Author: rodneylives

Legends of Localization Shows Signs of Activity

Clyde “Tomato” Mandelin, translator and localizer of video games, including especially of the fan translation of Mother 3, has a website and blog called Legends of Localization. It had been sleeping for a couple of years, but recently has sprung to life again with two posts this year. A few days ago he linked to a 2017 live playthrough and translation in a series of Youtube videos he made of a Sega Saturn JRPG called Tengai Makyō: The Apocalypse IV, a satirical game that pokes fun at Western culture, that he refers to as kind of a cousin of Earthbound. At 31 videos, each about two hours long, it takes quite a while to get through the whole thing, but it sounds like fun. Here is the 62-hour epic:

On the same day, he posted a history and timeline of fan’s waiting for news about an official localization of Mother 3.

Back in April he curated a collection of articles about bad game translations, including games like Twinkle Star Sprites and Breath of Fire II, but also has a collection of iffy translations of English games into Japanese. It turns out that Atari Games was notorious for them, inspiring a couple of long-lasting Japanlish memes.

At the top of the screen: “koin ikko ireru,” an awkward way of saying “Insert Coin.” (image from the Legends of Localization site)

I hope these posts are an indication of further writing from Tomato in 2025!

Aftermath Looks Back On One Year of Operation

Two whole days in a row of non-Youtube links? Who’d have thought it possible! Shame yesterday was on Nintendo-related things, the other over-frequent subject of our little blogmachine, but I guess you can’t have it all.

Aftermath is composed of just five webugees (original word plz steal) from various other bigcorp contentboxes, and is one of a whole wave of similar creator-owned outfits that also includes Second Wind, 404 Media and Defector. All seem to be doing pretty well… for now… but we’re hoping all the best for all of them, at least until they grow into Kotakus, Escapists or Washingtons Post of their own, and come to oppress an entirely new generation of writer. But that’s the future, and there’s still time to avoid it, at least according to my good friend, the Ghost of Collective Ownership Future.

Aftermath’s principals have an article up describing their experiences, and its variously enlightening and illuminating. Running a small business is a process rife with pitfalls, and when you’re just five people, most working part-time and not able to afford to just pay others to take care of the hard parts, it can be difficult, especially when at your last jobs you could just focus on doing the thing you’re good at, the thing you like doing. Another problem that being only five people creates is fragility. Not intending to jinx them at all, but if one of them were to suddenly pass away, could the remaining four keep the banner held aloft?

But they are doing it. It’s working! And they have plans to expand next year. If you want to follow them and help keep them afloat, they have a trial subscription going where you can read them for one month for just $1. And their monthly rate is just $7 anyway, $10 for commenting privileges and Discord access.

Reading the article, especially the bit about how sites like this tend to slowly bleed subscribers over time just as a fact of their existence, as life happens to their readers in the aggregate, but gain them in lumps as new features are introduced or bursts of publicity occur. It feels like we could all stand to recognize this, and remember these sites need subscribers to survive. Aftermath’s rates are quite reasonable I think, considering that the New York Times charges $25 a month for their output, and as a bonus Aftermath doesn’t even publish frequent transphobic op-eds from right-wing jerks. Huh!

The Ringer on Funny Mario RPGs

Joshua Rivera on The Ringer reminds us of the history of comedy RPGs involving Mario, beginning with Super Mario RPG, then branching into the twin threads of the Paper Mario games and the Mario & Luigi series. They all share the common aspect of making Mario pretty boring, the archetype of the silent protagonist, and instead focusing on the world he inhabits.

Mario & Luigi (image from mariowiki)

In particular, the article mentions how the two of the principals behind Super Mario RPG went on to work on Mario and Luigi, and how Nintendo hasn’t made developing the series any easier with increasingly strict guidelines on how the characters can be used, like how modified versions of iconic, yet generic, types like Toads and Goombas can’t be created, possibly for fear of diluting their brands.

Zess T., a classic Thousand Year Door character who couldn’t be created today, because she’s not a bog-standard, mint-in-box Toad. (Image from mariowiki.)

