4lorn
Deep Blooper
Posts: 27
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Post by 4lorn on Dec 21, 2021 11:35:14 GMT
Announcing: a 100% English patch for Bazaru de Gozaru no Game de Gozaru! Bazaru de Gozaru no Game de Gozaru is a puzzle game developed by Game Freak. Published in 1996, it stands out as a great PC-Engine CD game, and as another example of the studio's creative design. You control Bazar, a down on his luck monkey who dreams of furnishing his house. To achieve this, players guide him along several stages, collecting money, solving puzzles and avoiding all sorts of dangers. However, Bazar cannot be directly controlled: players must define a set of Actions for him that will be automatically played out when he touches hotspots along a level. Once these are decided on, it's time to set him off on his course and watch how he reaches a Stage's Goal - or fails to do so! There's a clear Rube Goldberg quality to the game, with observation, experimentation and application of Actions and their consequences (intended or otherwise) coming together really well. I got involved with Bazaru in October 2021, when Dave recruited me for artistic assistance with a project he was working on for a while. At this point, Dave had already worked on much of the game on his own in regards to hacking and inserting text. Development of the patch, in between other projects, continued right until Christmas week, where we finally found ourselves with a build ready for release. This patch translates virtually every last bit of text found during the course of the game, which also includes some GFX and the title screen. If you never played the game before, or want to rediscover it in English, now's your chance! You can find the patch here. Credits: David Shadoff - Hacking, tools, translation, minor art and text Me - Font work, Testing MooZ - Support, Testing
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Post by dshadoff on Dec 21, 2021 13:48:00 GMT
Yay, 3 translations in one week - never had this kind of activity before. It's like the glory days of the system, when games were being released frequently.
Actually, I wanted to share a couple of anecdotes about this translation...
1) It was basically all art. While some code was written for tools to support the translation effort, no code inside the game was altered (although some pointers were). Furthermore, I chose to edit the art as ASCII art... it just seemed easier me (I guess I'm art-impaired). 4lorn did an excellent job with anything actually artistic, such as fonts thicker than 1 pixel.
2) For the end credits, I needed to research the proper Anglicized spelling of "TOPICS" (a company). I investigated Masahiko Satou and Masumi Uchino, which were the individuals in the credits... and found that they had also worked on the creation of "Pythagoraswitch", a popular children's show in Japan, which features Rube Goldberg machines at the start (and often end) of the show. Maybe you can find some examples on Youtube of Nico Nico Douga.
I will publish all of our work in a GitHub repo, probably later today. I just need to finish a couple of README documents.
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Post by Galahad on Dec 21, 2021 14:39:29 GMT
Yay, 3 translations in one week - never had this kind of activity before. It's like the glory days of the system, when games were being released frequently. It's awesome to see so many translations
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Post by dshadoff on Dec 22, 2021 2:12:12 GMT
And, I have just made the GitHub repo public, with all the information and tools written for this project. I may need to go back and add a little more information about a couple of tools, but I think there's more than enough to keep you all busy until then: github.com/dshadoff/PCE_xlate_BazarudeGozaru
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Post by supper on Dec 22, 2021 8:00:33 GMT
Yay, 3 translations in one week - never had this kind of activity before. You'd almost think we'd actually planned it... This looks great! Let me tell you, it's nice to see a CD translation that's not by me (if I'm not mistaken, the first one since 2012!?). This is one of those games I'd heard mentioned and had been meaning to take a look at sometime, so I'm glad to see it getting some deserved attention. Thanks for sharing the source, too -- it's very interesting to be able to see someone else's approach to the problems of working with the CD system, as well as hacking on the PCE in general. (I can tell you that editing graphics as ASCII art is an idea that would never have crossed my mind.) And I envy your commitment to properly organizing and documenting your projects; by the time I'm done coding, I'm too tired to do anything but throw the whole thing into a repo with no cleanup and call it a day. Excellent work, and thank you!
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4lorn
Deep Blooper
Posts: 27
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Post by 4lorn on Dec 22, 2021 10:16:56 GMT
In the meantime, I took the liberty of creating a small guide for the game. It includes explanations on mechanics and all of the Stage Solutions Dave and I found while playing and playtesting. If you're interested, feel free to download it from either of these Google Drive links:
Hope everyone enjoys the translation! (and the guide too, even if it's optional)
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Post by dshadoff on Dec 22, 2021 14:40:33 GMT
This looks great! Let me tell you, it's nice to see a CD translation that's not by me (if I'm not mistaken, the first one since 2012!?). This is one of those games I'd heard mentioned and had been meaning to take a look at sometime, so I'm glad to see it getting some deserved attention. It certainly has been a while, and it was quite a surprise when I saw your translations starting last year. Much appreciated, and highly motivational. But wow, it's a high standard of quality to try to attain... I was also thinking that the addition of subtitles alone could transform a number of games which don't really need any/much additional translation - shootng games and action games, primarily. It might be cool to work on something like that in the coming months (along with the other projects). Thanks for sharing the source, too -- it's very interesting to be able to see someone else's approach to the problems of working with the CD system, as well as hacking on the PCE in general. (I can tell you that editing graphics as ASCII art is an idea that would never have crossed my mind.) And I envy your commitment to properly organizing and documenting your projects; by the time I'm done coding, I'm too tired to do anything but throw the whole thing into a repo with no cleanup and call it a day. Actually, if you see the commit history, it was set up that way from the restart of the project a couple of months ago - it's just that it was private until yesterday. I found that I needed to organize it that way in GitHub to get the project running - partly to refresh my own memory on the work that I had done before putting it away, and partly to arrange it for collaboration (and of course, also to keep versioning straight). I added comments into the code for the same reason - it's for "anybody who wants to understand the code at a later time"... which usually turns out to be me at a later date.
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