For those of you who’ve tried to look at the old posts on the Mother 3 translation blog, fear not, I fixed the problems so now all the old entries work again. If you’re really adventurous, try reading every blog post from the earliest archive
Mother 1+2 translation is going slowly, I’ve been at 90% on the first draft script for a couple weeks. http://mother12.net for updates, though the updates are a lot less regular than the M3 updates used to be.
And, as always, I must pimp out EarthBound Central, there’s lots of new stuff every day, including Mother 3 polls, neat info, tricks, videos, etc.
Back when the patch was still being worked on, people asked me to someday make a video of a bunch of the weird things that happened during the hacking. A few weeks ago I made a short video showing a couple of them. I couldn’t fit them all in due to YouTube’s video length limit, but these are some of the more amusing ones:
There are also many glitch pics and early development pics inside this big ol’ image archive that I put up a few months ago.
Work on the MOTHER 1+2 translation is slowly coming along. I didn’t realize how much of a drain EarthBound Central would be on my time, but I want to get the MOTHER 1 part done so I can work on some other interesting projects. You can follow the MOTHER 1+2 progress here if you’re interested.
In other news, the MOTHER 3 Handbooks have shipped! If you didn’t preorder, you can still order a copy anytime, so don’t worry. Also, for more up-to-date news about MOTHER 3 stuff and just the entire series in general, EarthBound Central is the place to go
It’s been a good while since the last update here, and it sounds like most people have already played through the game and long finished. If you’ve played through it, have a look here, it’s interesting to see what others think about the game. The results of that poll are actually really surprising to me too. I thought nothing would ever move EarthBound from its pedestal
While I’m sort of on the subject, the past month I’ve been hard at work on a personal EarthBound blog called EarthBound Central. If you like the EarthBound/MOTHER games, you’ll probably love EB Central. I’m still putting some finishing touches on things there, but it’s been up for a few weeks now and it’s been a ton of fun. So check it out sometime!
Getting back to MOTHER 3, a few things to report. One thing that would be crazy not to mention is that the Brownie Brown president said he would love for overseas fans to play MOTHER 3 if Nintendo ever asked them to make a DS version. See here. Of course, that doesn’t really mean anything, it’s entirely up to Itoi and Nintendo whether or not to do any more with the MOTHER games. But it doesn’t hurt to pray. If, by some crazy chance, a DS version is made, I’d gladly let them have my text translation for free if it meant the game would be released in English too.
1. First, and probably the coolest of all, Jeffman is asking for help testing his MOTHER 3 Sprite Editor. It’s very cool, so help him test it here!
2. I still get e-mails and PMs about it. The patch downloads have slowed down of course, though I believe we passed 100,000 local downloads long ago. I don’t have an exact # but it doesn’t matter too much.
3. Translations into other languages are still progressing well, and teams are starting to finish all the non-main script text. Soon they will taste the terror of the main script!
4. An updated English patch probably won’t be out for at least a few months. We’ve fixed a few bugs and typo/bug reports have mostly stopped, so it’s looking like it’s time to get working on them.
5. There are currently no concrete plans to translate the MOTHER 2 part of MOTHER 1+2 (that’s Jeffman’s territory), but I did start messing with the MOTHER 1 part of it a few weeks ago. It’s been much, much easier to hack than the third game, whew. Most of the hacking is done, and now I’m retranslating the Japanese script from scratch. You can read all the details and see pics and videos here. This blog is for MOTHER 3, so any MOTHER 1+2 updates will be over at my personal one.
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
Latin American Spanish translation
For a list of other translations, see the front page, near the bottom right.
A few months ago, Jeff wrote a program to dump all of MOTHER 3’s sprites from the ROM. There are so many sprites in the game that they had to be stored in an unfriendly way, you see.
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!
The main translation notes will take precedence, but I put together a preview of just a few things to expect in the “Unused Content” portion of the site. You can see the preview below, but beware that there probably are spoilers!
It’s kind of rambly and there’s a lot of stuff to cover as the game is just starting, but for those who are interested, part 1 of the translation notes/commentary is up here:
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
It’s been a week already??? I hope everyone’s had fun with the game since the patch was released, it’s definitely been fun seeing people’s reactions to the game
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.
MOTHER 3 is the sequel to MOTHER 2 (also called EarthBound). It is a GBA RPG that was released in Japan in April 2006. Nintendo has made it clear that they do not intend to translate the game, so we, the fans, have begun our own translation.
