The E Club has gone through two transitions since its creation: the move from its original home on the ill-fated Moogo website builder to WebStarts, and the move from WebStarts to website host FastComet. While the first transition was out of necessity - Moogo would have shut The E Club down due to changes to its business model had I not moved the site - the second was due to profound advances in The E Club's technologies that a drag-and-drop website builder could no longer keep up with. A powerful responsive design, greater client-side interactivity, a robust blog backed by WordPress, a more optimal page structure paired with speed and search engine optimizations, and more made The E Club 3.0, launched in 2016, the best version of The E Club yet and provided tighter end-to-end control over the site and the technologies supporting it. Recently, it started becoming clear that The E Club…
The E Club has evolved since its creation in 2009, but its design stayed more-or-less the same: a large banner (sometimes animated) at the top of the page, the menu and content below that, and the footer. That layout worked for the older versions of The E Club - the content didn't take up the whole width of the page since the site was only optimized for bigger screens, and there was lots of space to display images in the background and at the top of the page. When The E Club 3.0 went live, The E Club was rebuilt from the ground up to be faster, simpler, more secure, and most notably, more responsive. The design of The E Club 2.0 was mostly intact, but it clashed with The E Club's new responsiveness in that the top bar banner wasn't well-optimized for larger displays (there was a bunch of whitespace around it), and there was a disconnect between the desktop and smartphone versions (the…
Since The E Club's creation back in 2009, E's Blog has always been the source for updates around The E Club. The E Club World was also created in 2010 to provide updates from across The E Club Family as well as more miscellaneous topics. But when The E Club left Moogo in September 2010, a problem began to coalesce: The E Club 2.0's host, WebStarts, couldn't match the Moogo site's blog capabilities, so the E's Blog posts from the original Moogo site had to be moved to a static page separate from the new blog. Eventually, this became More Blog. When The E Club 3.0 was created, I also had to integrate the posts from The E Club 2.0 into More Blog. Because that one page is six years' worth of posts, some accompanied by images and YouTube videos, More Blog is by far the most sluggish and inefficient page on The E Club 3.0; while other pages take around 1-3 seconds to load, More Blog tops 10…
Over a month has gone by since the debut of the Nintendo Switch (the inspiration for Season of Switch), and it looks like it's a runaway success - Nintendo's latest console has sold around 1 million units since March 3, making it the fastest-selling Nintendo console! Also, the company announced some new games for the Switch in its April 12th Nintendo Direct. Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon (also known as Luigi's Mansion 2 in some regions), released for the 3DS in 2013 as a part of the Year of Luigi, had some big shoes to fill as the successor to Luigi's Mansion for the GameCube, released in 2001. The original brought Luigi out of his brother's shadow as he explored a haunted mansion, guided by Professor E. Gadd (pun intended), inventor of the Poltergust 3000 (another pun intended) that Luigi uses to capture ghosts inhabiting the mansion. Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon brings Luigi to the aptly…
Until a few years ago, Xenoblade Chronicles (2010) wasn't very well-known; it wasn't advertised too much, and it almost didn't come to the US. In 2014, however, that began to change when Xenoblade's main character Shulk was added to the roster of playable characters. Since then, the game has seen a New 3DS remake, a sequel (Xenoblade Chronicles X for Wii U), and another sequel (Xenoblade Chronicles 2) for the Switch later this year. So what makes this game so critically acclaimed yet almost unnoticed at the same time? The main premise of Xenoblade Chronicles is that the Homs (basically humans) of the titan Bionis are fighting the Mechon (machines) of the titan Mechonis. Mechon armor is invulnerable to all weapons except for one, the Monado, wielded by a Homs named Dunban. He swiftly beats the Mechon back, but a year later the Mechon invade Bionis again, this time with larger units that…
Welcome to the first-ever Season of Switch post! Kicking off this season is, of course, the launch of the Nintendo Switch itself four days ago; it's been sold out almost everywhere since then. In fact, it's said that the Switch has sold faster than the Wii did in its first few days after launch! While there have been a few hardware (screen bezels scratching when docking) and software (Joy-Con syncing) issues, reviews are mostly positive. The console has real potential, and that will continue to be shown through software fixes and new games that will be released over time. Anyway, it's time for the first game feature: Super Mario Galaxy!
Super Mario Galaxy, released in 2007, holds special significance for me: it's the first Mario game I ever played. I was drawn in by its stunning, bright graphics, motion-control-powered gameplay, and the story, and I had to know more about and play more…