Changes are afoot at Gamenikki, and unlike some occasions, these are for the better. The origins of the change in design and format started actually a year ago, when conversations with site administrator/designer/writer/wearer of many hats Chris Bews would go something like this:

Dave: Excuse me, oh highly regarded Sir. When might we expect a design cha…
Chris takes out shotgun and aims at face.
Dave: Never mind, this design is peachy. You know, I can grow to like Sunburst!

That might be a slight exaggeration, seeing as how Chris Bews and myself are an ocean apart, and how Sunburst Orange was my idea (finally feeling threatened by the pink scheme), but I like to think of it as fact. Anyway, eventually Chris began to tinker with the idea that if we were going to do one of those once-every-blue moon design changes, we might as well make it massive. Granted, these massive changes are always fun to see in the end, but absolute hell to go through in the process of getting them working—something that never seems to be fully understood when we take on such projects. Gamenikki’s base core of NewsPro was scrapped for Coranto, which is like replacing a foot soldier with several nuclear bombs. This brought up its own set of problems that we later learned, only when we were fully done transferring material over to the new system, mind you, that our host at the time did not like the idea of hosting a ‘nuclear bomb’, so to speak. This meant the moving of the hosting and domain from OneandOne, which was a bureaucratic battle, and the spending of additional money we non-profit types of people are very short on. To be fair, our Coranto servers do tend to eat up the server’s CPU like praying mantises wolf down their young, but these taxing operations last mere seconds and happen only once daily, so there’s no reason our old host should have flipped.

Since Coranto is not fully compatible with our old NewsPro hacked-up system, everything had to be transferred by hand. In the process, Josh got to laugh at all my many-years old reviews, full of great things like double to multiple negatives (and I don’t know nobody that doesn’t like neither this or that) and comparing everything with Final Fantasy (if the game in question was an RPG) or Gran Turismo 3 (if the game in question was a racing game). How embarrassing. We also learned just how much had been written—it doesn’t begin to fully dawn on you the scope of Gamenikki until you stare at several hundred DVD reviews, and several hundred game reviews, knowing you have to not only transfer the text but make new images also. These lengthy processes are what threw out both of my wrists with near carpal tunnel syndrome, the first of many sacrifices made for this new site.

But I know you readers care nothing about the staff’s physical pain and suffering, so let’s get down to what this new site represents. This is the most radical shift in Gamenikki’s function and design since, uh… a long time. The first thing you should notice is the return of the pink. It takes a brave site to wear pink, and we actually found this pink color scheme was something people remembered about the site. Nothing says unusual and potentially dangerous like a manly site draped in pink. More than just the color change, the site design has been changed to make automatic index updating, letting you see the work that’s been posted on the site each day. Auto-builds are done at 1AM Central time, which is a bit odd, but I’m sure we can all get used to that.

One thing that really bugged me about the original Gamenikki was the way reviews were listed from Z to A, like On Beyond Zebra or something. Coranto not only allows proper, dignified #-Z listing, it goes one step further and categorizes everything under individual selectable letters—quite the good thing. Another little techie trick that Chris Bews is quite proud of is our new Thumbnail Viewer, which place thumbs in the middle of the review. After clicking them, the Viewer is accessed and large screens of the thumbs can be browsed through as you see fit. Try it out!

Actually, now that I think about it, the biggest change would have to be the separation of the DVD section. Since the DVD reviews were getting so frequent and popular on the original Gamenikki, we split off the movie section into a sister site, Cinenikki, and expanded the scope to include movies in theaters, articles and columns over films and more. It’s quite the extensive project, and I highly recommend you bookmark Cinenikki and see what we (that’s myself plus a few newly hired writers) can do with our new space. The sister site also gets a great new black and white artsy color scheme, which is downright cool in my opinion.

Thankfully, the bulk of the work is over now, and the staff can finally relax back into the usual roles of writing and providing coverage for both games and film. We recognize we’ve lost a lot of readership since we closed down the site two weeks ago, but hope these new changes will make people realize the site is all the better for the time spent massively rearranging everything. You can be assured such an event won’t happen again for a very long time; my wrists will make sure of that.