Spartonberry clued us in about some interesting info in the Salamander (Life Force) manual for the Famicom. Nobody sells just the manual second-hand, so we ended up having to buy a whole complete copy.
Luckily, the manual is in very good condition! And the cartridge looks really cool too. Reminds me of those translucent Game Boys.
Now that the latest book is done and out of our hands, it’s time for me to get back to something I’ve been meaning to do forever and ever: continue the main LoL site redesign! Tony the designer did some great mockups and our pal Brian C. has been implementing it in HTML, but it falls to me to do all the WordPress magic to work with my custom site voodoo I’ve made over the years.
It’s not a very exciting process of course:
I expect there’ll be a time in the coming weeks when the live LoL site will have the new design but be broken in many places. I’ll probably need help finding all the broken stuff when that time comes…
Woo woo! We’re getting closer to the printing stage for press start to translate! The book proof arrived yesterday:
And here’s a lesson in why you should always, always read your proof, even though it’s so tempting to skim it since by this point you’ve read it so many times already:
Cmd+v (or Ctrl+v on Windows) is the “paste” shortcut. Sometime during our final edits before submitting the book to the printers, we replaced the word “Gorp” with a mistyped paste shortcut. AGH! So glad I caught this.
Legends of Localization is subscribed to a handful of gaming magazines in Japan. We usually get 2 at a time, but thanks to a holdup at customs, we got double the goodies today~
I love that Halloween-themed Famitsu cover! I’m hoping that Halloween keeps getting popular in Japan 😀
I’ve been having a good ol’ time playing through Ys VIII on the PS4, getting screenshots of the localization mistakes before the game gets patched next month. Then other day, @DigitalEmelas pointed out that the French on the back of the North American Vita version of Ys VIII has nothing to do with the game and doesn’t make sense:
The French text in the black bar in the middle says these two lines twice:
Je suis desolé de vous quitter, mais je dois acheter un chapeau.
I am sorry I have to leave you, but I must buy a hat.Je vais demander à ces paysans qui viennent au-devant de nous, si le chemin par où ils ont passé est mauvais.
I shall ask these peasants who are coming towards us, if the road by which they have come is bad.
Mike Fahey over at Kotaku did some research and found these two phrases on Omniglot’s list of “assorted ‘useful’ foreign phrases”. He asked NIS America what the heck happened, and they admitted that the weird French text up there is placeholder text that never got fixed before going to print. The box also claims the game has cross-platform play, which it doesn’t.
Somebody at NIS America goofed up pretty hard on this one! Every reprint of Ys VIII on the Vita will have the correct French on the back, so I rushed out and bought one of the last copies of the first printing in my town to preserve a bit of gaming history.
Despite all these weird problems, Ys VIII is really fun.
The other day I suddenly remembered the old 4Kids version of One Piece and felt like it’d be something useful to have someday. So I picked this up from Amazon for surprisingly cheap! For some reason, Volume 8 or 9 or something sells for hundreds of dollars though. I dunno why.
I’m always on the lookout for things that could be useful in future projects, articles, and books, so if you see anything cool or have anything to share let me know!
Our good buddy Steven, who works at Fangamer Japan, came across this poorly named mixed whiskey drink:
Well. Yep. I’ll just pretend it’s short for “wizard”.
I’ve seen a handful of people flip our Legends of Localization books for stupid high prices on second-hand markets like ebay and amazon. Nothin’ we can do about it, so I try to find amusement from it. The worst is someone asking $2,000 for the Zelda book in “used, acceptable” condition, hah. But I saw this today and couldn’t stop laughing:
“Realistic price”, lmao. Dude. We sell it new for $29. I hope nobody falls for this!
It’s done! It’s done! After working through the weekend, we submitted the Funky Fantasy IV book on Monday! We waited until the very last second to decide on the title:
That question mark at the end was a mistake, but we decided to keep it there. I know LoL fans were very adamant about keeping “Funky Fantasy IV” as the title, but we wanted people to be able to glance at the title and get an idea of what the book is about. We also don’t want people to assume that they have to be a Final Fantasy fan to enjoy the book.
Maybe it’ll be released soon? Haha I have no idea at this point. It’ll be this year, though. GOSH! October is almost over.
I sent my buddy Jonathan Holmes a copy of I’m Stuck in a Video Game, and his review was posted on Destructoid yesterday!
His review is as unique as the book itself, because he includes what his two-year-old son thinks of the book. Read it here!