I have strong opinions about “The Ballad of Gilligan’s Isle”

Everyone knows the opening theme from Gilligan’s Island, yeah? I know the mid-’60s sitcom stopped being even a camp sensation about 15 years ago, but I’m reasonably sure the show’s bold depictions of south-seas civilization, animal life, and jungle engineering left a mark on the counterculture movement that still lingers today…right?

Just in case you need a reminder of how the song goes, here it is:

I’ve been recording some music for my game/chiptune-only MP3 player and realized that I have not one, not two, but three game-centric covers of this theme at my fingertips — two just ok, and one which hits it out of the park. I figured I’d share them with you:

- Gilligan’s Island (NES, 1990): The title screen jingle from this odd adventure. It’s not bad, but a bit short and melancholy, isn’t it? I wonder if the Japanese developers of this game actually saw the local version of the show any back in the 1960s — the Japan dub, which aired on NTV, has apparently been lost entirely, a victim of wiping. (The vid above was recreated by someone who loved the theme so much that he tape-recorded it off NTV 42 years ago.)

- Gilligan.mod: This was, believe it or not, one of the first Amiga .MOD files I ever listened to after I got a Sound Blaster Pro in 1993. I tracked down the file again a few months back and it’s been in regular rotation since. It’s catchy in that silly Euro-acid way a lot of Amiga tunes were.

- Gilligan’s Island (Williams, 1991): The pinball game, the first one from Williams/Midway to feature a dot-matrix score display. While it fared only average in arcades (only about 4100 machines were manufactured), it’s a personal favorite of mine and I always make a beeline for it at pinball expos and such.

I firmly believe that some of the best chip-generated music of the late ’80s/early ’90s was bring produced by people like Chris Granner and Jon Hey for Midway’s pinball machines and 16-bit arcade games. In fact, I’d put them right up there with any of the Japanese people working on the PCE or Genesis at the time. What they did with the Yamaha YM2151 (the same sound chip that was in Sharp’s X68000) constantly blows my mind even today…so much so, in fact, that I’ll probably devote another entry to them later.

But enough about them. Don’t want them stealing the spotlight from the crew of the SS Minnow or anything. Uh-uh.

Evangelion shows up in Japanese proficiency exam

Level 1 of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test this year had a listening question which, to say the least, doesn’t involve a lot of of day-to-day vocabulary.

The humor here is that this little drama is heavily inspired by Eva (even using the names “Asuka” and “Unit 04″ and so on) while remaining just different enough to avoid copyright issues. I can’t help but laugh at how hard people wanted to understand this stuff back in the late ’90s without having to rely on subtitles.

If you know Japanese, why not listen and give it a shot? Transcripts and so on are under the cut.

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Adventures in localization, MW2 edition

Hey! Remember this stirring scene from Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a game you may’ve heard a thing or two about over the past month or so?

In the English original, Vladimir Makarov (far left; one of MW2′s chief villains) is telling you “Remember, no Russian” — i.e., “Don’t speak Russian during this topical Fox News-bait sequence we’re about to commit.” In the Japanese version that Square Enix is releasing next week, however, the trademark phrase — according to the above screenshot, anyway — has become “Korose, Roshia-jin da,” “Kill them; they are Russians.”

Maybe it’s a matter of matching with Makarov’s lip flaps, but isn’t that straying a pretty decent distance away from the original intent? As one 2ch commenter rather rudely put it: “It’s meaningless as Japanese already, but how does ‘No Russian’ translate as this? Is this just some college student using Excite [machine translation], or what?”

Square Enix came under fire last year for their Japanese localization of the original Modern Warfare, a game whose translation was questionable enough that even Famitsu and other publisher-friendly review sites brought it up as a fault. In addition to a slew of typos and instances where text got corrupted when it was imported into the game, a great deal of military vocabulary was simply mistranslated for the Japanese version. The most noted example in Japan reviews: The word “Marine” (officially kaiheitai (海兵隊) in Japanese) is repeatedly translated as kaigunhei (海軍兵), a term which literally translates to “naval soldier” that doesn’t actually exist in standard Japanese.

“It’d be one thing if these were obscure details,” Game Watch wrote in their Modern Warfare review, “but considering these things show up within the first 30 minutes of play, I really wish it was possible for QA to cover them more thoroughly. This is something that we could say to all overseas game publishers these days. These are not budget games, but full-price titles you’re expecting people to pay for, and especially with a big-name title like COD4, I wish they could’ve avoided disappointing gamers with issues that aren’t the fault of the game itself.”

Famitsu gave MW2 39 out of 40 points in its review this week, but news that the game is available only with Japanese voices has touched off nerd rage across the Internet over there, with dozens of gamers swearing they’ll only buy the English-language Asian version instead. We’ll see how the game fares next week. (Between the PS3 and 360, the original Modern Warfare sold about 250,000 copies in Japan.)

