One Piece and Other Stuff

Sunday, May 17th, 2009 | Translation

Earlier this week FUNimation announced that English-subtitled versions of the latest One Piece episodes would be put up online just one hour after the episodes air in Japan. By many strings of random chances and just being in the right place at the right time, the job of doing these subs has fallen into my hands. It’s pretty crazy and also a huge honor.

At the same time, it’s also scary as hell. One Piece is probably one of the most difficult things I’ve ever worked on, even after working on like 100+ eps, a game, and a movie. I often wonder why that’s the case, and I haven’t found all the answers yet, but 1: the author is awesome and skilled and very detail-oriented, and 2: the number of names, places, techniques, terms, events, foreshadows, etc. is INCREDIBLY huge and trying to juggle all of that while also having things like tight deadlines, having to fix the wonky 4Kids terms, etc. is intense. Even more so when I’m jumping like 200 episodes forward now. This is the big leagues now

Anyway, I talk about stuff a little more over at Mato Piece, which is a One Piece blog I started a few months ago but wound up neglecting for a while. All my future OP stuff will probably be over there. I just need to redesign it someday, I basically just copy+pasted my EarthBound Central design earlier, but I’m not happy with it.

When I step back and look at it, I’m amazed that somehow I was involved with all this huge-name stuff like Dragon Ball, Lupin the 3rd, Det. Conan/Case Closed, Shin-chan, and especially One Piece. When I first stepped into the real world after graduation, I never ever expected to wind up basically doing what I did just fansubbing stuff for fun for people in the #chronotrigger IRC chatroom, much less mega names like this.

Even so, I know I still have a LONG, LONG way until I’ll be really happy with my Japanese skills and translating skills. I think this latest One Piece stuff will definitely power me up on my way to that goal.

Anyway, you can see the current test video of episode 391 here, if you’re interested.

Speaking of redesign, I think this site really needs one too. I wish I lived on a planet with more hours per day so I could have more spare time

13 Comments

Square Throws the Legal Books

Monday, May 11th, 2009 | Games, Translation

Apparently, Square-Enix sent a Cease and Desist to Chrono Compendium, saying that all the Chrono-related ROM hacks must stop. See here. Scary stuff.

I think we’re lucky as hell that Nintendo doesn’t seem to care about EarthBound hacks (not that many get made…) and especially didn’t seem to care about the MOTHER 3 translation.

The thing that makes this really newsworthy though is that it’s the first time a company has sent a C&D against stuff related to ROM hacking. There had been a C&D against someone distributing an English version of RPGMaker a few years back, but that wasn’t related to ROMs or hacking, and Square also sent a C&D to that old 3D Chrono Trigger remake group years ago. But this is the first time it’s happened with ROM hacking apparently.

Hopefully this isn’t the start of something bigger though, because I did work on the Bahamut Lagoon fan translation. But by now that translation is all over the place, so there’s probably not much to worry about

8 Comments

Subtitle Translator Contest

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 | Translation

Rather than try to explain everything myself, just see here. Basically, if you know Japanese and you know how to transalte, this is probably one of THE best chances to get your foot into the industry. It’d also make really good resume material, because Osamu Tezuka’s stuff is legendary.

Anyway, check it out!

7 Comments

Food Fight Ep. 4!

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 | Japan Stuff, Videos

Oh man it’s been forever since I updated this site. Been too busy with work and EarthBound Central. I might revamp this site at some point and/or change things majorly, but that of course depends on how much time I can find.

Anyway, since some people have been asking for it, here is episode four of Food Fight!

Hard to believe that it’s almost been 10 years since this show aired. Also, in case you haven’t heard, the guy who plays the main character in Food Fight got drunk and naked and loud in a park the other day and got in big trouble. The whole thing has been insane and WAY overblown, but maybe that’s because we’re desensitized to celebrities acting liking idiots here

Anyway, I figure he’ll be hidden from TV and everything for a good while until everything blows over.

6 Comments

XBox Live Arcade Stuff

Thursday, March 5th, 2009 | Games

Finally got me one of those XBox 360 wireless adaptors. Stupid ass Microsoft can’t even include it in the console like the Wii can. And they charge $100 for the things. And they don’t even support WPA2. WTF, it’s amazing to me how Nintendo got so much right with the Wii for so cheap. Though the Wii could use a hard drive, so it’s got its own issues.

Anyway, I finally got my 360 online and have been messing around with stuff. I don’t have time for recreation much anymore, but if anyone cares, my tag is Tomatoisme. It wouldn’t let me use anything like Tomato or Mato or MatoSan. Instead, it recommended HyperTomatoSan and ConcernedBus. Reminds me of the old AOL days

So far, I’ve found that I like Portal a lot, but more than anything I like that Hexic game. $400+ for a puzzla game, woo! Right now I’m technically playing Star Ocean 4, but I have so little time that I don’t play it for days at a time, and even then I get like 10 minutes, which will get you nowhere in an RPG

This whole XBox Live thing is new to me though, so does anyone have any suggestions for cool games to get?

Also, I browsed through the community-made games, and I gotta say that I’m not very impressed overall. I know I can make something really cool and appealling, but first I have to learn C# (I’m too attached to C, heh) and then learn the XNA stuff, but I really want to try. Lately I’ve been having creativity rays exploding from my head non-stop, so I feel like wanting to do a little of everything.

27 Comments

Getting Star Ocean 4

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009 | Games

The new Star Ocean came out yesterday, though I waited until today because I’ve had enough experience to know that games usually TRULY come out the day after the so-called “release date”

Anyway, almost on kind of a whim, I stopped by a nearby GameStop and it went like this:

Guy: “Hey, you looking for anything?”

Me: “Yeah, do you have the new Star Ocean in?”

Guy: “Yep, we sure do.”

Me: “Cool. Oh yeah, and I need an XBox 360 too.”

Guy: “Whoa, major Star Ocean fan.”

Didn’t feel like even explaining my story of having fan translated the first game or any of my other crazed fanaticism with the series Anyway, I got the game, the $299 XBox 360, the guide, and the Orange Box pack since Portal refuses to run on my PC. I doubt they get paid by commission at GameStop, but I could definitely see the “holy crap this guy is loaded” gleam in his eye. Usually I have terrible experiences at that GameStop, but this guy was actually really cool and nice.

Anyway, I know so little about 360s that I was shocked to learn the hard way that they don’t have built-in wireless, and even more shocked that the stupid wireless dongle things cost like $100. WTF, the system’s already expensive enough, and the Wii has wireless built in. Hell, DSs have wireless built in and you can get them for the same price. Bleh, and I was hoping to do a lot of online-ish stuff with my 360 too.

Will start playing SO4 later tonight probably. Can’t wait

While I’m at it, I should also mention that I’ve also been working on another spin-off of my main blog that focuses on Star Ocean stuff. I want to explore Star Ocean stuff more than I’ve been able to lately, so much like with EarthBound Central, I created a site for Star Ocean stuff called Star Ocean Central. Though I don’t think I should’ve called it that, seeing as I don’t plan for it to be as central-rific and extensive as EarthBound Central. Oh well.

I’ve also started on a One Piece blog too, but I’ll talk about that a little later on when I’m more done with setting it up. I like being able to separate my things so that I can talk about specific subjects in their own places.

25 Comments

Food Fight Episode 3!

Sunday, February 8th, 2009 | Japan Stuff, Translation, Videos

Ah, one of my most favorite Food Fight episodes This one is great, if you can only watch one, then I’d probably recommend this one. But you should watch more than one anyway

Long-time readers might remember an old Food Fight page I made in 2000 while I was staying in Japan for a little while. I had just discovered the show and I decided to take a ton of pics and record stuff using my crappy TV capture card. The nostalgic results are here! It covers the entirety of Episode 3 though, so you should probably watch the video before you visit the page

Moral of the story: clowns are scary and company president man is an ass.

12 Comments

Buy Star Ocean, Get a Dog?

Wednesday, February 4th, 2009 | Miscellaneous

I ran across this in an eBay auction just now. The auction is for a copy of Star Ocean for PSP, but something doesn’t seem right

“>

It’s weird, but I guess the person took that pic on purpose to be weird and so that weirdos like me would notice it. But the listing also says this:

Now, obviously, the dog isn’t for sell, but couldn’t some evil law-knowing dude use the literal meaning of that text to buy the dog too? How legally-binding are descriptions like this in eBay auctions? In the end, I guess it’s no different from having some hot girl sit on a car you’re trying to sell, but this auction still got me wondering.

I wonder if there’ve actually been any cases like this in eBay’s past where someone used a technicality of a description to their advantage. I do recall people selling XBox boxes to people who thought they were buying actual XBoxes. Anything else like that happen?

9 Comments

Watch S.T.R.A.I.N. Online for Free!

Monday, February 2nd, 2009 | Translation, Videos

I guess I should pay more attention to things, because I had no idea that FUNimation had started putting up so many of its shows online for free to watch I had known that a few new shows were being shown, but not to this extent. Oh man, this is cool.

The other day I mentioned that S.T.R.A.I.N. came out on DVD. If you can’t afford it right now, you can watch it online for free here. I really liked this show a lot, so give it a watch sometime. You can even watch it subbed or dubbed, whichever you prefer. Talk about awesome and convenient

You can also check out a whole bunch of other shows (many of which I translated) on the FUNimation site here. There are so many shows that you actually have to choose the letter a show starts with to jump to that page sometimes. Some other recent things I did have been the 2nd season of Gunslinger Girl (I did the first season too), S.T.R.A.I.N., Shin-chan, and One Piece, though One Piece only has a bunch of trailers up. Ah well.

Anyway, those are just a couple of the shows I’ve done recently, the semi-recent full list is here. Check ‘em out sometime!

14 Comments

Drunk? Japanese Guy Plays Mario Land

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 | Games, Japan Stuff, Videos

I saw this elsewhere but just had to post it here. It’s too strange not to pass up

Basically, some oddly-acting Japanese guy tries to talk about about Mario Land in English while he plays it. Neat and funny.

22 Comments