Messages

1

ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Screenshots

« on: May 08, 2013, 04:40:48 am »

This is generally my attitude towards things. The issue here is that the game in question has been known as Sutte Hakkun in emulation circles for over a decade, with Hakkun being the main character. If we change the name and leave it subtitled or something (and that's a pretty big if) do you have any suggestions for names that would both keep the internal soundalike consistency and not sound rude? :p

Got a full list of character names? (Maybe this could go in a new topic.)

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Screenshots

« on: May 07, 2013, 06:12:04 am »

Potty

You want to name him after a child's training toilet? You utter bounder, sir!

Incidentally, my opinion is that a name that's been rendered in English for Japanese audiences doesn't necessarily count as a localisation. Even if they did write out Burokkun in English, I'd still localise it, because the creators of the game didn't do it for an English-speaking audience, they did it for a Japanese audience. Respecting the creators' intentions is one thing, but I do think that there are things where I'm sure they wouldn't give a damn if you asked to change something, and it's more important to tailor the game for the new English-speaking audience. (The title screen for Hourai High's a small example of this - it originally provided an English title under the Japanese text, "The Adventure of Hourai High School", which I changed to "The Adventures of Hourai High". Speaking of which, I think the subtitle I chose, "Transfer Student Dramabomb" ruffled some feathers here, but it's actually a faithful localisation - just not a direct translation.)

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Screenshots

« on: February 14, 2013, 07:23:50 pm »

i would highly recommend auto-wrapping on any game/system on which it's remotely feasible for any translation project. it's especially nice for text that has control codes in it that are expanded at runtime into arbitrary item/character/whatever names, because you can't even write a manual autoformatter to deal with that at build time

i wish you were every romhacker

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Front Page News / Re: Translations: Energy Breaker English V1.00

« on: October 08, 2012, 03:05:08 pm »

The discussion on gamefaqs also mentions some bugs, like a crash before the ending so that you cannot reach new game+, don't know if this is true yet. But maybe it has been reported and fixed already.

I do not think the game is too easy, only if you do a lot of grinding this is the case. But the character balancing could be better, Myra is just so much stronger than all the other characters. All in all, Energy Breaker seems to be a comparatively short but very good game.

If you're participating in the discussion, I'd really appreciate it if you could encourage them to post a bug report on our message board!
http://yuudachi.net/bbs/

You can easily post screenshots and save files there.

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Front Page News / Re: Translations: Energy Breaker English V1.00

« on: October 08, 2012, 02:21:02 pm »

That happens all the time, the left-most conversation menu corrupts easily. Fortunately it doesn't seem to have any consequences and it's easy to reset.
One thing i think i noticed was that some shinny pebbles rewards seemed missing (from the walkthrough). I think it was the second time you fought the 'security system' in the past, the main cannon was missing a shinny pebble reward when destroyed (and it was destroyed, unlike some boss appendages, which can be skipped, because the cannon was the 'boss').

Also i think i never got a shiny pebble for the giving the pin or the toy to the girl on the past (whose grandmother died).

For the former, it might have been because the character who delivered the finishing hit had a full inventory. If your inventory is full, you don't get enemy drops.

[Spoiler:]

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Front Page News / Re: Translations: Energy Breaker English V1.00

« on: October 06, 2012, 05:45:05 am »

Things i dislike is how the plot gets quite confused about midway, only straightening up near the end (was that the translator tweaking?), the *ridiculous* backtracking, the moral relativism of some things (Leon is a scumbag) and the weird stuff with that 'inside the body (womb)' sequences, especially the one with the prepubescent girl.

I did try to nail down what I could and straighten out a few things without changing it too much from what was intended.
The game was originally designed so that you could select a main character, before they threw that out the window and made Myra the main character. There's a bunch of unused text from the initial dream sequence, with conversations for each of the different characters. I think this explains why

Spoiler:

large swathes of the story mostly seem to be about Lenardo, Star is kind of inconsistent as a character, Krill comes out of nowhere and so on. I think Leon's story and character were certainly a casualty of this - the original Japanese text was a lot worse about letting Leon off the hook for everything he does.

