Japanese Gaming back to life

[GaijinPunch]

As the title says, Japanese Gaming is finally alive again. As some people know, IGN/Gamespy was hacked in a very malicious way late last year. As a result, they disabled all CGI except PHP. As JG was originally coded in Perl, the site became impotent, requiring me to rewrite everyting in PHP. I actuallly resurrected the site a few weeks ago, and only recently got everything back in line. I have, however, made some big improvements which were released just last night.

-A graphical facelift that will surely make a few people want to touch themselves.
-Added the translation section. This is where I will translate articles and interviews. Only has 4 entries now, but will surely grow.
-New systems added to the Yahoo Japan Auction Assistant. You can now search MegaDrive, Saturn, SuperFamicom, PC-Engine (inlucding CDs and SGX games), PC-FX, and NeoGeo (Rom & CD)
-Quite a few flyers added to the flyer section
-Depending on the last time you looked, some pretty cool items in the promo section.

The old portal, which for some reason I didn't update, is still up: <-- EDIT: B/c I lost my password to the FTP server that it's on! :(
http://www.classicgaming.com/japangaming

Enjoy!

[PDorr3]

I have never visited the site. You designed it? it looks great!

[GaijinPunch]

Yes, I did the design. The site has actually gone through like 4 phases... Max Lords, amongst other people, has seen them all, so perhaps he can comment on the ugliness of the previous versions.

The last one wasn't too bad, but was rather flat. It was a complete overhaul from a very strange, and "horizontal" vision I had after surfing a lot of Japanese sites. Eventually, there was just too much content to make it work. As such, I switched to a traditional vertical view about a year ago, but always though the eyecandy quality of it was medicore at best. Hence, we now have (what I think) is a very pretty layout. Hope everyone enjoys it. :D

[badinsults]

Very nice.

[WanganRunner]

What's with no one on Yahoo Japan wanting to ship internationally......

Is it just somehow inherently more of a pain in the ass over there, or what?

Most US/European ebay sellers will gladly send stuff anywhere.

[hydr0x]

fantastic news, glad to see your site back, good work :)

[maxlords]

*whistles* Friggin SWEET man! And I must say, way better than the last iteration! I personally really liked the horizontal one...felt it was unique :)

Glad to finally see you back up and running, and settled in the new place!

[neuropolitique]

Site looks nice. A note, though. The left side menus don't work on Safari. You probably don't get a lot of visitors using Safari, though.

[Iron Draggon]

I found an error while I was browsing the site:

Warning: getimagesize (saturn/soldivide.jpg): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /z/www/japangaming/cgi-bin/game_information.php on line 122

I really love your site, but I wish that you had more Saturn games covered.

[GaijinPunch]

I'll try to answer in order:

WanganRunner: Well, it's not that much harder, but most Japanese sellers assume that shipping abroad means speaking something other than Japanese, and accepting a form of payment other than local bank transfer, in which case, it's a HUGE pain. The shipping part is easy though. I get off SOMETIMES if I clearly convey that I speak the langauge, and can trasnfer funds locally.... but they still have to fill out a customs form. Also... if you look around, there are tons of US sellers that will not ship abroad. YOu notice when you are abroad... I had to send a ton of items to my parents back when I lived in Japan.

Maxx: Yeah, I liked the horizontal one as well, but you lose out on things like page numbers and whatnot. I guess you can find ways around it, but I've gotten way more compliments on the traditional layout. FYI -- the page is in the same place. No way would I pay to host the bandwidth I get. :)

Neuropolitique: I only test with IE and Firefox (on both Linux & Windows). Firefox follows w3 standards very strictly, so I use it as my benchmark. I then run through w/ IE and make tweaks.... 4 hours of tweaks in this rollout. :( There are an unfortunate amount of people using Internet Explorer still. I would love to make it compatible for the two people using Opera, and anything else out there, but it's just not feasible. Personally, I think Firefox is the best browser out there (on Linux and Windows), so really only support IE due to the numbers.

Thanks to everyone else for the compliments!

[Berserker]

I noticed this a few days ago. Very much digging the new layout, man.

If I had to offer any kind of advice or crit, I'd probably say - ditch the splash. It's more or less completely unnescesary, and without it your site would go from being an excellent fanmade site dedicated to japanese gaming, to a excellent site dedicated to japanese gaming, which happens to be made by a fan.

You might not think it matters that much, and maybe it doesn't, but it's really just not worth existing as something people need to click through before having access to your site.

Just a thought.

[GaijinPunch]

There is only ONE reason that Splash screen exists.

www.classicgaming.com/japangaming is about a million times easier to remember than http://dynamic5.gamespy.com/~japangaming. That's the downside of putting your site on a Unix server as opposed to the Windows ASP crap they offer on non-Unix machines. I could use a frame, but I think that's a bad choice.

An auto-link is probably the answer, but no joke... I really have no access to it right now. I think it's the same password, but Gamespy changed the name of those servers like a year ago... :(

I emailed them for the updated info... hopefully they'll get back to me.

[Iron Draggon]

I don't think that there's anything really wrong with that splash screen, but a bit of animation or something would help. Maybe some kind of flash intro.

[mezzanine]

Is the PC Engine game info not working?

" Sorry, but there's seems to have been a problem. The query passed through the URL returned no matches. "

[Cauterize]

This site is awesome!

I didnt realise there was a De La Jet Set Radio, *goes to ebay*

[Berserker]

Well, if you have no choice in the matter, then I guess that's that. Like I said, it's not that big of a deal really. No complaints about it whatsoever.

That being the case, I hope you'll just keep it as an image. I'd rather wait for some relatively small image to load than have to sit through some flash animation, but hey, that's me. :P

[GaijinPunch]

Actually, a simple flash animation loads a lot faster than a JPG, but I won't be adding a Flash animation there anytime soon.

I fixed the PC-Engine part (sorry...goofed the link in the template...thanks for pointing that out).

Cauterize: Good luck finding a De La Jet Set Radio. The LE was a Dreamcast Direct Only item... not sold in stores. The game-only version is a Dorikore version. Not a huge print run. It retailed for 2500 yen, but runs almost double that now. :)

[WanganRunner]

Gaijin: Thanks for the info.

I have a friend who will be going over to Japan for JET pretty soon, so I guess I can have them ship everything to him, and he'll send it back to me. That'll help when trying to get car parts too.

Are you still seeing brand new AV Famicoms and Super Famicom Jrs in stores over there? Back in '01 the Kobe Sofmap had 'em piled to the ceiling, but I heard they finally got discontinued. Seen any?

[Cauterize]

Good luck finding a De La Jet Set Radio. The LE was a Dreamcast Direct Only item... not sold in stores. The game-only version is a Dorikore version. Not a huge print run. It retailed for 2500 yen, but runs almost double that now. :)

Damn! lol! I just love the JAP JSR Artwork!

[GaijinPunch]

I'm actually not in Japan anymore... hence the weird location name in my profile here. (I'm in Honolulu). Before leaving though, the most accessible Famicom anything is that new clone, the NeoFami. Have not tried it out, but it's everywhere.

There is a section I started working on back in Japan that I didn't finish, and had to put on hold until I get everything back to normal. That'd be a Flash map of Akihabara. One of these days, I'll get back on it, but don't know if it'll be done by the time your buddy goes to Japan. :)

Cauterize: Yeah, that De La JSR is one of my prize possesions. :)

[Crush Crawfish]

Awesome! I've been waiting for this site to come back!!! I need all the Super Famicom info I can get! Keep up the great work!

[poloplayr]

Nice work, man! Keep up the hard work!!!