Retro Game Super Translation Selection


Book Description

Presented by retro video game website Hardcore Gaming 101. Localization is a tricky business, especially due to the myriad of differences between both the English and Japanese languages and cultures. Retro Game Super Translation Selection examines 101 lines of dialogue from classic video games, compares how they were localized, and includes some explanation for the business or cultural reasons surrounding such changes. Originally authored by a professional video game translator, this is a localized version of a doujinshi released at the Game Legend retro game event in late 2016, and features a unique perspective rarely seen in the English speaking world! Also includes four columns by guest writers that compare English and Japanese onomatopoeia, examines different game titles between territories, explains the math behind retro games, and illustrates the many changes made to the Pok�mon Game Boy titles.Covered games include: Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior / Dragon Quest, Super Mario World, Landstalker, Lunar: The Silver Star, Zero Wing, River City Ransom, Cybernator, Pok�mon, Lufia II, Shadowgate, Shadowrun, Maniac Mansion, Princess Tomato in the Salad Kingdom, and many more!NOTE: The paperback edition of this book is in black and white, but the Kindle version uses color images.




Vintage Games


Book Description

Vintage Games explores the most influential videogames of all time, including Super Mario Bros., Grand Theft Auto III, Doom, The Sims and many more. Drawing on interviews as well as the authors' own lifelong experience with videogames, the book discusses each game's development, predecessors, critical reception, and influence on the industry. It also features hundreds of full-color screenshots and images, including rare photos of game boxes and other materials. Vintage Games is the ideal book for game enthusiasts and professionals who desire a broader understanding of the history of videogames and their evolution from a niche to a global market.




Legends of Localization Book 1


Book Description

An in-depth exploration of the localization of Nintendo's blockbuster franchise from Japanese to English.




Hardcore Gaming 101 Presents: Japanese Video Game Obscurities


Book Description

Japan has produced thousands of intriguing video games. But not all of them were released outside of the country, especially not in the 1980s and 90s. While a few of these titles have since been documented by the English-speaking video game community, a huge proportion of this output is unknown beyond Japan (and even, in some cases, within it). Hardcore Gaming 101 Presents: Japanese Video Game Obscurities seeks to catalogue many of these titles – games that are weird, compelling, cool or historically important. The selections represent a large number of genres – platformers, shoot-em-ups, role-playing games, adventure games – across nearly four decades of gaming on arcade, computer and console platforms. Featuring the work of giants like Nintendo, Sega, Namco and Konami alongside that of long-forgotten developers and publishers, even those well versed in Japanese gaming culture are bound to learn something new.




Nintendo Magic: Winning the Videogame Wars


Book Description

Back in the 80s, Nintendo ruled the home-entertainment market with the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System). But then rival Sony introduced PlayStation, which featured advancements and cutting-edge technology that put Nintendo's Super-NES to shame. Nintendo quickly lost its dominant market share to Sony and found itself floundering. In 2006, Nintendo released Wii at the same time Sony introduced its highly-anticipated and much-vaunted PlayStation III and Microsoft's XBox 360. Wii's David defeated PlayStation's Goliath, inversely echoing the SNES/PlayStation outcome of a decade previous. Nintendo Magic: Winning the Videogame Wars is the story of what went right, discussing the business strategies and marketing savvy that took on the mighty Sony and won. Topics include: How where you put your company is just as important as how you run it: being in Kyoto From work force to policies, why Nintendo's "just enough" attitude succeeds Why the ability to read a balance sheet is overrated Respect seniority but approve huge R&D budgets for talented junior employees Allowing maximum communication between disparate divisions (hardware and software) Enlarging the pie: going after casual gamers (The art of mainstreaming) How the Wii will be the next major household appliance and the DSi will be the cell phone of the future. Nintendo Magic: Winning the Videogame Wars should serve as a warning to similar powerhouse industries never to understimate the modest competitor. It should occupy the bookshelf of any business person smart enough to know they don't need to be a giant to win.