The article also notes that both subseries have undergone revivals lately, with Origami King and Thousand Year Door in the Paper Mario series, and the new Brothership in the Mario & Luigi line, despite the shutting down of AlphaDream, who made them. But it’s not getting easier to make new games in either series, with Nintendo’s growing strictness over outside use of their characters and the serieses painting themselves further into a corner with each installment consuming more of the feasible possibility space.

Oh Fawful. Will we ever see your like again? (image from mariowiki)

Sega to Delist Classic Games From Online Storefronts

“We scour the Earth web for indie, retro, and niche gaming news so you don’t have to, drebnar!” – your faithful reporter

(I decided to get some use out of the old news roundup post template for this item.)

News comes from Ars Technica‘s Kevin Purdy, and was announced on Sega’s website, a large number of items will be removed from Steam and all the major console storefronts with the end of the year, although as Ars points out, the Playstation and Switch storefronts are only seeing the Sega Classics Collection removed. Steam is seeing the most removals. Items on the Nintendo Switch online compilation will not be affected. Nothing removed will disappear from your library of online purchases (unlike what happened with Oxenfree on itch.io when it was picked up by Netflix), so if you want to play these items, in this form, later, buy them now, and you’ll “always” be able to download them again later. (Always deserves scare quotes because nothing online is forever, but you’ll be able to play them some while later at least.)

Why are they being removed? Purdy speculates that, like how Sonic the Hedgehog titles were removed in advance of the release of Sonic Origins, there’s probably some new collection of Sega classics in the works that these items will be a part of, or maybe they plan on bundling a bunch of them with a Yakuza game or something.

Sega’s website lists them all, but the great majority of them are Genesis titles, along with Nights Into Dreams for Saturn, and Crazy Taxi, Space Channel 5 Part 2, and the Dreamcast Collection, originally for Dreamcast of course. I personally recommend Crazy Taxi, of course.

Blaster Master & Wing of Madoola’s Lost Arcade Versions

Blaster Master, Sunsoft’s English localization of Japan’s Metafight, turns out to have an unreleased arcade version for the Vs. Unisystem. The Unisystem was substantially Famicom/NES hardware with some changes, so it makes sense that there were once plans to make an arcade version.

No known public copies exist, and I don’t think any ROM dumps have been released. The sole record of its existence may be a video (8 minutes) on the Youtube channel of higenekodo:

They have more videos on their channel than this one, including one of another possibly-unreleased Unisystem adaption of a Sunsoft Famicom game, the Wing of Madoola (16 minutes):

Both games have added scoring systems and other changes to adapt them for arcade play. Without ROM dumps though, we can’t know the full extent of the changes. Wing of Madoola seems to have been given an English localization, and had Gauntlet-ish timed health loss added to prevent player stalling, but it’s not known what changes were made to Blaster Master’s play to keep them moving. Blaster Master was also made less free-roaming: once you defeat the boss of an area and collect the powerup, the player is taken directly to the entrance of the next area, and each area begins with a map screen giving an overview of the area. And collected vehicle weapons appear in the corner of the screen, which suggests that the pause screen was removed.

I love hearing about games being adapted in design to meet different needs, like arcade play, and I’d love to try these modified versions some day to see what other changes were planned. Maybe they’ll come to light, eventually. I can only hope.

Super Mario All-Stars Random Debug Mode

We are told by The Cutting Room Floor this interesting fact. Super Mario Bros. 3 has a debug mode that activates when a specific memory location contains 80 hex, that allows the user to grant Mario any powerup. In normal play this never activates because the cartridge initializes all of RAM to 0 as part of initialization. But the version of the game included in SNES Super Mario All-Stars, while it closely follows the original’s logic in many ways including including debug mode and its criteria for activation, doesn’t initialize memory when starting up. When the console boots up, its RAM contains random voltages that can be interpreted as nearly any value, and there’s a chance that there’ll be 80 hex in memory location 7E0160, and enable the debug mode for Super Mario Bros. 3.

