Archive

The Wii’s Weird Descriptive Icons

Just about wrapped up with getting all the Japanese Wii VC and Wii Ware games we might ever need in the next 10 years. Some of the game descriptions come with icons as warnings of the game’s contents. The icons for the scary school stories game is loaded with dreadful things:

I do like the ghost icon they use for horror games :3

Moving on to the American Wii pretty soon…

Assaulted by Nintendo’s Archaic Online Store

Nintendo’s Wii Shop is leaving us soon. Next Monday is the last day you can buy Wii Shop points, and the Shop closes entirely in January 2019. Time is running out to preserve all those Wii-exclusive digital games before they disappear (possibly forever), so here I go!

Except Nintendo doesn’t make it easy to buy games on the Wii Shop. I’ve run into lots of little problems along the way:

  • You have to buy “points” first, you can’t use money to directly buy a game.
  • You can only buy up to 3,000 (about $28) points at a time.
  • You can’t buy more than 10,000 points. You gotta spend your points before buying more.
  • None of the games are priced at round numbers. It’s always something like 512 points so you’ll inevitably waste money.
  • You can only buy one game at a time, and then download one game at a time. There’s no download queue.
  • You have to scroll through the game list every time. They don’t save your place.
  • If you buy a lot of points, your credit card will get flagged for suspicious activity (yeah, this happened to me).

I’ve bought games through Nintendo’s eShop on the Switch and it’s a big improvement, though it could still be better. I don’t think anyone will really miss the Wii Shop once it’s gone. Well, except for video game historians.

Gilbert Goes to Target

Poe: What’s with this thumbnail?

Mato: I don’t know. I didn’t know what to do.
Poe: What’s that behind him?
Mato: Shopping carts from Target.
Poe: Why?!
Mato: I don’t know, it’s a free stock photo. Please make a better one.
Poe: Okay I’ll try.

Poe: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

New Japanese Research Goods – Chrono Trigger and Zelda

We recently bought a bunch of Japanese guidebooks to assist us in some articles we’ve got simmering. I can’t believe one of the the Chrono Trigger ones is called the “Perfect Bible”.

Also got the Dragon Power NES manual for that Master Roshi sprite that they didn’t change, and a copy of Cooking Mama 2 because I hear the voice acting in it is…. very, very bad. Wanted to see for myself~

Fantasy Gradients

We have a new section on the website! Now you can browse articles by series. Take a look here~

Most of the old thumbnails need to be replaced, so I’ve been working on that today. I’m a novice at photo editing software, so I spent a long time messing around with gradients to make this simple thumbnail for the Final Fantasy section:

That took longer that I was hoping, but it came out nice. Hopefully I’ll be fully done with thumbnails by tomorrow!

Now You’re Playing with Programming

I’ve been working on a pretty large coding project that will make the Info Dumps and side-by-side game comparison galleries easier for me to organize and comment on. I basically had to redo the research page stuff from scratch and write it all in a new language + write a back end organization tool.

I finally got it into an alpha state yesterday. Before, I had to manually edit dozens of .txt files and rebuild pages manually, but now I can just drag and drop and type text.

And here’s what that same stuff looks like on the front end, aka what ordinary users will see:

Once I have it in a more complete state I plan to do full side-by-side game comparison galleries somewhat regularly for Legends of Localization. They won’t be as info dense as my EarthBound, Zelda, FFIV sections but they’ll still provide lots of cool info for me and for readers.