Games

The Name Of The Game is… ILLGAZE!

Great article at atlus.com from the Head of Localization on what sort of issues and workarounds people come up with in translating and localizing games for different audiences. Here he talks about things encountered in translating the Etrian Odyssey games. Hard limits on character names prove fantastic linguistic challenges from long and complex names in kanji over to good ole phonetic English!

“…. we had a hard limit of 8 characters for player skills, enemy skills, and enemy names, and a generous 10 for item and equipment names. The hard part is that 8 characters in Japanese can give you enemy names like 憤怒の眼光主, which romanizes as “Fundo No Gankou-Nushi” and translates as the even lengthier “Owner of the Malicious Glare.”

That’s a lot to pack into 8 English letters. So in this case, we jettisoned the word “Owner” as being the least meaningful word in the name, and were left with “Malicious Glare.” Casting about for some shorter synonyms for “malicious” gives us words like “evil” and “bad,” which are both short enough to fit. But Evilglare and Badglare have that slightly clumsy air that went hand-in-hand with the old NES days, and we try to produce localizations more natural than that, even with character limits as tough as these.

Read more of the article for weapons workarounds and maintaining historical authenticity! Sigh - I so wish this was my job…

The rise of the emo game? “99 no Namida” brings the tears

As someone with a sickening obsession for all things Jin Akanishi J-boyband/tat related, I often find myself spending disgusting amounts of money on Japanese teen fash/music mags. Quite a few of these run large advertisements for new Nintendo DS games, generally featuring Cinnamoroll, seals baking cakes etc etc - which is a nice change to the mags here which only EVER advertise sodding Brain Age…. but a random one jumped out at me the other day and gave me a double take! 99 no Namida (99 Tears). I thought for one MAD moment that it might have been some sort of related DS game to the bawl-yr-eyes-out-sobfest drama that is 1 Litre of Tears - a drama based on a girl with a degenerative and incurable spinal disease, which renders her incapable of movement by the end, but doesn’t affect her mind at all, nrgghh gawd… and awfully? That’s not so far from the truth!

99 no Namida essentially does what it says on the tin. It’s an emotional development game (one might say… an EMO game?!) which creates a ‘personality profile’ based on your answering a few questions on the starting input screen, and then uses this profile to generate a story which should… make you cry! The point being that it is healthy to unleash your emotions and release stress, whether that is through a solitary tear rolling down the cheek or an all out bawl.

Whether this is true or not, I certainly can’t imagine playing this one on the tube. And how does it measure if you’ve cried or not? And if it doesn’t try and measure, then why not just read a weepy book? Or download aforementioned “1 Litre of Tears” into yr iPod? (Or in fact, read the actual true-life diary the story came from?). Can the crying game… really be a game at all? So - I seriously have zero clue on whether this will make it out of Japan. Can any of our Japanese correspondents confirm or deny swathes of salarymen sniffling as inconspiciously as possible into their briefcases on the tube each morning? Or… given the genre of the mag I saw the original ad in, swathes of schoolgirls gathered round in the playground, at the heart-rending stories of … ???

Well - I suppose emotional development is as important as mental development, given the popularity of Prof. Kawashima’s Brain Training — which has JUST dropped out of the UK charts! For the first time since release! Is this a sign that we’re ready to develop other parts of our mind, as well as arithmetic and logic? Hardly very Vulcan, is it…

cthulhuedo

the hideously maddening game from World of Lovecraft: … read on …

Pac-Man vs The Asteroids

In these days of Grand Theft Auto IV and WiiFit (who knew you could wee and get fit) its good to know there are plucky game designers out there doing it all for nothing. Perhaps as a showcase for half finished ideas, perhaps as a way of trying out ideas. Or just to show off. Anyway in flicking through a couple of these at Indie Games* I came across ROM CHECK FAIL! which is a acid fuelled nostalgia fest which has been a fun little diversion for the last couple of days.
… read on …

HitchHikers Text Adventure Sequel – Oh Em Gee

waxy.org – Milliways: Infocom’s Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

From an anonymous source close to the company, I’ve found myself in possession of the “Infocom Drive” — a complete backup of Infocom’s shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I’ve ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

If you want to play it here is the z-code file. You need an application that loads z-code files.

Legend of Zelda Movie Trailer

An April 1st (2009) release, but if it is another joke it’s an amazingly good-looking one! There have been previous fake Zelda movie trailers, mostly by fans, and you can tell.

Twisty little passages - mazes re-solved

Maze War is the grand-daddy of not only first-person shooters, but also networked multi-player games like World of Warcraft. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are mazes in WoW, Second Life etc, as they are the nursey-slopes for 3D environment creating. I doubt they feature highly in such games.

The persistence of mazes in the text adventure genre of computer games is due perhaps for two reasons. Mazes seem to have an affinity with things literary - they can be used metaphorically or as entities in a magical realist settings, in ways that wouldn’t cohere in more ‘realist’ graphically-oriented game. There is also the metaphor of ’story as maze’ of which Borges ‘Garden of Forking Paths’ is the most well known.

More importantly, the genre just seems to attract game designers who like mazes as mazes, and as a historical ‘in joke’. In Graham Nelson’s Designer’s Manual he puts it bluntly: “it is designers who like mazes … players do not like mazes.” I would also go along with his description of mazes as the ‘locked room’ of text adventures. Provide a novel solution, and you please everyone.

So it goes that in modern text adventures, mazes in name and appearance only often have peculiar and map-free solutions:

SPOILAZ ALERT
* an unsolvable maze - you … read on …

Gary Gygax 1938–2008 RIP

AP story on wbay.com “Gary Gygax died this morning at his home in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin”

Yes, he’s failed that final saving throw and the Official D’n'D site has a black front page today.

I Was A Cretan (Cretin?)

As heard on last weeks FTLoP, amongst the fantasy gamebook boom of the mid eighties, was an unusual threesome known as the Cretan Chronicles. Not the first linked set of gamebooks, it nevertheless followed quite swiftly on the heels of Steve Jackson’s very popular Sorcery series, and in a similar way tried to add more depth to the 400 paragraphed Fighting Fantasy books. It did this by a complex patronage/religion system, a novel setting and occasionally seeming to have a bit of sex in it.
… read on …

JBOF Watch: NZ Racism Undermined By Photo Research

Those of you following the current cricket controversy in Australia will be aware of the basic facts. During the recent test Indian cricketer Harbhajan Singh allegedly called black Australian player Andrew Symonds a “monkey”. Now this may seem like a simple case of kneejerk racism and unacceptable, but it is amazing how both sides have spun the story until it is now out of all context and control. For example, as Marina Hyde reports, Raj Natarajan the President of Australia’s United Indian Association offered this opinion to calm things down. “Considering that the monkey god is one of the revered idols of Hindu mythology and worshipped by millions it is surprising that it was considered a racist term.”

Well I love the PG Tips monkeys but you don’t see me throwing bananas on the pitch at my favourite tea loving footballers. As Marina’s piece goes on to say, the big problem is not just the racism (or lack of) that lies in these comments, it is that within cricket the concept of sledging is not just allowed, it is in some instances celebrated. … read on …