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Very Early Funky Fantasy 4 Book Sample

Mato & Tony have been hard at work writing and designing the Funky Fantasy 4 book these past few weeks. Here’s a peek at a page printed on our weird office printer that will definitely change by the time the book is finished:

We also need to figure out what to call this book. “Funky Fantasy IV” doesn’t get the point across very easily! D:

LaserDiscs are Cool

The LoL team is always juggling at least 5 projects at once; here’s a peek at one of them. We began collecting a bunch of Japanese-subtitled movies, and this led to Mato & me becoming LaserDisc owners. I… kinda want to buy my movies exclusively on LaserDisc from now on…

The Original Funky Fantasy

Working on the Funky Fantasy book got me thinking about this old video.

Three years ago, Mato drew pictures of the entire plot of Final Fantasy 4. And then he had me watch this video and narrate what was happening. And I barely remembered the plot of Final Fantasy 4 back then.

Please enjoy.

Typing in Japanese

English keyboards are used to type non-English languages all the time. I remember when I knew nothing about how people typed Japanese stuff into computers. The topic could probably get its own full LoL article sometime but basically it’s crazy and you can type words in a bunch of different ways to reach the same spelling. For example, here’s how you can type Pikachu’s Japanese name with some English keyboards depending on your setup:

I actually only came across that when I decided “maybe I should see if other names like Yoshi have weird alternate spellings in Japanese” and then found Pikatyu being used on rare occasion. I’d love to make a gallery of alternate spellings of beloved characters someday.

Guess Boy Advance

The November 1999 issue of N64 Magazine got their hands on the technical specs of the Game Boy Advance. They included a picture of an artist’s guess at what the new Game Boy would look like:

Hey, they weren’t too far off!

Special Book Signing

Back when the EarthBound LoL book was first released, we offered to sign books if people asked. I liked to do personalized messages and one person used that to dare me into signing a piece of toilet paper rather than the book itself. Well I managed to sign the toilet paper after some trial and error learning.

Unfortunately it’s not as feasible to do personalized messages anymore. You can still get a signed copy of our books but they probably won’t have anything more than just our autographs and tiny drawings of things.

Funky Fantasy 6 Test

Ever since Mato & I streamed Funky Fantasy 4, people have been asking for a Funky Fantasy 6. Because Final Fantasy 6 uses kanji in its script, machine translations are pretty competent and a lot less entertaining. AI is still pretty far behind the skills of human translators, though.

As a test, Mato ran Final Fantasy 6’s script through Google Translate and I’m combing through it now trying to see if it would be worth streaming. I’m only a fifth of the way done (god it’s huge), but here are some funny lines I’ve found so far:

  • “Okay, the thinking should be stopped [NEWLINE] with the power of the head brain. [NEWLINE]
  • Actually, I met an example girl.
  • Kefuka “Hey, shoes of sand!
  • Tina “Oh … my brother? [NEWLINE] Wow, I … I guess it’s a big bear ….
  • [NEWLINE] I do not have ears to hear …
  • Kefuka “Hey Cuts!” [NEWLINE] I will definitely return this mulberry!
  • Cayenne “Somebody does not exist [NEWLINE] It’s been a while!
  • Rock “ぐ [PAUSE_60] ぐ ぐ ひ ひ ~
  • Let me tell you how to chocobo!
  • Cayenne “As I thought [NEWLINE] I was a credible woman!
  • Even if the world got fucked up [NEWLINE], even with such a stone [NEWLINE] ginger noodle …

The funny lines are few and far between, unfortunately! Not sure if we’ll stream this, but I’ll continue to post more funny goofs as I scrub through the script.

Space World 1997 Preview of Mario Artist

Continuing with scans from the January 1998 issue of the French gaming magazine Consoles, here’s a spread on Mario Artist. The short description of Mario Artist is that it’s an upgraded version of Mario Paint. But really, it was an ambitious project that would have been composed of 8 suites of creative fun, if the N64DD hadn’t crashed and burned. Unfortunately, Mario Artist never left Japan.

Featured in the article below are Picture Studio, Polygon Studio, and Talent Studio:

The other suite that got released was Communication Kit, where you could connect to the internet to share your creations. There were four other suites planned, but they were never released: Game Maker, Graphical Message Maker, Sound Maker, and Video Jockey Maker.

Thanks to a friend who’s obsessed with Mario Paint, I actually got to play Polygon Studio for a bit. I had no idea what I was doing.