In case you’re curious, here is how MW2 sounds in Japanese:

The little Takahashi Meijin in my soul

The other day I got a chance to translate for an interview conducted with Toshiyuki Takahashi, better known as Takahashi Meijin to millions of eager Japanese boys who are now sadly my age. He still works at Hudson after all this time and for the past few years he’s once again been serving as their top PR guy — more recently he’s been talking about Hudson’s US downloadable releases in Nintendo Power and other US media outlets.

Imagine if Howard Phillips was about 20 times more well-known to the general public, and that’s what Takahashi was to Japan in the ’80s. In fact I’d bet that a lot of Phillips’ image as presented in Nintendo Power was heavily inspired by Takahashi’s. Both were relentlessly good at Nintendo games, both were kind of dorky and nerd-friendly — Phillips freckled and kind of Iowan, while Takahashi was, let’s face it, downright ugly — but both presented a clean-cut image that let them serve as positive role models for kids.

One difference between the two: Howard Phillips didn’t get that many opportunities to show off his hot Game Master skills, but in 1986-88, Takahashi was a near-permanent fixture on Japanese kids’ TV. I think I can see why. Just look at him dissect the first stage of Star Soldier in the above video — playing through the stage, getting nearly every bonus, and narrating himself the whole way. Also note his rate of button-pressing. Jeez. I’m amazed he doesn’t have arthritis these days.

And while Phillips sported a neat bow tie, did he ever release his own single? Sadly, no. But Takahashi did!

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers comes out for the Wii in two days in Japan, receiving 30/40 points in Famitsu’s cross review. It is the latest Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles game to be released after Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers is not strictly a sequel to Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, the GameCube game where you searched for crystals; it is simply a game in the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series, alongside Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates is set before Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, while Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time is set after Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles; in terms of the story, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers uses the same setting as Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time.

To be more precise, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates is the oldest story-wise, followed by Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, and then Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates, to be even more exact, takes place 2000 years before  Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, making it interesting to compare with Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers‘ far-future setting.

The Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series has also appeared on WiiWare — first as Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, set in nearly the same era as Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles. Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles was actually published by Nintendo, not Square Enix. However, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers, along with Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Ring of Fates, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, were all Square Enix publications, making Nintendo’s involvement with the Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series unclear.

Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers is set several millennia after Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, featuring modern technology not seen in other Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles games. Many Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles titles are action-oriented, and Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers continues this tradition by offering classic Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles-style action and adventure.

If you like Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, or even if you’ve never tried a Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles game before, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers is a wonderful experience, one of the most accessible in the whole Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles series.

(Inspired by Gadget News)

Hidden messagin’ part 2

Poking around GDRI tonight led me to another extensive hidden message tucked inside an 8-bit cartridge game by the programmers. This time, it’s been discovered in Gun Nac, a Compile-developed vertical shooter released 1990 in Japan and 1991 in America.

Poking open the NES version of the ROM reveals a charming little piece of ASCII greeting between $01FF10 and $01FFFF. Take a look at the same place in the original Japanese Famicom version, though, and things look different:

1990-06-21 Almost time for the master-up [i.e. to go gold]; I guess this’ll probably be my last job on the FC. We had 4 months to work with, so there’s nothing really standout with this game, but I think it’s gotten pretty playable, so, well, I guess that’s good enough. I wonder where I might run into you next time?

Aww. :’)

“Movie”

A rather inspired illustration for an otherwise nondescript article in the Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo about PlayStation 3 movie downloads.

I’m back to more regular updating!

Should reviewers explicitly admit their total time with the game?

Dengeki Games, a new Japanese magazine that launched its first issue last week, thinks so. This shot of a review page (for Pokémon HeartGold/SoulSilver) I swiped from Hachimaki-ko. In it, you can see that within every EGM-style cross review is a little bubble showing how many hours each writer played the game — in this case, 12 and 15 hours each. I figure that if you’ve already played both Pokémon Platinum and the original Gold/Silver, 12 to 15 hours is long enough to intelligently gauge out all the new things in this remake. I’m betting that most readers would agree with me, too.

The mk2 series of websites, popular outlets for user-submitted game reviews in Japan, make writers give out hours-played with each review they submit. Not so in the professional ranks. The only “high-tier” game media I can think of that ever did this before Dengeki Games is Saturn FAN, a Japanese title from Tokuma Shoten that covered the Sega Saturn, and even they did away with it after awhile.

Around 1999 or 2000 (I need to fish out the actual issue), Famitsu published a discussion between then-EIC Hirokazu Hamamura and Japan game-biz problem child Kenji Eno. The two did not exactly have the rosiest of business relationships at the time, and it was one of the better interviews Famitsu ever published, but I remember Eno asking Hamamura at one point why his mag didn’t reveal “time spent in the game” with each review. “I’ve thought about it,” the EIC responded, “but it depends too much on the individual. My one hour of play’s going to be different from someone else’s one hour of play, especially if one of us skips past all the cutscenes. I figure it’s just better to man up and say ‘I play it until I’m sure of what I want to say about it.’”