While ordinarily this would be a 1-in-256 chance, some consoles are prone to favoring specific values, so some units will turn on debug mode more often. As a result a legend developed that certain Super Mario All-Star cartridges are special debug versions that accidentally got put into retail boxes and sold.

Supper Mario Broth made a short video (about 1 1/2 minutes) explaining how it works in crudely animated form:

As it turns out, Mario All-Stars has its own debug modes for each game in the compilation, but the one for Mario 3 is different, and buggier. Meanwhile the original debug mode for Mario 3 remains, intact, buried in the code, waiting for the value 80 hex to appear in its magic location to unveil itself.

Sundry Sunday: Ganon Complains About People Spelling His Name With Two ‘N’s

Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.

BitFinity, aka Matthew Taranto, the guy who made the long-running webcomic Brawl in the Family, has kept busy since with making Youtube songs. In addition a number featuring Waluigi, and one with Aeris from Final Fantasy VI, most recently he’s made one starring Ganondorf complaining about people who spell his name wrong, and who also takes the opportunity to dress down peoples’ issues with game language and pronunciation more generally. (3 minute)

O-Chan vs Freeon-Leon

Kid Fenris wishes to remind us all that, in the Western release of Hebereke, called “Ufouria: The Saga” (and by “Western” I don’t mean the US, it never got a NES release over here), its localizers decided to rename its characters, and while doing so even redesigned two of them, turning protagonist Hebe into “Bop-Louie,” and fursuited girl O-Chan into the orange dinosaur Freeon-Leon.

The Hebereke bunch were already a random bunch of crazies, but they’re cute crazies. Sunsoft’s localizers tried to inject them with a dose of hip-serum. Here’s a brief summary:


Hebe the penguin
Changes: Rechristened “Bop-Louie,” given big eyes

O-chan the cat-suited girl
Changes: Made a wall-eyed lizard not in any kind of suit, renamed “Freeon-Leon”

Jennifer the fish/frog thing
Changes: Renamed “Gil”

Sukezaemon the ghost
Changes: Renamed “Shades”
Images from Spriter’s Resource

Kid Fenris notes, in a pair of posts, that, in the recently-released sequel for Switch, the localized versions make cameos during the return to base cutscene!

Image from Kid Fenris’ blog. Note the orange character is a lizard and not a girl in a fursuit.

Hebereke had a much more productive live in Japan, where the series got several sequels. The changed characters are a relic of the time when Sunsoft seemed uncertain of how to approach overseas markets. Blaster Mastered was (and is) revered, but didn’t sell as well as they expected, so they released a weird kind of sequel called Fester’s Quest, with Addams Family characters. They localized a Game Boy version of Hudson’s Bomber King (renamed to “Robowarrior”in English) as a sequel to Blaster Master, called Blaster Master Boy, and sponsored another sequel, made by Software Creations, for the Genesis.

Back on the NES, the license for a Terminator 2 game fell through, so they rebranded it as Journey to Silius, and not being able to get the Superman license scuttled plans to release another game completely, despite a hasty renaming to “Sunman.” Was there ever another game publisher so cursed with licensing issues as Sunsoft?

Gamefinds: Pac-Man Superfast

Part of Youtube’s doomed-to-fail Playables series, so enjoy this before it gets heartlessly deleted by Google when they decide games on their video platform don’t make sense, isn’t worth it, or whenever Netflix gives up on games and they don’t feel they need to compete on that front anymore.

The game is basically Pac-Man, but with a Championship Edition-like speedup gimmick. As you eat dots, the game slowly increases the simulation rate. it never really gets up to CE’s white-hot speeds, but it does get pretty fast. You get a slight slowdown when you finish a board and lose a life. Since you start with five lives, earn an extra one every 5,000 points, and each of a rack’s three (instead of the arcade’s two) fruit are worth at least 1,000 points, and even more as you advance to later boards, you are unlikely to run out of lives. The game ends after 13 levels, so you have a decent chance of finishing this one!

My best score is right around 150,000 points, but I was only playing casually. See if you can do better!