Thad

@razielmla You tell that strawman.

@Martin_H Yes, that's the great thing about growth curves; they continue at the same rate forever.

@Zero_0 Funny, "just another tool" is exactly what I think when I hear about somebody dumping a half-assed AI translation and expecting somebody else to fix it for them.

@AndyVGR You know, that text below the headline isn't just there for you to scroll past on your way to the comments.

@AlienX cool

@AllieKitsune But the flipside of that is that there are only so many person-hours and if you devote yours to a project someone else is already working on, that's time you could be spending on an original project.

I mean, obviously people are free to spend their time however they want and they don't need permission. But I do think "what can I do that isn't already being done?" is a perfectly valid question to ask before setting out.

@MSaturn Compared to the unofficial translation that another team was already working on?

@CookieByte "Just learn the Japanese language, idioms, and cultural context" is not a practical solution for most people.

And while we're on the subject of learning languages, the possessive form of it is its. No apostrophe.

I'm not necessarily averse to AI as a translation tool if no other option is available; an AI translation is (hopefully) better than nothing.

But releasing an AI translation to compete with an actual, in-development translation that people are putting real work into is a bad look. You're not helping.

There are lots and lots of untranslated games out there. Choose one of the many options that people aren't already working on.

@ghostofkutaragi why was there significant backlash if no one cares

@dodgykebaab What streams is Bluesky sponsoring?

@Blackredx "Yet you participate in society. Curious! I am very intelligent."

@ECP Can you name another government which is sponsoring GDQ streams?

WOW it takes some chutzpah to quote somebody and cut it off right before the word "but".

It's like they're so close to figuring out how marketing works.

I should have spent that $25 on beer.

It was 2013; back then I could have bought a whole case with that and gotten change back.

@Sawboss It was early days and I don't think we'd quite gotten the hang of this whole Kickstarter thing yet.

Between this and Mighty No. 9, I learned an important lesson about contributing to game Kickstarters: don't.

(MN9 at least managed to release. Though maybe they should have spent 12 more years on it.)

At this point I've got two criteria for backing a Kickstarter project: either the work is already finished and the campaign is just for manufacturing and shipping, or the person/group doing it has a track record and has delivered in the past.

(And sometimes even a project that checks both those boxes still disappoints. I kicked in on Dynamite Comics' campaign to reprint some old Gargoyles comics and they ended up delivering a subpar product over a year late. I don't know how that happened but my best guess is they subcontracted it out to some other company that didn't have Dynamite's production pipeline or experience.)

@dslayer Oh yeah, I've heard good things about most of those, now that you mention it. Keep meaning to fire them up in an emulator one of these days. (Or possibly on my MiSTer, if the 3DO core gets a little more mature than it currently is.)

@PowerPandaMods It was a great little system for indies, but now we've got the Switch and Deck for those.

@-wc- I think what he means to say is that the kinds of games that are successful on other handhelds didn't use or need the control gimmicks the Vita had and that those features added to the price tag without being worth whatever gameplay innovations they brought to the table.

He's not necessarily wrong but gyro and touch controls have certainly proven popular on other systems; it's really just the back touch that seems to have been a deadend. And I don't think any of those things were as significant a drawback as the expensive proprietary memory cards.

@Razieluigi But they wouldn't have abandoned it if it had sold better.

Which isn't to say they couldn't have made it work if they'd made more of an effort. The 3DS had a disastrous launch but Nintendo stuck with it and it became a huge success.

@ecco6t9 Yeah, that's true; when I went to transition from the card that came with it to an SD2VITA I found that the card had been corrupted. I eventually managed to recover my saves but it was a real PITA.

Course, most people wouldn't have known the memory cards were trash when they first bought one; they just would have known that they were expensive.

@Zybex242 Oh, I guess they had the best version of Star Control 2. Although that doesn't seem like a system seller so much as a cult hit.

It's not just that the memory card was proprietary, it's that it was expensive. What was it, like $80 for 16GB or something insane like that?

I guess it was good for reducing piracy, in that there's a lot less piracy on systems nobody buys.

Hahaha yeah THAT'S why Atari went bankrupt, piracy, and no other reason.

I can at least name a couple of Jaguar games that are generally regarded as good (AvP and Tempest 2000, off the top of my head). I can't think of any for the 3DO. There's, what, Gex? but AFAICT consensus is that the PS1 and Saturn versions were better.

@Tom_Gamer Yeah, the people in the comments hated GJI and some of the former staff have talked about it and made it clear they hated it too.

I don't know if it really attracted clicks or not, but management at least thought it did.

@HammyHavoc This does seem to be one of those "reporting something we just read on ROM" articles.