I Am Error


Book Description

The complex material histories of the Nintendo Entertainment System platform, from code to silicon, focusing on its technical constraints and its expressive affordances. In the 1987 Nintendo Entertainment System videogame Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, a character famously declared: I AM ERROR. Puzzled players assumed that this cryptic mesage was a programming flaw, but it was actually a clumsy Japanese-English translation of “My Name is Error,” a benign programmer's joke. In I AM ERROR Nathan Altice explores the complex material histories of the Nintendo Entertainment System (and its Japanese predecessor, the Family Computer), offering a detailed analysis of its programming and engineering, its expressive affordances, and its cultural significance. Nintendo games were rife with mistranslated texts, but, as Altice explains, Nintendo's translation challenges were not just linguistic but also material, with consequences beyond simple misinterpretation. Emphasizing the technical and material evolution of Nintendo's first cartridge-based platform, Altice describes the development of the Family Computer (or Famicom) and its computational architecture; the “translation” problems faced while adapting the Famicom for the U.S. videogame market as the redesigned Entertainment System; Nintendo's breakthrough console title Super Mario Bros. and its remarkable software innovations; the introduction of Nintendo's short-lived proprietary disk format and the design repercussions on The Legend of Zelda; Nintendo's efforts to extend their console's lifespan through cartridge augmentations; the Famicom's Audio Processing Unit (APU) and its importance for the chiptunes genre; and the emergence of software emulators and the new kinds of play they enabled.




The Translation of Realia and Irrealia in Game Localization


Book Description

This book explores the impact of a video game’s degree of realism or fictionality on its linguistic dimensions, investigating the challenges and strategies for translating realia and irrealia, the interface of the real world and the game world where culture-specificity manifests itself. The volume outlines the key elements in the translation of video games, such as textual non-linearity, multitextuality, and playability, and introduces the theoretical framework used to determine a game’s respective degree of realism or fictionality. Pettini applies an interdisciplinary approach drawing on video game research and Descriptive Translation Studies to the linguistic and translational analysis of in-game dialogs in English-Italian and English-Spanish language pairs from a corpus of three war video games. This approach allows for an in-depth look at the localization challenges posed by the varying degree of realism and fictionality across video games and the different strategies translators employ in response to these challenges. A final chapter offers a comparative analysis of the three games and subsequently avenues for further research on the role of culture-specificity in game localization. This book is key reading for students and scholars interested in game localization, audiovisual translation studies, and video game research.




The Dubbing Translation of Humorous Audiovisual Texts


Book Description

This book provides a theoretical and practical framework for researchers and practitioners who focus on the construction, interpretation and retextualisation of audiovisual texts. It defines translation as a communicative and interpretative process, with translators seen as cross-cultural mediators who make the denotative-semantic and connotative-pragmatic dimensions of source scripts accessible to target receivers, prompting equivalent perlocutionary effects, while still respecting the original illocutionary force. While existing research on audiovisual translation generally adopts a product-based perspective, examining the lexico-semantic and syntactic features of source and target versions, this book proposes an “Interactive Model”, in order to explore what happens in the translators’ minds, as well as the influence of the interaction between the linguistic and extralinguistic dimensions in the construction and interpretation of audiovisual texts. The application of this Model to the analysis of a corpus of humorous films, TV series and video games foregrounds the integration between the analysis of the source-text features and the knowledge of the target linguacultural backgrounds in the creation of pragmalingustic equivalent scripts. At the same time, this book also provides valuable insights into the audience’s reception of these translations, by submitting close-ended and open-ended questionnaires to subjects representing empirical receivers, thus helping to evaluate the degree of linguistic and functional equivalence of target versions.




Erebos


Book Description

When 16-year-old Nick receives a package containing the mysterious computer game Erebos, he wonders if it will explain the behavior of his classmates, who have been secretive lately. Players of the game must obey strict rules: always play alone, never talk about the game, and never tell anyone your nickname. Curious, Nick joins the game and quickly becomes addicted. But Erebos knows a lot about the players and begins to manipulate their lives. When it sends Nick on a deadly assignment, he refuses and is banished from the game. Now unable to play, Nick turns to a friend for help in finding out who controls the game. The two set off on a dangerous mission in which the border between reality and the virtual world begins to blur. This utterly convincing and suspenseful thriller originated in Germany, where it has become a runaway bestseller.