the second Xmas bash just yesterday, actually. I don’t really get gifts at my age, but it was a pleasant enough get-together. My girlfriend got me a neato screen projector, and a friend helped me out financially. Both something to be thankful for!

My change to a bi-weekly format is paying off; I have a lot to talk about. Allow me to open with…

Noah’s Barks

Site Updates

All images converted to .webp format for quicker page loading, excepting those already at equal or smaller file sizes.
Restored functionality to contact forms on the contact and commissions pages.
Addition of Cloudflare Turnstile to anything requiring user input to protect against bots.
Improved firewall.
Resumed generating critical .css.
Various caching optimizations.
Overhauled SEO metadata.
Addition and/or changes to subscription banners.
Sub-categories for video game platforms for better navigation.
Deleted redundant tags.
Refined the Categories & Tags page. Added premade hybrid tags for convenience.
Made a new home page layout… twice.

I like to think this work has paid off, as my site viewership and retention has practically quadrupled in the past two weeks. In the past 30 days, I’ve had 456 visitors, 766 pageviews, and higher average reading times! That’s incredible, and I’m very grateful to everyone who’s found my site worthy of their time. I’ll continue trying to meet and exceed your standards.

In particular, my Super Robot Wars guides have been gaining traction, such as for J and Alpha Gaiden. Those took a long time to make, and a small number of readers have been revisiting them. I’ll have to add to those! The majority of these visits are scattered across hundreds of different pages, which suggests my SEO work is effective.

Frustrated, I decided to return to ground zero and start the basics over. Since my technical vocabulary has expanded from my own trial-and-error, I have an easier time parsing beginner guides now. I followed some suggestions, most of which turned out to be quite helpful. An exception is a .css and js optimization plugin that I think was inappropriately suggested to entry-level WordPress users. Basically, I didn’t know what I was doing and ended up damaging my .css and js.

Now, let me rewind a bit. While looking for alternatives to the Yoast SEO plugin, which could be related to my lengthy backend load times, I tried a different SEO plugin and accidentally deleted my previous Yoast settings during the export process.

Well, fuck. That was bad. I deleted hundreds of pages’ focus keyphrases, breadcrumbs, meta descriptions, and canonical URLs. I could have used an auto backup, but even going back just a day would have undone major changes to my site’s structure. I was screwed either way. Thinking it over, I decided it’d be best to redo the metadata, as I had pages with outdated practices anyway, and finding those would require me to comb pages one-by-one. A redo would incorporate that into the process.

So, that’s what I did. I spent about three days redoing SEO metadata for my entire goddamn site. I’m amazed I didn’t get carpal tunnel. During this, I shortened a ton of URLs. It’s possible Google will stop indexing those pages because it’s a bad search engine, but I’ll cross that bridge when I become aware that it’s burning. I mean, I’ll cross it after putting the fire out. Whatever.

Fast-forward to where we were, which is my site breaking from that plugin. I’d learned my lesson and made a backup right before using that plugin, so no worries about data loss. …Except, for reasons still unknown, my host denied me permission to download (and restore) my own backup. Completely baffling. It even went against their own internal guide for restoring backups. I tried many ways to get around this, but ultimately, my generated backup file was inaccessible to me.

Well, I opened a support ticket, but of course this had to have happened on fucking Friday, so I’d have to go two whole days with a broken site and being unable to work on anything (since a backup would overwrite even things such as article drafts, etc.) After poking around, I discovered my host’s auto backups, which were contained in a different section from the standard backups (I’m being deliberately vague for security reasons, bear with me here). I restored a backup from the previous day, which was before I had done some work, but I externally copied everything new I could think of and carried it back into the restored backup.

Hours of troubleshooting later, the site has returned to working order. What a mess. Even my host’s support team is sick of me. Self-hosting is kind of out of my budget, however…

I messed around with my home page layout and temporarily settled on a two vertical column arrangement. I wanted as much information to be onscreen as possible, but feedback was largely negative. I switched back to horizontal feeds. There’s a new feed for my guides, as I moved them to their own category. I don’t want my video game directory to be populated by whatever tip pages I make on a whim.

The header now features background images under its directory links. I’ve been wanting to do this for quite a while, and only recently discovered a practical way to do it. I increased opacity to make the text more readable, but it’s still not ideal. A drop shadow on the text might solve the issue, but for reasons I hope make sense to someone, WordPress doesn’t allow for drop shadows on text. I might be best off saving the category name text as an image after applying drop shadows in another program and overlaying it. Haven’t gotten around to it yet.

I’ve returned to cleaning up my old works, and this has mostly entailed consolidating them to specifically-designated drafts rather than my general notepad. So, everything I’ve written about Banjo-Kazooie over the years has been moved to a Banjo-Kazooie draft to be refined for whenever I write a full article.

To Do

Add subcategories for other, non-video game categories.
Continue optimizing SEO.
If possible, create separate subscription lists where people can opt out of certain category updates.
More visual flair.
Better navigation and permalink structure.

