ENTRY 05: 09/28/2023 - Super Junkoid Is a Good Videogame

I’ve been back on the Super Metroid ROMhacks horse again, lately. I’m not sure why I fell off, what with Super Metroid being one of my favorite games of all time. Hopping back onto a ROMhack, it feels like no time’s passed at all. The movement and exploration feels just as natural and fluid as it ever has.

Today’s soup du jour is Super Junkoid, the sequel to a hack for Metroid on the NES that I played a hot minute ago. The original is one of my favorite NEStroid hacks, and after a few hours of exploring this sequel, I think it’s shaping up to be as good or better. Very much looking forward to playing it more, and highly recommended for any player of Metroid ROMhacks.

In other news, I’ve been exploring my options regarding that badly-sized costume I bought. The seller says that, while I can return it, I’ll have to pay the international shipping, which is pretty costly. In the name of customer service, they seem to be saying that they’ll send me a new, re-sized one free of charge provided I pay the shipping on it and give them the shoulder and arm measurements for the thing. I like this idea, though I’m not sure how it’ll go down.

For one thing, given that this stuff is going through Amazon, I’m not clear on what the process is for paying the shipping on something like this outside of straight buying the product through the store. Maybe I gotta do some kinda postal fuckery, but there’s a chance I’ll have to like, send them the bad costume, which is nearly $50 in shipping, and then pay the shipping when they send me the good costume, which totals nearly $100. Pretty pricey considering I paid a little more than that to buy the damn thing in the first place.

Their wording is a little unspecific, but I might not have to send them the bad costume, which at least cuts the price tag in half on the whole endeavor. Still, I’m not super sure how to go about that. I’ll have to get back to them once I figure out how that’s done.

Apart from that, it’s mostly business as usual for the moment. Regarding the development of the site, I’m looking into ways I can improve how this site looks on mobile. So far, the strategy seems to be media queries in the CSS for specific screen sizes, which seems simple enough. I think my plan is gonna be to make sure the top navbar resizes a little better on mobile instead of sliding offscreen to the left, and working out a solution for the sidebar.

As it is now, the sidebar squishes into the page content, making the text a pain to read. If I could get it to slide offscreen to the left, there’d be enough room to read the text more comfortably, at least outside of text-heavy pages like this one. Then maybe I could work something out for making the sidebar, like, unhideable. Like, adding a button or something to pop the sidebar out for a mobile user, giving them access to the sweet, sweet links inside.

That might be a tall order, though, possibly requiring the use of javascript. Either way, mobile optimizations are coming down the pipe.