Whenever some net commenter badmouths “professional” reviews. one of the pieces of conventional wisdom that always gets thrown around is “you know they only play it for half an hour, WTF do they know about this game?” But what do you think? Is printing total play time with the review something that encourages you to trust the reviewer, or would you cynically think they’re lying about that, too?

(My personal opinion: I played through every single game I played for Newtype, including the goddamn Fullmetal Alchemist Trading Card Game. This is a bragging point for me, and I’d like to show it off to as many people as possible, because come on, are you ever gonna play through that game? Hell, if I was still working full-time for media, I’d love to have a webcam pointing at my cube during work, outfitted with timers for this and that game I’m “working on.” Pageviews would be through the roof. I swear it.)

The people who wrote that Cross Review don’t understand anything!

So says Ryoichi Hasegawa, the former Sonic Team and Naughty Dog dude whom I think I either drank with him once or attended his GDC panel, one of the two. Maybe both.

These days he’s back at Sega as their localization manager; his latest project,  House of the Dead: Overkill, comes out 9/17 in Japan. Famitsu gave the game straight 6′s in this week’s issue (a fair bit lower than the US/European reception), and Japanese blog My Game News Flash did an informal interview with him about it.

Hasegawa: Good to meet you. Let me get one thing out of the way: The House of the Dead: Overkill, coming out next week from our company, got straight 6′s in Famitsu’s Cross Review, but please don’t believe that.

Q: Boy, that’s rough. Is the game fun?

Hasegawa: Oh, of course it is. The people who wrote that review don’t get it! The four people who reviewed it don’t get what makes it fun at all!

Q: I saw a movie of it yesterday; was Biohazard and stuff like that a pretty big influence?

Hasegawa: It’s less Bio and more just really over-the-top — not silly, but just incredible. People speak English in this game, but the dialogue’s crazy; they say “fuck” enough to make it into Guinness. You have zombies eating something under this human-meat mixer. But it still got a D rating [age 17 and up] from CERO, not a Z. We worked with Nintendo to stretch the limits of that. It definitely lives up to the “Overkill” name. So of course it’s a fun game.

Forget about the Japan game business for a moment — it’s extremely uncommon for someone in the American game industry to openly call out a magazine’s review. EA obliquely criticized OXM’s review of Dead Space in last month’s Game Informer, which looking back I’m very surprised GI’s editors allowed them to do without asking OXM for a response. In Japan such criticism is practically unheard of.

I can’t criticize Hasegawa for his frustration, but I don’t find Famitsu’s scores for Overkill outrageous out-of-hand, either. I do not really trust the mag’s cross-reviews for big-name titles any longer, but once their number scores go below 7, the reviewers are usually bringing up real and believable issues. It’s the same deal with reviews on Amazon or game forums, I suppose — you can sort of get constructive guidance from a negative review, but positive ones often seem “planted” even if they aren’t.

The bigger problem with Famitsu right now is the very obvious score inflation applied to AAA games in the past couple years. Does anyone think there’s any possible way Final Fantasy XIII won’t be awarded a 40 this winter?

Translation as a career

Hooray! The entry I did about ROM messages got linked from a lot of places, including Make Magazine’s blog, which cheers me because I love that magazine to bits.

A new reader from that link wrote in with an unrelated question:

I’m writing to ask you if you have any tips as to how to break into commercial translation.  I have a Bachelor’s Degree in Japanese language from a local university and I’m working at a Japanese company but the translation work in the company is very low-demand.

Also, I’m planning on taking the JLPT this season, Level 2, mostly for experience.  I know I could pass Level 3 but the next level is much harder overall.  Did you take the test, or do you know if it’s even relevant in the field?

I contributed to a great big article all about this subject for issue 2 or 3 of PiQ which I oughta scan in (what, is ADV gonna sue me?!!), but it’s not all that different from getting a job in game PR, or game media, or game creatin’. First you prove you can do things, and then you pass that around to people, and then those people let other people know about you, and eventually that leads to some sort of a job. No real secret to it other than that.

In terms of more concrete advice I’d say that the $100/yr I spend on American Translators Association dues and being present in their database has, so far, gotten me a lot more than $100/yr worth of work. There’s also ProZ, but I have to admit I’ve never hardcore-used that site.

As for the JLPT, it’s another line to fill the resume with but if I was the hiring editor my preoccupation would be with two things:

- Your translation samples
- Your references telling me that you submit decent work on time and are generally congenial

Some time waaaay back in 2000 I had both of those things and I am still able to afford fancy $4 beer so It Really Works!

(2000 was the year I passed level 1 of the JLPT, which is a good test of non-technical Japanese comprehension on a pretty native level. The JLPT is wonderful as a signpost for Japanese language study, but if you’re aiming for a career involving the Japanese language, you better at least comprehend enough to pass level 1. I don’t know if it’s true now like it was in 2000, but what I found was that if you think you can ace level 2, you can put in just a bit more work and probably pass level 1.)