This past November?! O_o WTF?



Hacks
and
Translations

There's plenty of GBA in there. One of them that struck my eyes was the Tales of Phantasia GBA port translation. :/ That one came out in America after all.

And lookie here... Gamecube?!

*Note, this is coming from someone who will never play the game.*

I think you're being too harsh in this particular case. It was 0-dayed(For lack of a better term.) because everyone and their mother knew the game had no chance of coming out here. This isn't the latest Pokemon game or something that has a chance of coming out here. There was no way it was coming out in English. None at all. While I do not believe it should have been started before it even came out(I detest 0-day releases myself. Hell, I saw a frigging SSBB release on the web the other day! Was half-way tempted to report it to Nintendo...), in this particular case, you can't really fault them for it.

I think the 0-day rule needs to be somewhat less stringent, or whatever the hell the word is, because of cases like this. The exception should only when the game has had its' chance to be released in the US and hasn't.

I agree with I.S.T. on this one, I've never really been a mother fan, so it's not a conflict of interest, it doesn't really matter if it comes to RHDN as it will be available elsewhere. I do beleive that the motivation is being a little misread though, they never planned to release it on or before the game was released, they never intended to sell it, they never intended to undermind or beat Nintendo or release it anywhere near the release date.

It's still not out  yet. I think they started when they did because they knew it was going to take awhile, and they wanted to produce something top quality.

I'm not trying to go against you Nightcrawler, in fact I hold your same view on this sort of thing, the difference is I rely MUCH more on motive than facts that might have been taken out of context.

Can you honestly say that any of those guys were intentionally trying to accompish anything you are accusing them of? or had any malicious intent against or where in ANY way trying to undermine the game, the developers, or the publishers at all? I really don't think so.

Not to dogpile the poor guy, but yeah, I agree that Nightcrawler's splitting hairs in this case for no good reason. There's a line between gray and black, but time and circumstance have pushed the Mother 3 project squarely back into the gray.

And if Lucas' appearance in SSBB inspires Nintendo to bring Mother 3 over the same way Marth and Roy in Melee gave us Fire Emblem...then we'll all rejoice and the project will quietly die.

While defining what "long enough" is in terms of waiting to announce a translation of a game is somewhat difficult, this has nothing to do with that. It's not that these folks didn't wait long enough--it's that this project, as it stands, effectively spawned from a translation project that started BEFORE the game was released. The general definition of 0-day in this context is a translation that starts before or on the release date of a game. We haven't made any secret about our stance on 0-day projects.

If the 0-day project hadn't been merged into the current one, we might not even be having this discussion. Unfortunately, it was, and we are. Don't get me wrong--I like most of the people involved in this one. I think it will be a very solid translation. But it is in part a 0-day project, so I agree with Nightcrawler in that it likely won't see the light of day here. It's not like it won't be available at all-there are other sites who will likely have no issue hosting it. We just won't be one of them.

Neither did Katamari Damacy. Until it did get released in other countries. Heck, neither did Magical Starsign. Or the GBA Fire Emblem games. Or Fire Pro Wrestling A. All of which DID get released elsewhere. That's the thing. There is NO WAY to know before, or immediately upon, a game's release if it will be released outside of Japan. Sometimes weird things happen, no matter how illogical. We know now that that it's pretty danged unlikely. I'd say a project started now would probably be fair game.

0-day translation projects are never a good thing. There is no way of knowing, short of an announcement by the developer and/or publisher, whether a game will get translated and released elsewhere. Regardless of your opinion of what constitutes an acceptable amount of wait time, zero days (or less!) is never that acceptable amount.

Question for you staffers. Can you honestly say you wouldn't have done things the same way as they did, given their situation?

On top of all that, Reggie himself said that Mother 3 was a NO. THAT's when Reid and Tomato decided to go on ahead and start translating the game. If they did incorporate a 0-day translation, that's because that part of the hacking was already done and would make things easier for Tomato (not that it has, anyhow).