LoL EarthBound: 2014 vs 2016

Mato found a gem while looking through old emails recently. It’s a mockup of what we thought the EarthBound Legends of Localization book would look like:

The name of this file was “open zine copy.png”. lmao, we thought it’d be small enough to be a zine! For those who don’t know/remember, LoL EB was funded as a stretch goal during Fangamer’s You Are Now EarthBound Kickstarter in October 2014. And two years later, when the actual LoL EB book was released, it looked a damn sight more impressive than the mockup:

And a “zine” it is not. At over 400 pages, I hope the EB book stays our biggest book. I don’t want to go any higher pleeeease!

More Goofs from the Google Translate App

One of the best things about receiving packages from Japan is using the Google Translate phone app on the newspapers stuffed inside the boxes for padding. We got a game recently (which I still need to post about), and the app churned out some funny phrases on the newspapers:

We will never be free of eagles here at LoL.

Poisoft Relaunched Their Translation Kickstarter

Knowing there was little chance they’d reach their 5,000,000 yen goal, Poisoft canceled their Order Land Translation Project Kickstarter last month, saying they’d relaunch it after tweaking things a bit. Well hey, they made good on their promise! The Kickstarter was relaunched this morning – the goal has been lowered to 2,000,000 yen and some of the rewards have changed.

Mato’s been playing a lot of Order Land on the Switch in Japanese and he’s been really liking it. All but the King mode.

The Origin of the Miserable Little Pile

So, this book arrived yesterday:

I was confused as to why we needed it until Mato tagged a page for me:

Whoa. So the Symphony of the Night localizer didn’t pull that line out of his butt. Mato goes into more detail about this line here if you’re interested!

All Yossy, All the Time!

Mato spotted a decently-priced set of Barcode Battler II cards for Super Mario World on eBay the other day. Swoosh! Snatched up!!

You might be able to guess by looking at the cover that we wanted these cards becaaaaaause:

More instances of Yoshi’s name romanized as Yossy! I’ll get these cards scanned real nice and add them to the Yossy Image Gallery soon~

Alt Covers for press start to translate

We took a look at the alternate titles were were considering for our new book (buy it here!), now let’s look at the alternate covers we were tossing around. Here are some mockups Tony the Designer started with:

So you can see we were originally going for a glitched-out looking cover. Then Tony started experimenting with dragging the Final Fantasy IV game cartridge and box across the scanner:

And that’s how we ended up with the cover we all know and love!

Tony said this about the scanning method:

the wiggling with your hand on the scanner is really what makes the best glitches. it’s very random and by chance. It’s also a machine interrupting and trying to build an electronic image that I (a human) am purposely messing with. Conceptually it felt perfect for the Funky cover. it also looks cool haha

Quite a journey! I need to find more of this work-in-progress stuff to share. I remember we had tons of different variations of the LoL logo before deciding on the final one.

Alt Titles for press start to translate

Now that press start to translate is out (buy it here!), I can share some of the alternate titles we considered. Mato wanted the title alone to make it immediately clear what the book is about, and also not explicitly reference Final Fantasy IV or Google Translate. Also, no negativity allowed. Some of the best/funniest ones were:

  • Copy, Paste, Translate!
  • The Surprising Results of a Translator that isn’t Human
  • Cached in Translation
  • This Book is About Basketball Enemas and Video Games
  • Everything Went Wrong! What happens when you let a computer translate a video game
  • Artificial Inelegance
  • CPU Spoony Bard
  • The Enema is Saying That You Should Not Wear a Basketball
  • Why Your Next Favorite Game Probably Won’t Be Translated By A Computer
  • Return the Bullshit! What happens when you let a computer translate a video game
  • Rated M for Machine Translation
  • Press Start to Translate (Nina gets the credit for saving our butts with this suggestion!)
  • Press Start to Translate: Wait, Wait! Undo! Undo! (I really wanted this one)
  • Let’s Machine Translation!

I even drew a terrible cover mockup of the title I liked the most:

Speaking of cover mockups, pretty soon I’ll share some mockups that Tony the Designer made before we went with the beautiful poorly-scanned copy of the game.

Wander Also Likes Mario Kart

American Thanksgiving was yesterday. Delicious food was eaten! One of Mato’s traditions is to play Super Mario Kart on Thanksgiving. Wander settled down on my lap and watched each race intently.

Do you have any Thanksgiving traditions involving video games? Shadow of the Colossus is another Thanksgiving game for us.

Sunday’s Surprise Breath of Fire Stream

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 😮