Want to buy my translations?

Apparently the good people at PlayGeneration have taken it upon themselves to help with distributing Sonic Eraser. They are also selling the King Colossus, Pulseman and Battle Mania 2 translations by MIJET, as well as Neverending (NE) Soft Team’s Shuihu Fengyun Zhuan (水浒风云传).

While I am flattered my translation of such a shitty game would ever appear on cart, a complimentary copy would have been nice.

It would be a real shame if someone were to e-mail SEGA of Japan about two of pirate versions of its games being sold at most likely what appears to be without license.

10 years since RPGe

I intended to write something for March 19 to coincide with the day I left RPGe. Real life jumped in and this is coming 10 days late. Hey, at least with this delay it is now 10 years and 10 days, and that has a damn nice ring to it.

A decade is not a short time.

RPGe died 9 years ago. I left it in a total mess. I am not sure if I gave MagitekKn the e-mail addresses of the group’s other members. It was a disaster — one that made me look bad and crippled what was the first translation scene group, and up until that time the biggest.

Everything is gone. The older patches were never archived. The Web site, despite having more than a million hits, never made it into the Wayback Machine. Only one page survives, dating from the summer of 1997 — the first time I considered jumping ship. It is a humbling experience to see how something that was the talk of every Squaresoft fan page — then a huge chunk of the Internet — can be so easily lost.

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Apologies for my broken comment system

I must apologize to all my readers. Dave Shadoff told me last week that when he posted a comment, he was immediately dumped to a dead page and never shown a Captcha. I failed to investigate why his comment never arrived in moderation.

Now I know.

There are some problems with my Spam Karma plug-in, and everyone’s posts are being flagged as karma “?” and held in limbo. The problem has apparently gone on for some time, and even comments on Final Fantasy VII were trapped.

I especially apologize to those who commented on the Tibet article. I was stunned how few comments it received. Now I know why: my page was broken and discussion could not take place.

I have restored all the comments which were stuck in limbo: they can now be viewed. Apologies for any inconvenience this may have caused. Aside from one extremely racist comment, I have not censored any. I do not run that kind of Web site. I will approve all comments until I can fix the plug-in, so there may be some delay until your post appears.

FBI Ate My Balls

If one of the Internet’s “older” denizens, you may remember “Ate My Balls,” one of the earliest examples of an Internet meme to spread off the web and into commercial press. “Ate My Balls” graced the pages of many authors, including the Miami Herald’s Dave Barry.

There were many “Ate My Balls” sites: Charles Bukowski Ate My Balls, Mr. T Ate My Balls and, most special to me, Faelan Ate My Balls.

Now, this is not special to me because Faelan ate my balls; it is special to me because I hosted it, along with the rest of Emucult.

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Quotations from the greatest translation

The finest work the world has ever seen:

Bardo: Leone! The aim daughter was discovered!

Leone: Majesty the Bern hull To waits for you. You be able to come to Teito, the rice bran.

Bardo: Because you were caught, this which such a thing something is already known well!
Leone: Stopping rice bran! Two degrees that kind of imitation is loose! As for the person who disturbs leadership, there is no necessity for my unit!

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New Langrisser documentation available

This document has been available online for several days now, however I forgot to make any mention of it on the main page of this Web site.

Recently, I spent some time working with Der Langrisser to analyze and dump its data structures following an interesting post by “maxmat” on the Chinese Emumax gaming forum, where he posted how to change Erwin’s base stats.

This inspired me to … improve on his work.

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To would-be writing teachers in China

News flash hot off the Xinhua wire: “harmonious society” is out, “scientific view of development” is in.

What does this mean to you, dear soon-to-be teacher? It means you will see this as the core of every single paper submitted in your class for the next five years.

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Mentioned in Retro Gamer

The magazine Retro Gamer did a three-page spread on the making of Beggar Prince some time after its release. They covered the entire development team via Brandon Cobb’s comments on our work. I am mentioned in the second column on the first page.

KingMike, please stop re-posting …

Dude, you are cool. I don’t want to say anything bad about you, so stop acting like my anthropomorphic RSS feed.

I post here for a many reasons. First off, most of the people who read here care what I have to say. Second, people who don’t care what I have to say won’t come here. Lastly, it’s low traffic, so it has no reach for creating drama.

Any time my name is barfed out at ROMHacking.net, people come back from the dead to go apeshit and do the drama locomotion without me. Nightcrawler and forum kids would appreciate not knowing I exist anymore, so don’t supply them my RSS feed via posts.

There are less flame-bait ways to bump your post count

Unpublished: the real Jamie Bunker

Some of you may remember T2D – The Second Dimension, a game news Web site I ran from 2003 – 2005. After the site closed its doors, I still got some very interesting e-mails. Ones I wished I could post.

The most interesting by far was one from Jamie Bunker, the professional gamer.

Visitors may remember one section of the Web site called “Scandamonium,” one of our most original columns where we riffed on terrible game ads from 1980s magazines. One page of Scandamonium riffed on “mullet man” Jamie Bunker, the “professional gamer” hired to pose for a series of Gaiares ads.

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