Noah’s Barks Blog: December 14, 2025

Intro: The 2025 Video Game Awards

Wow, what a depressing title.

Anyway…

I covered the 2025 Video Game Awards here. It was less than ideal. I never want to talk about that night again. I will, however, talk about the handful of games revealed during the show that looked good—when the opportunity arises.

Site Updates

Page Edits

As I talked about in last week’s post, just about the entire site is indexed on Google now. My focus has shifted to generally improving SEO metrics across my site using Yoast. Over half my pages have a “good” rating now, by their standards, which feels nice. The efficacy of this shift has yet to yield dramatic results.

More noticeable adjustments result from me revisiting old pages and giving ’em the ‘ol spit-shine. This week, I’ve mostly focused on improving my video game reviews. Some were written with no regard to grammar, and I think I might be just about done with cleaning those up. They haven’t been rewritten yet, however. I’ve also been applying more recent universal formatting standards where applicable, so everything in general is more consistently visually appealing.

Subscriptions

After dropping my previous subscription plugin for being too resource-intensive (Jetpack), I’ve been shopping around for an alternative. At first, I tried using SureCart. It seems like a fine eCommerce service, but I soon learned that it wasn’t what I was looking for. It turned out that the function I wanted wasn’t best supported by looking for “subscription” plugins, but rather “newsletter” plugins. I don’t have the energy to rant about how that’s totally arbitrary, but whatever. Net jargon.

So, now I’m attempting to use Newsletter. It was mostly fine, but it has some critical shortcomings, and if their support doesn’t help me soon, I’m dropping it. Something they allowed for was an automatic popup asking new visitors to subscribe.

You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. I turned that sucker on only to discover the popup displayed as white text on a bright-grey background. It’s completely unreadable, and the Newsletter UI has no easy function for changing colors. It’s one of those design “quirks” that’s so baffling that I have to worry I’m doing something wrong. But as I’ve made clear, the more I attempt to learn web design, the more I understand that UX design genuinely is just really terrible all over.

This could be an exception, but until I find out, I’m potentially burning new subs. It’s pretty lame to have this over a problem that ought to affect every Newsletter user. Like, in what universe would it just be me? I’ve barely touched the default settings. See what I mean? Shit makes you feel crazy.

Another problem is that, even after importing my existing subscribers, they’ve yet to be alerted to any new posts I make. To be fair, I haven’t fucked with the alert settings that much. Granted, I would still expect this behavior to be the default, but I need to look into things. It could be a malfunction, and it might not be. Either one of these two issues being unresolvable would make me uninstall, so I’m kind of waiting to see if they can even address the first one. I haven’t made any big posts since, anyway.

To subscribers: thank you for being patient as I restore functionality. The backend is way more of a headache than you can probably imagine.

Visuals

I got rid of the borders around my home page’s content feed. I originally had them because my early designs felt cluttered. After cleaning individual elements up, I think they’re distinguished enough to no longer require manual borders, which had roped back around to causing clutter. By using a lighter-colored background than my main background and header/footer colors, I think everything is now parsable without borders.

Other Nonsense

I’m trying a new method of generating critical .css. I think it’s automated now, which is great, because Jetpack required me to manually generate it every single time I edited a page. I haven’t noticed any problems with it yet, but let me know if you see any strange behavior.

In fact, I think it may have cut down somewhat on the long load times I’ve been experiencing on the backend. Those still haven’t been resolved. I’ve noticed that I can log in in an incognito window and continue working at the same URLs taking forever to load. This points to some kind of caching issue, but I still have no idea why it’s intermittent, and it persists after clearing my cache (even browser-wide). So that continues to be a struggle.

My portfolio is back up and running, though that’s only relevant to my prospective employers and clients. I keep it hidden from normal visitors. Still, this detail provides one more example of just how much I’m working on behind the scenes, in case you’re ever wondering why content is slow to roll out.

Music

I’ve resumed importing music reviews again. The process remains as before. Keep a look out for those!

Video Games

Old School Gamer Magazine

I’ve submitted what I’m fairly certain will appear in January’s issue of Old School Gamer Magazine. You can expect short pieces from me on Super Mario Bros., Mega Man (NES), and Deus Ex.

I don’t often get chances to bring the game up, but Deus Ex is one of my favorite games. I’m proud of what I wrote on all three, and I’ll tell you where and how you can access them when they’re public.

Super Robot Wars X

Yeah, we still on that shit. I’m about to start the final standard route split, and after that, only the normal ending route split remains. I’m running out of steam but still playing daily. Nothing else to add. I contribute to my massive, drafted review occasionally.

