This was my first splash page for the site, a pisstake of the Mega Man 2 intro. The rock part is from a Guitar Arrange album released for the series’ 20th anniversary.
]]> http://kinsie.helloiaminter.net/blog/2009/04/18/mm2-style-intro/feed/ 2 http://kinsie.helloiaminter.net/blog/2008/11/13/31/ http://kinsie.helloiaminter.net/blog/2008/11/13/31/#comments Thu, 13 Nov 2008 08:32:09 +0000 Kinsie http://kinsie.helloiaminter.net/blog/?p=31 (This article was written… umm… must have been two years ago, now? December ’06? I can only assume my writing’s improved over that period of time… for a earlier, crappier site bearing the same name as this one. I present everything as it was back then, except that I had to move the image captions to alttags because my HTML sucked. Onwards!)

In 1992, an arcade game called Mortal Kombat became considerably popular due to the sheer difference between it and other fighters like Street Fighter – things like juggling, a separate block button, digitised characters… oh, and a little something called the “Fatality”, a special move to kill off the loser of the match in a hilariously violent manner. This of course caused a great deal of controversy, which resulted in, yes, more popularity!

A year later, Acclaim went on a marketing blitz for it’s many home versions of the game, giving them all one release date – “Mortal Monday” – and going so far as to run TV ads, a rarity for games back then.

Now, we’ve all heard the SNES versus Genesis arguments regarding both consoles’ home ports, but little has been written regarding the portable versions. Far from the sleek multimedia powerhouses of today’s PSP or DS, the portable devices of the time were fat, bulky, battery-chewing 8-bit bricks. So you’d expect pushing a detailed beat-em-up onto the console would end in dismal failure, wouldn’t you?

Well, let’s look at each such port with a vaguely trained eye.

First, let’s start with the Game Boy. The major failing of this device is it’s ability to only display from a somewhat limited palette of four shades of grey. This, as you’d perhaps expect, does MK’s digitised sprites no favours. Okay, that’s a bit too polite… it turns the normally easily recognisable characters into blurry, indistinguishable blobs of grey crap. There, that’s better. Presumably, redrawing the sprites a tad to play to the console’s ability would take more effort than the moth-in-a-empty-wallet budget this port was presumably made on, leaving the characters as indistinguishable blobs with six frames of animation each. Which, let’s face it, would be bearable if the gameplay and controls were as razor sharp as the arcade, since the processor won’t have to deal with graphics, am I rite?

The game suffers from a disease called too-much-animation-itis. Upon hitting your kick button, your chosen smear will spend the next second stuttering through a five-frame kick animation that on a more powerful console would flash by in a quarter second, but in this version is as easily dodgable as a bed-and-breakfast. Thanks to these slow animations from smudgy avatars, the gameplay chugs along like the ever-predictable riff of a bad Metallica clone.

Each of your pugilistic ink blot tests has two special moves (good luck hitting with one, though!) and a finishing move that has been extremely – to use a scientific term – pussified. While Scorpion’s classic Toasty fatality is intact, pretty much everything else has been reduced to a mockery of itself – Kano’s ever-popular heart rip has been replaced with a high kick, for pete’s sake!

Perhaps the only notable thing about this port is the addition of a cheat code to play as the famous mini-boss Goro, who in the arcade towered over players and viciously pummeled them, but in this version… uhh… slaps you in the face in a very awkward “I want to hit you but don’t want to touch you” way, and jumps limply on your chest like a retarded kitten. Way to go, Acclaim!

Now, as for the Game Gear version… it’s actually bareable! (Boy, you weren’t expecting that, were you?)

While the game suffers from a pinch of control lag, it seems most of the portable MK budget fell to this version – the characters look almost exactly the same as their arcade counterparts, the blood-code is in, the sound is pleasing, and the game overall feels like a decent replica of the original. Which, let’s face it, is probably not what we expected from Sega’s Harvester Of Battery Souls.

Where the Sega port suffers, however, is in variety of backgrounds. Somehow, Acclaim only saw fit to include two backgrounds in the game, so chances are you’re going to get sick of Goro’s Lair very quickly.

All things considered though, the Game Gear port not only beats the Game Boy version up easily, but caps it off by uppercutting it off a bridge onto a pit of spikes.

Fan-made translations are a wonderful idea. Where the complexities of corporate wrangling and conflicting ideologies (Square’s reasons for not localizing it’s follow up to Secret of Mana, so I faintly remember, was that the game was “too buggy” for western audiences, and that they’d probably be seen dead before they’d give the source code to their US branch to fix it up) failed, a pack of hygiene-impaired doofuses with a year of high-school Japanese between them picked up from Naruto fan-subs can succeed! Unfortunately, true successes are perhaps a rarity in the realm of the fan-translation, and I put it down to a little thing called Literalism. (Not to be confused with Liberalism.)

The key to making a translated version of a game fun is not just in converting the text from one language to another, but in adjusting, editing, and re-writing to fit the cultural whims of the new territory and to be an easier read. One reason for this, simply, is text size – the nature of Japanese text is that it can fit more in a text window than the same message in English. You might notice that the four-character limit on player names in some old NES RPGs like Final Fantasy 1 is a hang-over of this. Another, simply put, is that a direct translation of Japanese to English often makes for a dry, boring and overly verbose read.

First, let’s look at some good examples of a fan-translation – Cave Story and Shiren the Wanderer, both Ingles-ised by one Gideon Zhi and his merry band of cohorts. Now, everybody’s been sucking Cave Story’s metaphorical (and most likely four colour and 16×16) cock for quite a long time, but the script is probably a very good reason as to why. It’s well-written, characters talk naturally and have different “voices”, and most importantly, the mood isn’t changed. Jokes are still funny, and sad moments are still decidedly glum. Shiren also shows great care and quality, with the various bit-players to your anonymous hero each showing a distinct personality. She’s a ditzy prankster, he’s a shiftless drunk, she’s a grumpy old crone, and he’s mysterious and creepy, and so on.

But this isn’t about good translations! This is about bad ones! The dry, ugly reads! The ones that still make you spend a few minutes trying to figure out what the fuck was just said, even in English! Also, my keyboard is playing up and it’s making me grumpy! Grr, bad keyboard!

Anyway, the main issue with bad translations is that it flattens the character and “voices” of the characters. Now, I’m no writer, but I know enough to know that characters should be different from each other, and maybe have the odd “quirk” to break things up. Many bad fan-translations read like a uptight, hollow shell of a man having a conversation with himself.

Also, obscenity. Some fan-translations seem to walk down the well-beaten “Grrr! I’ll show those Nintendo guys who censored things that didn’t even affect gameplay!” path, with, shall we say, predictable results. I vaguely remember a FF3/6 fan-translation having a line that was something like “So who is this “bitch” you speak of?”, which sounds pretty damn forced to me.

Course, it really doesn’t matter, call your Espers Phantom Lords if you will, because no fan translation will ever be this bad ever again: