S.T.R.A.I.N.: Strategic Armored Infantry

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009 | Translation

Today (or at least according to Amazon.com) one of the shows I worked on was released. The English version is called S.T.R.A.I.N.: Strategic Armored Infantry - Complete Series Box Set“>”S.T.R.A.I.N.: Strategic Armored Infantry”, but if you’re more familiar with Japanese titles, it was called “Soukou no Strain” originally.

Out of everything I’ve ever worked on, this probably ranks right up near the top. It was the perfect show for me. It’s hard to explain well with just words, but it’s basically a 13-episode series (I think it’s 13, I forget…) and it involves space travel, space wars, stuff like that. I usually can’t stand super sci-fi stuff, but this was all done really well. If you liked the space and science stuff in Star Ocean 3, this show reminded me so much of that.

Essentially, at some point, mankind managed to master sub-light speed travel, and humanity spreads out. There’s eventually some fighting and hostility between different groups, and they often have to battle while traveling at sub-light speed. Because of time dilation (thanks to Einstein), this causes some strange things, and is interesting from a social view too. Soldiers who go off to war will be the same age when they come back, but their loved ones will have aged many years (or even have died long before). Also, shooting forward while traveling at sub-light speed will cause your projectile to fall back onto you and blow you up.

Well, I guess I didn’t explain the show very well, but it’s one of my all-time favorites for a reason, so if by some chance you happen to like interesting science fiction that’s plausible and based on science fact, you’ll probably love this. It’s really good. Also, the show isn’t porn or anything, but there are sexual-ish scenes and boobs and that kind of stuff somtimes. It’s kind of like a grownup sci-fi series with grownup things, I guess you could say. It’s got action, drama, sci-fi, humor, scares, sex, and probably more.

For those who used to hang out at the MOTHER 3 fan translation blog last year, this was the show I was working on while I was doing all that horrible “sprite welding” stuff. I had insane deadlines for this show, and trying to get that sprite weld hacking done at the same time nearly blew my brain up. But in the end both things were successfully completed, so hurray!

You can get the complete DVD set here on Amazon, or if you’re the more adventurous type, eBay might have some deals.

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Food Fight Ep. 2!

Sunday, January 18th, 2009 | Japan Stuff, Translation, Videos

Continuing from the first episode!

This time, Mitsuru meets a foreign guy who eats like crazy. Also, he apparently must eat to save a young orphan from dying. However that works. Also, puddle-swimming!

This was the first full Food Fight ep. I saw back when it aired, and it completely stole my heart. The show’s just so cheesy but so good. I wish I had time to go and redo all the subs now that I have maaaany years of pro experience under my belt now, but for now I should probably focus on translating the final two episodes, huh?

Anyway, enjoy! Man, this show makes me hungry.

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Nasubi Part 3!

Wednesday, January 14th, 2009 | Japan Stuff, Videos

If you don’t know who/what Nasubi is, you’ll want to see this first. Basically, they locked a guy in an apartment, took everything he had - even his clothes - and the only way he’s allowed to survive is by sending in postcards to raffles/drawings and winning prizes from them. He doesn’t even get food, unless he wins it.

Anyway, part 3 is now online and in English here. For some reason, Part 2 has been up for like 3 or 4 weeks but it refuses to play. If someone can figure out how to get Part 2 to play, let me know! Sending an e-mail to the joost people doesn’t seem too helpful, but maybe if lots of people do it, it’ll get their attention.

I’m still shocked that the producers of this show didn’t get thrown in jail or anything for doing stuff like this

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EarthBound Central

Monday, January 12th, 2009 | EarthBound Stuff

If it looks like I’ve been slowing down on this blog lately, it’s because I’ve actually been busy spinning all the EarthBound stuff into its own separate blog, which I call EarthBound Central. The mix of EB and non-EB stuff here was getting kind of weird I felt So if you click any EB-related links here, you might automatically get redirected there.

EBC actually isn’t 100% finished yet, but mostly I just need to make a few more images and write up a few articles I’ve been planning, so it’ll be fully up and running in a week or two. Until then, I’m kind of testing things out, so you can help if you want by visiting it and browsing around. Once it’s running, it’ll probably be updated multiple times a day with tons of cool EB content and discussion

For a limited time, I’m also giving out custom avatars over there, so if you’re interested, read here.

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Funniest English #3

Saturday, January 10th, 2009 | Japan Stuff, Videos

Here it is! Another Funniest English segment! I like this one better than #2, but I still think #1 is the best. Sadly, this is the last of the clips I have on tape. I recorded them while I was studying in Japan a bazillion years ago. They stopped the Funniest English thing around 2001 or so I think, but they did the segment for years before. If anyone knows where I can find more, let me know right away and I’ll sub them and put them up here! I love this stuff, and I saw a bunch of hilarious ones when I was in Japan, but I had no way of recording them most of the time

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EarthBound Double Enemy Trick

Thursday, January 8th, 2009 | EarthBound Stuff, Videos

Here’s a very little-known trick in EarthBound. It also works in MOTHER 2.

There are some enemies in the game that don’t attack in groups. But you can get them to attack in groups anyway with this little trick.

Read the rest of this entry >>>

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Another Horribly Cruel Japanese Show

Monday, January 5th, 2009 | Japan Stuff, Videos

Following the same lines of thinking as the Nasubi thing, the people in the old Denpa Shonen TV show basically take these two guys off the streets of Tokyo, blindfold them, sail several days off the coast of Japan, then leave them on a deserted island. They’re told to find a way off the island on their own. And that’s that. Oh yeah, and they get some matches.

I’ve always wondered how I would fare if something like this happened to me, so it’s interesting to see how they come up with ways to get water and get food. But these kinds of Japanese shows are still crazy as hell. Once someone actually dies from something like this…

Anyway, I know it’s on Joost, but you can see the first two episodes here if you’re in the U.S.

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Final Fantasy: Cat vs. Bird!

Saturday, January 3rd, 2009 | Games, Videos

Nothing too special, but I found this kind of neat. Mostly the cat keeps missing and the bird keeps using “Provoke” and sometimes counterattacks.

There’s something about the odd combination of random daily stuff + video game humor that I like. It’s strange. Or maybe I’m just strange

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Weird EarthBound Glitch

Friday, January 2nd, 2009 | EarthBound Stuff, Videos

Here’s a strange glitch thing in EarthBound that very few seem to know about.

If you go to this one section below the bottom right pillar in the Threed circus tent and press L, sometimes the text box will seem to delay a tiny bit. If you keep doing this over and over, you can get it to do weird stuff. Usually it just prints garbage letters and sometimes prints garbage letters in strange new windows that open. But once I got the sprites on the screen to screw up, then the screen went mostly black and started playing random sound effects slowly and at strange playback frequencies.

The bug has never messed with my save data, but maybe you should back up your saves if you want to give it a try. I wonder if there’s any way to exploit this bug. And I wonder if it can be done in other places in the game…

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Strange Gaming Terminology

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008 | Games

I moved a lot when I was a kid, and since I was a game-playing kid, I quickly noticed that different areas (even just different parts of the same town) sometimes have differing terms for gaming stuff.

For example, I always say “I beat Super Mario”, but in some places people would say “I cleared Super Mario”. Also common were “I completed” and “I defeated”. Normally, you could probably chalk it up to just randomness and/or individual terminology, but it usually wasn’t isolated, each different school or whatever would use one term more than another.

It was pretty interesting, though it sure sounded weird to me. I wonder if I sounded weird. After all, “I beat” sounds a little more violent. At least it did when I was a kid I still think of “beat” as the default term, though. I think it probably is… right?

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