New Articles

In some instances, I unearthed pieces that were almost good enough to publish. One of these is a review for War in the Pocket. It had poor grammar and syntax, but my cleanup turned into a complete rewrite, so I published it as a new article. The Mission to the Rise review took comparably less work, so it and Macross 7 Movie retained their original publication dates.

Video Game Log

Rayman 2

On Friday, I beat Rayman 2 for the first time. This was a pretty big deal for me, as I loved the game on PC growing up but was never able to beat the bastard of a final boss. But yeah, after considerable effort, I finished the Nintendo 64 version with 100% of collectibles found. Another childhood demon slain.

I have a review drafted, and it’s progressing well enough. I don’t like the game as much as I used to, but I still see the same things I appreciated about it in it. My issue nowadays is the concentration of those positive values relative to the negatives. The gimmick levels in Rayman 2 are excessive, frustrating, and really drag down what’s otherwise an atmospheric, genuinely mystical 3D platformer. It sucks how many 3D platformers of the era self-sabotaged in similar ways, but Rayman 2 is up there in terms of density and severity. At least Crash Bandicoot: Warped! didn’t end with a final boss fight using the biplane, y’know?

I’ve a lot to say about Rayman 2, which is always a dangerous sentiment coming from me. Anyway, I’m curious about checking out versions of the game with more substantial differences, namely Rayman Revolution. I’m not expecting them to radically alter my perception of the game, but I’m generally not opposed to returning to Rayman 2 again, and I’ll take an opportunity to satisfy my curiosity, as well.

Of course, it’s also tempting to just move onto Rayman 3. I rented it a few times as a kid and generally liked it, but I recall the voice acting being extremely annoying and in constant conflict with the serene, beautiful environments. The more I think about it, the more I find it difficult to resist booting the game up. Maybe you’ll hear about that soon…

Super Robot Wars GC

I couldn’t take any more of Super Robot Wars X. What remained of my spirit was ground to dust upon seeing the lack of differences between Amari and Iori’s routes. I thought I would just take a peek at GC and see if my interest in SRW had waned for the time being, but I quickly became invested, so I guess not.

I’d almost forgotten what it was like to play an SRW that feels like it has passion behind it. The unique mechanics help the admittedly too-easy gameplay from becoming overly monotonous. It can be tedious destroying larger enemies; it’s usually far more expedient to fight them with your own large enemies or units with the Sniper Skill than to destroy their individual parts. The enemy capture feature likewise feels like an afterthought in the face of how much effort it takes to capture one. Still, I like these ideas on a conceptual level and would take them over the same ‘ol, same ‘ol.

The story’s fairly compelling. It was a real treat to see such a modern SRW tackle the One-Year War, even if it was resolved fairly quickly. I haven’t been as engaged since L-Gaim took center stage, but things are recovering with SPT Layzner. That’s surprising to me, as I didn’t find it that interesting in Super Robot Wars J. GC‘s adaptation adds morally ambiguous villains and internal conflicts. I wonder which better represents the original anime?

While I generally keep animations off in SRW, since they can make maps take forever, even I’m bothered by GC‘s. It’s one of the few titles to use 3D graphics instead of sprites which, as far as I can tell, always goes over poorly. First of all, GC‘s models look pretty awful. They’re roughly on-par with Nintendo 64 models in terms of jaggedness, but since they’re depicting largely-angular machines, that’s not necessarily unexpected.

A bigger issue is whatever lighting engine GC uses—it’s hideous. I can only assume they were attempting semi-realistic, natural lighting, which I think is misguided from the outset. The models are still of a stocky, super-deformed style, so realism shouldn’t be a concern. Whatever their intentions, the models look excessively dark and are occasionally difficult to discern when viewed over the menus’ dark blue background. In a game full of flashy anime designs, the large color variety is undermined by how muted the palette is. It’s a very unappealing and lifeless look.

I have other things to say, but they’ll have to wait for a full review. I’m probably about halfway through the game and still enjoying myself. I think the translation quality could be significantly improved with some editing, but I’m grateful for what we have.

Donkey Kong

Gosh diggity darn it, I feel like there’s one other game I should be mentioning here, but the name escapes me. There’s some random things I’ve been messing with and have yet to dedicate more time to. Of these, the one I’m most likely to continue with is Donkey Kong on the original Game Boy. It’s always been a cult classic, but I’ve admittedly barely played it before now. I’m at the start of the third world, which is the furthest I’ve ever gotten. It really is incredibly impressive for a Game Boy game. I’m having a great time and look forward to finishing it and writing about it.

Until Next Time

I’m eager to get back to work, so I’ll head off for another two weeks. I think I’ve been improving things at an increasingly faster pace, so by the next blog update, this site should have servers on the moon. It’ll drastically reduce speeds, but it’ll be great for speculative investors looking to embrace the “future!”

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Brave New Year