First, the dance contest thing is over, and the results are in. If you entered and didn’t win a prize, don’t fret, because you won’t leave empty-handed. See the video for details.

Second, one of my hopes was that someday, somewhere, someone would play the MOTHER 3 translation on the side of a building with a big projector or something. It actually didn’t take long to happen, as video of the translation wound up being played on buildings during an art show, because the MOTHER series had been a big influence on the artist’s style. See more here! My other hope was that someone would play the translation inside Nintendo the day the patch was released, though I doubt that happened

Third, I’ve been slowly working on more of the translation notes, but I’m suddenly very tired of the game, so the notes will be slow-going for a while. I think I’ve played through it too much now, it suddenly hit me one day while working on some notes. The next thing I add will probably be about character names, location names, and other names.

Fourth, the translations into other languages have already begun and are already showing good progress. Here are some pics.

• 
  Italian translation
• 
  German translation

For a list of other translations, see the front page, near the bottom right.

Anyway, you can now download them here:

• Sprite Pack 1
• Sprite Pack 2

Be careful, though! Because of how computer file systems work, you’ll need about 100+ MB of free space on your hard drive for all these tiny .png files, even though they technically total 15 or 20 MB.

Anyway, have fun exploring all the sprites, and keep an eye out on all the weird, unused/hidden stuff too!

http://mother3.fobby.net/unused/

If anyone has good questions for this part of the game that I haven’t covered, I still have enough energy to go add the answers into the notes. Anyway, I hope people find these notes interesting. They’re kind of like my MOTHER 2 and Earthbound comparison site, except this time it’s my own translation I’m picking apart. What an odd situation

We moved the blog to this new address, so I don’t know if the RSS stuff was broken in the process. Anyway, there will still be the occasional update here for various things, for those who are still interested. More on that stuff later.

First big piece of news is a little contest we cooked up the other day. The idea came to me in a dream. Basically, record yourself doing one of the crazy dances in the game. The top 3 videos (some people on the starmen.net staff will do the judging I guess) will earn their creators cool stuff, like: a boxed copy of Japanese MOTHER 3, one of those rare Mr. Saturn plushies, or an official Ultimate Chimera T-Shirt from The King of Games. See the video for details and an example! The contest ends on November 14th.

(more…)

The blog has been relocated to this address.

(more…)

This past week was very slow-going for me with real-life work, but pretty much everyone has stepped up to the plate in one way or another to help out. The testers are awesome and trying things I probably wouldn’t have even thought of. byuu’s been kind enough to help put the final patching program together for Windows and Linux, all while very sick. sblur’s been working on the Mac version. Jeff’s been around to answer testers’ questions. Very awesome teamwork. Send all free food and booze to them

Testing will probably end in the next day or two. I still want demi to look through a few key lines to make them sound better, I set him up with all the stuff he needs for that. It will probably take him an hour or two, if he can find the time. If all goes well, there’ll be two updates left, one when everything is done and one with the patch for download.

Details about stuff will come next time.

At this point, it pretty much looks like the translation will work on most everything out there than can emulate/play GBA games. If you want to be really sure ahead of time, try playing the Japanese version a tiny bit and see if you have any problems. If you can save your game properly (which is a common problem for Mac GBA emulators…), then you’re probably good to go.

When the patch is released, we’ll have a detailed list of hardware and emulators you can play the translation on. Some fine folks at gbatemp have offered their help in that regard, so the list should be pretty thorough. Until then, if you’re interested in running the translation on actual hardware or on other systems, this thread may be worth a read.

I figure we’ll let the testers do their stuff a little while longer, and during the meantime I’ll do my own testing and help get a handful of key lines polished up. Since more and more people are finishing the game (and playing through again) without any new bugs, the patch could be out a bit sooner than I had thought.

Jeff and I fixed the Sleep Mode text bug the other day, I fixed the Antidote text bug, and sblur and Jeff even went and fixed one of those miniscule naming screen issues that I mentioned an update or two ago.

Compare to last update:

I started my own testing yesterday, all is going well. I’ve even started writing up the readme if that’s any indication It’s still a couple weeks off, assuming no big bugs show up, but with each passing day such bugs seem less and less likely.