by 
Video games are amazing escapism, aren't they? One day you're exercising your destructive tendencies, running through a jungle smashing crates as a wild-eyed marsupial or wrecking some poor bloke's car as you escape from the cops; the next, you're living out one in a collection of incredibly niche job-related fantasies — from becoming the operator of your very own theme park to taking over the management of your favourite football team.
Originally released in 1996 for the Sony PlayStation (and later Sega Saturn and Windows PCs), Koei's Air Management '96 definitely belongs to the latter camp, being less about pulse-raising action and more about savvy business planning, clever budgeting, and the satisfaction of a job well done. A successor to the video game Air Management for 16-bit consoles (known as Aerobiz in the West), it was available exclusively in Japan, but has now received a complete English translation (for the PS1 version), courtesy of the hacker/translator Saralene, as of yesterday.
"This is a complete English translation of Air Management '96, also known as Aerobiz '96, PlayStation version," Saralene wrote in the description of the patch on romhack.ing, "This game is a remake of the original Air Management, which was released in English as Aerobiz for SNES and Genesis. It was originally slated for a late release in English under the title of Aerobiz 2000, but that release was quietly cancelled."
She continues, "Every piece of text and every graphic has been completely translated into English. Only the title screen katakana subtitle has been left alone, as the name of the game and its title screen have intentionally been left as-is. This translation used the SNES version's text as an original baseline and reference, though it has largely diverged from that text over time."
As Saralene notes in the patch's readme.txt, the patch has been in development on/off for over five years, with the ROM hacker having released a "nearly complete beta translation" of the patch in 2021. She ultimately left this patch unfinished at the time, busy with work and hoped to return to it later. But before she could do that, someone took her work and "finished" the translation with generative AI, releasing it as an addendum to the patch, in a move she has since criticised due to the method used and the quality of its output.
"I had been looking for help on finishing the patch for a long time," wrote Saralene in the readme.txt, "And yet here someone had taken what I'd made and used the plagiarism machine to create a 'finished' patch using what I would consider an enormous waste of our planet's limited space and resources.
"That patch used an AI-edited title screen and video, changed the button arrangement using AI, and adjusted some of my strings that had overruns, mostly by shortening them with new text that wasn't even up to the standards of my own patch at the time, which were already frankly pretty low! In general, it felt like an insult to my work; "Here is what she failed to finish, I did it instead in the worst possible way, please donate to my Ko-Fi!"
Rather than simply giving up and letting the AI version become the de facto way to play the game in English, this event appears to have "lit a fire" under Saralene in order to make the "AI slop" patch "completely and utterly obsolete" with a brand-new version developed without the use of generative AI.
What all this boils down to is that you can now play Air Management '96 on PlayStation in English (provided you have the files), with something more akin to "a professional, official-grade quality like you might have seen in the late 90s or 2000." A win-win for everyone.
You can grab the patch here.