Project Stuff Archive

Yesterday, Mato & I started our game-cataloging journey through Super Mario Odyssey. We’re playing through both the English and Japanese versions and getting crisp, high-quality PNG screenshots of all the text in the game. We’re also streaming the journey! Join us on Twitch Mondays through Fridays at 5pm AZ time (currently MST), chat with us, and give us tips! We’ll be streaming on that schedule until we finish the game.

And here’s the archive of Day 1 if you missed it:

Day 2 of mega file organization. Here are some of my folder names: Booze to Coffee, L/R, References, SNK, Soft Hard, Wrong, YES NO.

And here’s the pic that made me laugh the most today:

This past Sunday, I was cleaning up some cat barf when Mato walked up to me and said, “This is probably the best time to ask this. Do you wanna stream?”

Getting new screenshots has been a big part of the main LoL site’s upgrade. Mato needed a set of screenshots from Breath of Fire, so hey, why don’t we stream the hunt? We didn’t announce it, we just did it.

To our surprise, many people showed up to watch! Lots of old regulars and a few new people. It was very heartwarming because a lot of people said they missed us. The last time we streamed was back in June, and we’ve indeed missed talking to all of you guys too! We can’t get back on a regular streaming schedule yet, but we do want to get back to it sometime. Mato’s got his sights set on a side-by-side Final Fantasy VI T-edition translation stream 😮

Earlier this year, Mato & I played through the entirety of Tengai Makyo: The Apocalypse IV on the Sega Saturn. He live-translated it as we played, and boyyyyy it was an adventure. How can I describe it in only a few sentences? Well, it’s set in “America” in the late 1800s, and yet there are high-tech flying machines and a crazed sentient TV man. Oh, the Alamo is a combat tank and the town of Tombstone is a fantasy food land … until it gets blown up by a laser from space.

And that’s just a tiny part of the story! If you’ve never seen this game before, go on the journey of discovery with us:

If you don’t have the energy to watch hours of RPG confusion, Hardcore Gaming 101 wrote a really good article about the game here! Man, I really miss streaming.

There’s a weird thing that happens with Tales of [fill in the blank] games. The main story is localized and voice-acted very well, but then you run into weird typos and strange wording in the “lesser text”. That’s what I call the stuff that NPCs might say to you, or the text in sidequests that aren’t necessary to complete the game. What you get is a game that seems like it was translated by two different companies – which is probably the case for Tales games.

I call it the Tales Curse.

Our buddy Ian Burch collected a bunch of examples of weird problems found in the sidequests near the end (or postgame?) of Tales of Berseria. I’ll be putting together a gallery of them all sometime, but here’s a look at one of my favorites from the bunch:

Ah, hmmmm. …. hmmm【・ヘ・?】

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.

About a year or two before I started working with Fangamer to make Legends of Localization books, I considered making books on my own. Anyone who knows me knows that my design senses are poop though, as this mega alpha first test prototype experiment PDF shows:

• Mega early prototype test thing PDF download

I think I was just seeing how the current LoL site would look if converted straight into book format. I’m glad I decided it was a bad idea. I think I also calculated it out and a Final Fantasy IV LoL book in this sort of format would’ve been around a thousand pages or more anyway 😯

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…

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.

It’s an LoL tradition to have a victory dinner after the release of our latest book. After Zelda, we went to an amazing Irish pub. EarthBound took us to both a great pizza place AND a southwestern themed place (yeah, we celebrated twice).

Now it’s time to celebrate This be book bad translation, video games! Where should we go?!