Yu-Gi-Oh!: Master Duel

I bought both the Labrynth bundles and Dracotail, so only Eldlich is left. My Super Quant deck is finally finished, which is nice. Cold opening Zetan and Red Layer is really important for making Magnus past disruption. My win ratio is okay, but that’s mostly because I’m still running into low-power decks.

Artmage

Last night, I pulled the Dracotail bundle and actually got really lucky with rarities. I got like, eight URs, which probably happens to me once a year. I managed to pull one of every Artmage UR, so I went ahead and built them by crafting the SRs. I’ve only just started playing them, but they were on my list to check out at some point due to their cool artwork and style. I knew nothing about what they did prior to this.

Note: All of these impressions are based on what’s currently in Master Duel. I have not yet read the effects of any future Artmage support cards.

Artmage’s card economy is pretty efficient. Most of their cards serve as a bridge to something else, so it’s not difficult to open a hand that accesses their entire archetype. I hate this kind of design in Yu-Gi-Oh!, but I guess the card designers lack the imagination to make decks good without it.

More notable is its negate and destruction, which is live when you have three or more different Monster Types on your field. This can be a little demanding considering the cost of Fusion summoning, but is mitigated by how easily Artmages put themselves on the field, and they all have different Types.

I’m not sure how useful it will be as a generic. It has a high stat line and destruction immunity when any Field Spell up, which is nice, but not amazing; it’s just a big wall, and it can’t protect your Field Spell itself. Its main effect is a destruction field nuke triggered by altering the effect of another Artmage Monster, which is genuinely pretty strong for how easy it is to trigger. Of course, you need an Artmage with an effect you can activate on field, and currently, they’re a sizable commitment to deck space. I think Nerva could see play in decks at some point just as a way to send three Monsters to the GY.

This allows Artmage to access Synchro and XYZ Monsters without dedicating a huge amount of engine space or going too crazy with infinite combo slop. I’ve been clamoring for archetypal toolbox-enabling cards ever since Shaddoll Falco was incidentally a Tuner Monster due to it being based on Gusto Falco. It’s a huge angle of card design Konami has been sleeping on for over a decade. This is a way to give deck builds more variety without completely opening the floodgates, as you can expand an archetype’s options while setting limits on them within cards designed for this express purpose. It’s far preferable to combo engines that are inherently capable of working with every Extra Deck card type.

I’m also not sure how this deck goes second, because its entire engine ceases to function if their Field Spell doesn’t go through, and them needing to play it early on just means any opponent is going to feel comfortable waiting to destroy it. They have no way to protect it and no backup plan, at least from Master Duel‘s imported cards. To me, this is easily the deck’s biggest problem to overcome.

The good news is that Artmage is easily salvageable. The engine is smooth enough to where you can easily slot in a new card(s) that provides protection and/or more impactful effects without contradicting any existing card design. You’d just be adding to their easily-accessed pool of cards.

Whether or not they will be salvaged is another matter entirely. There’s a good chance of it, since it’s part of the newest “lore series” of archetypes. Will those probable buffs push Artmage into the meta or merely raise their viability? Only time can tell.

I’m rooting for Artmage. It’s been a while since I liked the aesthetics of a meta archetype, so it’d be nice to have one to play. White Forest could have counted, but it bombed on Master Duel, as far as I can tell. I’m also looking forward to DoomZ and Elvennotes. The Medius storyline is doing good on aesthetics so far, if nothing else. It’d be cool if they could write a storyline that doesn’t center around one character, but oh well.

Thank you to Yugipedia for hosting these images, and to Konami’s Master Duel for the original rips.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (PC)
and Other Reviews

Shifting gears just a little bit, while improving various articles, I ended up substantially rewriting my review for I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. The grammar and syntax were a mess, so I wrote an original introduction. That was so far above the rest of the prose (even after revision) that I felt compelled to rewrite the entire article.

Due to how WordPress is designed, I can’t have a separate, drafted version of an article that’s already been published. In theory, I could duplicate a page and work on one of the copies, then replace the old one when ready, but… I didn’t realize that until typing this, so get over it! I’ll try and do that in the future.

Basically, I took down the original No Mouth review with the intention of uploading a revised version. Castlevania (NES) and Castlevania: Circle of the Moon have similarly been in limbo over this. With the above solution just now dawning on me, I might look at ways to get their original versions up while I chip away at their revisions.

I have a brand new review I’m hoping to post soon. I’m waiting for my subscription popup’s issues to be fixed. Thank you for being patient while I bring you the quality content you deserve.

Conclusion

Wow, what a great blog post (by my standards). I’m really starting to get the hang of how a lot of WordPress tools work, even though many of the decisions behind them still make no sense to me. This site is just going to keep getting better and better. I think I’ll get back to that, actually. Thank you for reading, and I’ll see you again soon. Unless I die in an accident. I will try to not do that, though!