Which I don't judge too harshly. Online publishing is a tough business and not every article is going to be unique. (I haven't read AV Club in years but I know for a long time they were under pressure from their corporate owners to do a feature called "Great Job, Internet!" that was basically describing stuff they saw on YouTube.)

@thehat360 wtf is pinboard

Yeeeeeeah I don't remember the part of Super Mario 64 that hits you with wave after endless wave of enemies while you're just trying to get to the next area.

Though I gotta hand it to 'em, they really managed to capture the frustration of constant random encounters in an action RPG.

@metaphysician Work-for-hire can include royalty agreements or other forms of profit participation; that's typical in the American film and TV industries, for example. But it's not typical in software.

@Johnny_Arthur If they're working on the compilation, sure; they'll get paid for the new work. But as for whether the original devs get any kind of long-term profit interest in an old game, that's pretty rare. Most game development is done on a work-for-hire basis with no profit-sharing incentives. That goes double for licensed games; Mattel doesn't want to be responsible for paying out royalties decades after their contract with the licensee is up.

There are cases where developers might get a new paycheck for the rerelease of an old game, if the developer actually owns the copyright (like Jordan Mechner owns Karateka, and Jeff Minter owns most of the Llamasoft games), or if it's a particularly generous (probably small) publisher that made profit-sharing agreements with its devs. But for a licensed game owned by Mattel? I really doubt it.

@ojisan Yeah, using AI tools in upscaling and restoration isn't an inherently bad thing but you have to use the right tools and tune them correctly. It may not require the same level of time and effort as restoring everything by hand, but it does require expertise and attention to detail; if you just throw the files into a batch job and call it a day, the result's going to show that.

@mariteaux "Can't imagine a whole lot" — well, that would explain why you're an AI booster, I guess.

I've never read Brawl in the Family but I liked Gamemaster Classified (his collaboration with Howard Phillips).

> Mike [Katz, the former president of Atari at the time]

Wait, was he the former president of Atari at the time, or was he the president of Atari at the time and he's the former president of Atari now?

"Former president of Atari at the time" implies that he'd been the president, wasn't anymore, then became the president again at some later time, like a Steve Jobs situation.

Man that apostrophe in the title is making my eye twitch.

I keep meaning to give these a read. I'm American so I had the Archie Sonic comic (which is a whole other topic in itself); I saw some bits of the Fleetway one here and there but I haven't read past the first issue.

> the retranslated script for the PSP release of the game

Not really retranslated so much as the same translation cleaned up a little.

https://legendsoflocalization.com/articles/castlevania-sotn-miserable-pile-of-secrets/#comment-9758

> (64-bit console)
> (8-bit handheld console)
> (16-bit console)
> (8-bit console)
> (home computer)

Guys, they're not Beetlejuice; you can say their names. I know Blaze is gun-shy about trademarks but you don't have to just copy-paste their list; you can say what those consoles and computers actually are.

@breach187 "This story's already been told, find something else" is a pretty weird way to look at history.

There's more than one way to look at past events. And while there are a number of resources dealing with the history of Tetris, the narrative to this point has been dominated by the Tetris Company's version of the story. There is a value to an outside perspective.

@Martin_H Wow. You're really going with the "animation is built on plagiarism" defense from The Simpsons.

@JJtheTexan We did get that ActRaiser remake, so it's not out of the question (I'm guessing SE owns the rest of Quintet's library but don't know that for sure), but ActRaiser is a better-known game, too.

@KingMike It's hard to even find what the heck it is @Yamanii is talking about but I guess one of the monsters has bare breasts in the Japanese version, and covering up a couple of 4-pixel nipples ruins the whole game?

@ojisan The original GI newsbit asked Sega for comment and quoted their response. If it wasn't accurate, whose fault is that?

@Yamanii IDK I still thought Earthbound, Final Fantasy 2&3, Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Breath of Fire, and ActRaiser were pretty good, but you do you.

I know some fan translations where everyone curses all the time, if that's what you're looking for.

I've been thinking for years that what the game could really use is a rebalancing patch. The bosses are damn damage sponges.

@cyxceven "Not exactly sure how different it is to have AI assist with BG element design, or drawing/tiling over the big collections of reference materials SEGA has amassed over the years. As long as the AI used isn't trained on other people's stuff that they don't own, it does not seem so bad."

Is your argument that if Sega didn't have AI, they'd just reuse old assets and not pay the original work-for-hire artists for that, either?

Because, I mean, even if you're right that's...not a great defense?

@Quick_Man Well, I don't know about that last part, but it's still a good idea.

@BionicDodo https://xkcd.com/1357/