The Dreamcast oddity Birdcage of Horrors (otherwise known as Grauen no Torikago) has just received a brand new fan translation, courtesy of the modder Derek Pascarella and a group of translators/transcribers including Anonymous, T_Chan, and Walnut.
Birdcage of Horrors is a pretty obscure title that we expect a lot of people reading this probably know nothing about (we certainly didn't!). It isn't a game, as you may expect, but a Japan-exclusive murder mystery/horror "i-dra" or "internet drama" from Sega and ASCII Entertainment that was available as part of Dreamcast Direct's Online service.
It was distributed on six GD-ROM discs representing chapters and was presented as 365 one-minute episodes. As Pascarella explains, each episode would become accessible gradually over the course of a year, from 1999 to 2000, and would also require players to complete the previous chapters before downloading special save files from the internet to their VMU to unlock the new episodes. This new patch, however, treats the six discs as standalone pieces of software.
According to Pascarella, the team behind the project has translated each episode as well as the bonus interview content, so it's now possible for Western Dreamcast enthusiasts to dig into this unusual release.
You can download the patches for each disc/chapter now from Derek Pascarella's GitHub page if you want to give them a watch or visit Pascarella's website to support his work directly.
[source github.com]
Comments 3
How strange but fascinating time capsule before video streaming was ubiquitous. Will have to check it out. I hope we eventually get a translation of the El Dorado Gate games, another early experiment with episodic releases (but actually a game).
Ha ha video streaming in 1999, maybe if you wanted it at a resolution of 50x50 pixels. This sounds like a very clever way to work around the technical restrictions of the time while still preventing players from just fiddling around with the system clock to unlock the content. Plus, connecting to the internet and doing funky stuff with the VMU was an end unto itself back then. Still I bet that a fair few people went a little crazy holding this pack of 6 GD ROMs in their hands and knowing that the majority of their contents were being held hostage.
There is a version you can burn to disc to play on a normal Dreamcast.
The video quality is rougher then 1 grit sandpaper.
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