[MD] Moving Adventure Psy-O-Blade

[tryphon]

Hi folks,

this is a complete fan-translation of "Moving Adventure Psy-O-Blade", one of the very first graphic adventure game launched on the Japanese Megadrive (19xx). It's a partial port of an MSX game that should have had some popularity, considering the number of ports.

Back in the days, I had a french magazine in which it was very badly marked, though the writer said "it must have some interest if you understand Japanese" (which now makes me think : "Why on Earth did you give a mark to a game you can't play ?")

At the time, I felt in love with the (old) japanese chara-design and the futuristic atmosphere and heavily regretted not being able to play it.

So when I considered hacking some MD games, I remembered this game and took it as an exercise. All I needed was a translator

And I had great luck with Eien Ni Hen's willing to take a look at it. She did an awesome job, though I sent her every two weeks some hundreds of dialogues I didn't notice in my previous dumps. I dare to say that this English version is likely better than the original Japanese !

The game itself may not be the best game ever produced on the Megadrive, but the adventure is fun, easy, and quite quick. It's a testimony of the Sci-Fi / Horror movies of the 80's, such as Alien of course (Eien Ni Hen has even dropped some allusions to it), or Blade Runner.



This patch is still a beta version : neither me nor Eien Ni Hen have time to play it extensively, so here's what I'm asking for :

* play the game, try to unlock every dialogues, and report typos
* report game-breaking bugs. For that, I'd ask you to play with the Regen emulator, and post savestates just before the bug occurs, describing what to do to make it happen

I ask you to use Regen because it's the debugger I'm used to (I know there are others, but for the moment I prefer this one). Though Regen's savestates are in classical gsx format, for some reason they are not always compatible between emulators. So please, stay with this one.

I played the game up to the end without any bug, but since I've modified a little my tool chain to produce this version, some new bugs may occur (though they should be very easy to fix).

The game features, at some moment, a shoot'em up sequence (à la Space Harrier). For testing purposes, I modified the number of ennemies to destroy in order to proceed. I'll remove it in the final version.

New version (25/11/2014) : download it here

You can use it with the ROM : Psy-O-Blade Moving Adventure (J) [!]

[goldenband]

Faaaaantastic! Such a nice surprise. Many thanks for this.

Wish I could help with the testing, but I don't believe there's a version of Regen for OS X -- though I've read that it can run in WINE?

[tryphon]

I didn't try. It's likely, since it's based on SDL.

If you can't make it work at all, try to be as precise as possible when describing bug, and I'll play the game up to there.

[Trickless]

Brilliant!

Unless I'm doing something terribly wrong, there seems to be some issues with the intro text?:

Line break after the word nuclear:


And some random looking letters at the end of some lines. Some examples:

[tryphon]

You're not doing anythin wrong : my line width are too long (which surprise me because I'm sure I had fixed that before, I hope there won't be too much bugs that reappear). I fix it at once!

[Shiryu]

Greetings! Decades long lurker here, just wanted to give some help so I decided to register because I found this bug in text placement:

(picpaste doesn't seem to work for embedding...)

I apologise, I was not using Regen because I was making a videoclip to upload onto my Youtube account. But from the picture you should be able to figure out what's wrong with the text placement. I was using KEGA Fusion v3.63 if it helps in any way.

Great work, keep it up.

[tryphon]

Thanks.

Another problem I was sure to have already fixed. Must be due to my changing my tool chain.

[Shiryu]

Raising awareness by posting it on Kotaku TAY  for my Now In English segment.
Hope that gets you some more beta testers.

[tryphon]

Thank you

[PresidentLeever]

Hello tryphon. First off I'd like to thank you both for your work on the translation.

Maybe this was fixed already as I downloaded the patch a couple of days ago over at Sega-16; I'm playing the game in Fusion 3.64 and discovered that the game hangs when you're back at the Cassowary at the start of chapter 2, if you talk to Bob (the guy to the right).

I also found some typos here and there, and one dialogue where a character's reply seemed odd. I'll post those in a bit.

Edit:


that's the doctor's reply to keith's question


similar issue to the intro


effecient>efficient

November 05, 2014, 09:29:53 PM - (Auto Merged - Double Posts are not allowed before 7 days.)
Tested it in Regen and the same thing happened again, locks up at the beginning of chapter 2.

[Pennywise]

So, considering this game is a port from one of the Japanese computer systems, any chance of translating one of those versions? Generally speaking, the PC versions are a lot better than the console ports.

[tryphon]

So, considering this game is a port from one of the Japanese computer systems, any chance of translating one of those versions? Generally speaking, the PC versions are a lot better than the console ports.

Quite unlikely. I'd need informations about those system and a copy of the game on these. That must be quite difficult to find for non-japanese speaking people. And then I'd need the will and time
Though, if you know where I can find those, I'd give an eye to it without any doubt...

From what I saw, MD port is indeed quite inferior (seems like half of the story is missing, and technically the game seems more impressive on the computers).

Maybe this was fixed already as I downloaded the patch a couple of days ago over at Sega-16; I'm playing the game in Fusion 3.64 and discovered that the game hangs when you're back at the Cassowary at the start of chapter 2, if you talk to Bob (the guy to the right).

I also found some typos here and there, and one dialogue where a character's reply seemed odd. I'll post those in a bit.

Thanks, I'll check there wasn't a mess with the dialogs, then I'll send them to Eien Ni Hen (English is not my mother tongue and I can interpret things wrongly).

Tested it in Regen and the same thing happened again, locks up at the beginning of chapter 2.

That's weird. Could you please provide a Regen savestate ?

For the moment, there's only one patch (precisely to avoid some mess when reorting errors)

[Gideon Zhi]

This actually looks pretty cool. I'm interested in playing it, but I think I'll wait until you're out of beta.

Looks quite good though!

[PresidentLeever]

Here's a Regen (0.97) savestate:
http://www.filedropper.com/psy-o-blademovingadventurejtengbeta

Things I thought might cause a problem:
Renamed ROM (added ''[T+Eng]'' to the filename, never had problems with this before)?
Wrong ROM (tested two of them now but same thing happened)?
Wrong patcher (Lunar IPS)?

[tryphon]

Thanks, it helped !

I reproduced and fixed the bug. It was due to my dumper that mistakenly took some piece of code for a text (it happened sometimes when testing, I missed this one).

Were you able to continue the game ? If not I'll upload another patch. But I'd prefer not too much patch circulate to avoid some mess in fixes

[PresidentLeever]

Sorry I should've made that clear, I was not able to continue. It seems you need to talk to Bob to progress the game further in that scene and that's when it locks up. I've tried talking to everyone and examining everything else 2-3 times.

[tryphon]

So another patch (fixes only the crash).

[Eien Ni Hen]

that's the doctor's reply to keith's question

I think I caught this error in my playthrough as well. This was definitely a mistranslation (hopefully the only one). The doctor's response should be "How should I know?"

Anyway, I'm glad everyone is enjoying the game. I really would like to work on the MSX or PC88 version. Like Tryphon mentioned, the MD version leaves out half the story.

[Trickless]

Forgot to mention in my previous post. During the intro:



"Raiden." should really be written as "Raiden". (fullstop outside the quotations)

[PresidentLeever]

Thanks for the update, I'll test it out asap.