It's a shame, I think, because the basic story and setting is really good, but only the broad brushstrokes are there, and the details are clearly quite rushed in places. I'm not saying it's like the Ecce Homo restoration, or that it's bad, but I think it had much more potential. I would really love to see a modern remake of the game as it was originally intended to be.

Spoiler question:

Spoiler:

What's that drowed+water elemental stuff at the end of the credits, is it related to some of the other games or is that Leon's body at the bottom of the sea? His hair was not grey though.

Nobody knows.

That's part of original game's design and probably won't be fixed. It's not Disnesquick's responsibility to fix game mechanics.
If you read the README file, especially the translators notes, you'd notice that this was the fault of the original game's script (Really? They talked about one of the staff member's pubes?). There is even dialog that's not even used in the final game, but left in the code. Personally, I think satsu did a great job with the mess that is Energy Breaker's original script.

The pubes dialogue would have only ever been visible to the debuggers. It's in a block of Irene's dialogue:

みやさかさん……って
Miyasaka...

チンげ、そった事
あるんですって！
They say he shaved
his pubes once!

There are other things like a shopkeeper mentioning a guy called Naoyuki came to buy a Lum bath towel, or other bits of cheeky dialogue - here's another one from Irene's dialogue:

わたしのヒミツ……
あそこに、ホクロがあるのよ〜〜
I've got a mole right on my...!
It's my little secret.

You can imagine what a pain in the arse this all was given the sheer volume of text. The people in Olga Town change their conversations with pretty much every event flag, it seems. You can actually miss stuff by not going counterintuitively going back to town in the middle of a quest.

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Personal Projects / Re: Alex Kidd HD

« on: September 16, 2012, 08:15:37 am »

This looks AMAZING! Ah, I can feel the childhood memories coming back too...

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: EB: June 2000 - September 2012

« on: September 16, 2012, 04:40:58 am »

That Mission Orders screen was hard work.

First, the numbers have to be 8x16 pixels, and bad things happen if you go over that:


Second, the font needs to be the same size for the title and body text, or it looks goofy:


An additional problem is that the chancery-style font was very tall due to its sweeping style, but you only have a row of 16 pixels for each line of text. This means you need to make the descenders and such fit into that row, and the only way to do that is to reduce the font size. Because it gets displayed in four colours, you lose a lot of definition and it gets hard to read on some screens.

In the end, I threw my hands up in the air and redid the whole set of graphics these Mission Orders screens are composited from:


There's an issue present in the original game where some colours get dropped depending on the background, and I think this graphic holds up better in the face of that issue:



It's not as fancy as the original graphics, but it's more legible and at least it fixes the problem with the bloody numbers.

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Programming / Re: One liner to print the alphabet.

« on: September 11, 2012, 03:59:17 pm »

10 PRINT "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz"

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: EB: June 2000 - September 2012

« on: September 09, 2012, 03:05:47 am »

Renaming to Far will now be less hilarious from a grade school perspective. 

You could still rename him to Fart for a similar effect.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: EB: June 2000 - September 2012

« on: September 07, 2012, 02:31:44 am »

In addition to DNQ's work on the menus, we've made some other improvements during this extra time as well, such as:

- Fixed the numbers on the battle orders screen from the original font to match the chancery-style font used for the rest of the text on that screen.

- Fixed an issue where words that began with "Star" would have Star's name inserted (oops), so if you called Star "Butts", words like "Start" written with an initial cap would display as "Buttst".

Funny, the stuff that comes out before release.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: EB: June 2000 - September 2012

« on: September 02, 2012, 06:30:34 pm »

Slight delay again. An advertisement for SVN or other versioning system occurred.

Speaking of last minute things, I overlooked the translation of a very subtle bit of Japanese text recently, which is now fixed:

"KA-BOOM!"

At first I experimented with text (forgive the shitty graphic):


But it turns out the graphic gets flipped (!) depending on Dorothy's orientation:



So I went with a non-text replacement graphic instead.


Incidentally, this graphic is visible for slightly less than a second.

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: EB: June 2000 - September 2012

« on: August 28, 2012, 01:19:03 pm »

Now with a few screenshots

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Gaming Discussion / Re: British english in games ?

« on: July 27, 2012, 03:31:38 am »

Nintendo Europe employ British native speakers to translate from Japanese and American English to British English.

Don't think it includes re-dubbing games to British accents from American, perhaps it's just for the text side of things.

https://jobs.nintendo.de/main?fn=bm.ext.jobsdetail_engl&refnr=1220231&land=

Xenoblade features British English voices, so that was probably their doing.

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General Discussion / Re: General opinion of Zophar's Domain?

« on: July 26, 2012, 01:53:28 pm »

I believe the downward spiral also corresponded to Zophar (the original owner) leaving and giving the site to Swampgas, who never cared much about the site after that.

That's what I was diplomatically referring to as changes for the worse.

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General Discussion / Re: General opinion of Zophar's Domain?

« on: July 26, 2012, 02:24:49 am »

If I recall correctly, and I probably don't because I'm thinking back to about 10 years ago, it basically boiled down to:
- general lack of updates on the front page because the site was good enough (apathy)
- a series of changes for the worse
- the forums being/becoming a horrid cesspit

As a result, the community built around it splintered, quite noticeably the translation scene which mostly hung around one of the message boards and never really got much 'news' coverage, which is where sites like RPGd and later Whirlpool found their niche.

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Script Help and Language Discussion / Re: Research on Video Games Localization/Translation - Dissertation Questionnaire

« on: July 17, 2012, 04:22:55 pm »

I'm a bit confused by this. Are questions 2.2, 3.x, 4.x and 5.x about fan translation work or official translation work? I get the impression it's the latter, but could you confirm?

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ROM Hacking Discussion / Re: Open Source ROM Hacking Projects

« on: March 07, 2012, 03:06:37 pm »

I was really keen to make as much of the Filena stuff as I could publicly available. Not necessarily source code, but the tools used and the script data and stuff. However, the problem was that there were numerous different tools by different people, and some aspects of the translation were a real kludge (e.g. some parts that were translated in a hex editor with a page about hex values for English letters in front of me), so it ended up becoming a huge effort to throw together. If I have a really long holiday or get laid off one day, I might have a bash at that again, particularly since I bolloxed up the last release, but I'm not sure if there's really much interest anyway.

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General Discussion / Re: How would one go about contacting someone who works in the game industry?

« on: February 05, 2012, 04:58:59 pm »

That is...really creepy. Does that kind of thing happen a lot in the industry?

No idea. Only happened the once!

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General Discussion / Re: How would one go about contacting someone who works in the game industry?

« on: February 05, 2012, 04:26:30 am »

...All right, I'll come clean. I want to ask Dylan Cuthbert if Fay and Miyu from Starfox 2 ever had official last names/bios. 'Cause he might know, right? T_T;

I replied to one of his Tweets, though nothing's come of it. There's a part of me that wonders if I'm really the first person who's thought of this/acted on that thought, but then again maybe getting these kinds of answers just isn't that easy...

On a random note, I haven't found anything indicating that Argonaut was involved with Starfox 64 (just FYI, it's been years since I last played it, so I wouldn't remember if they actually showed up in the credits), but it is kinda neat that Q-Games (basically Argonaut 2.0) was most definitely involved with Starfox 64 3D.

It looks like a busy twitter page, why not just try again? Otherwise, contacting someone who works in the industry is the same as contacting a normal person, with all the stalkerish implications that comes with. (I got a letter from a customer a while ago, and I have no idea how they got my name and office address. Incidentally, replying to something received at a business address basically makes your response an official company response.)