Samuel    Messner

@obskyr

Translator, hacker, programmer – 3 for the price of 1! Recently: Azusa 999 (PC-98!), Game Boy Save Immortalizer, Telefang fan translation. 永遠の楽天家。

Stockholm again!?  
Joined November 2009

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  1. Pinned Tweet
    28 Jul 2020

    It's nowhere on the internet. It's not even in any books! But in a small shop in Akihabara, I discovered something historic: Where action RPGs really came from. It's out NOW! ⭐️ Get the scoop!

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  2. 5 minutes ago

    Did y'all know that without Hamtaro, Miis wouldn't exist!? Mentioned only briefly in English, a JP Iwata Asks reveals: 1) Tomodachi Collection (Tomodachi Life precursor) was based on the '00 Hamtaro fortune-telling game 2) Miis were originally character creation developed for TC!

    Ryūtarō Takahashi (Tomodachi Collection co-director):
So in 2000…

Satoru Iwata (former Nintendo president):
2000? Nine whole years ago!? Has this concept been in the works since the 20th century?

Takahashi:
Indeed. I hadn't even joined the company yet, haha. In 2000, Nintendo released *Tottoko Hamtaro: Tomodachi Daisakusen Dechu.* [...] At that time, a female employee apparently told [Tomodachi Collection producer Yoshio] Sakamoto, her boss, that she'd like a game that even grown women could play.

Iwata:
So you must've heard this after you joined the company.

Takahashi:
Right. So around October 2005, Sakamoto said “We had that game, but I'd like to make a version that grown women could play.” We called it “The Grown Woman's Fortune-Telling Notebook”.

Daisuke Shiiba (Tomodachi Collection composer):
The grown… woman's…?

Takahashi:
Fortune-telling handbook, yes.

Shiiba:
What!? You called it that!?

(Everyone laughs.)
    Takahashi:
It's a bit blunt, isn't it, haha. […] We'd made it so that you could enter your name and birthday and all that, but it felt a bit shallow, so we thought, “what if we let the player create portraits?” [...] At the time, I was thinking fukuwarai-like [traditional “pin the face on the lady” game] 2D faces. [Tomodachi Collection programmer] Nakagawa and his team said “if we're doing it, we might as well make it 3D”. [...] We showed the 3D portrait tool we'd made to Sakamoto, and he said “Good work, but… is it impossible to make a ‘non-standard face’ like mine?” […] So we added the ability to rotate, enlarge, and shrink parts, and to move them around. As soon as we did that, it immediately looked like him. […] That's when an overjoyed Sakamoto brought it to you, Iwata, right?

Iwata:
If I recall… this would have been around the start of 2006. And that's when your project took a sharp unexpected turn, isn't it! […] …I'm the culprit who unexpectedly turned it, though, of course.
    Iwata:
It sparked something within me. Miyamoto had actually been saying for years that he wanted to put portraits in games. [...] So I thought, “this might be exactly what Miyamoto has been looking for”, and brought it to him straight away.

Takahashi:
And that's when the Mii was born.

Iwata:
I was worried. When we designed the parts for Miis' faces, at first, we only considered Japanese faces. Even if we could make a “non-standard face” like Sakamoto's, I wasn't confident that we could make non-Japanese people. To that end, I had Nintendo of America send photos of their staff, and asked Sakamoto to make every one of them.

Takahashi:
And we got to wo
We all helped out to make those portraits.

Iwata:
Then we showed the portraits you'd made to NOA, and when we asked who each was, they'd know right off the bat. That's when I was convinced that, hey, this will work! And so, The Grown Woman's Fortune-Telling Notebook was put on hold.

Takahashi:
And we got to work on the Mii Channel.
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  3. 21 hours ago

    Fun fact that's entirely true but totally unknown to English sources: with 2 degrees of separation, Miis (as in the avatars on the Wii and on) are based on Hamtaro. Without Hamtaro, Miis would not exist. …I'll put together proper info later – holy moly, history's bizarre, hahah.

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  4. Jun 3

    Why do we say “asexual” and not “non-bonary”

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  5. May 29

    I want to play… Bakuretsu Senshi Warrior, AKA Cyraid… Holla if you know the feel of those Cyraid cravings

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  6. May 24

    Kōsaku Shima is of especial interest due to its topicality! This is a manga that tells the story of the bubble economy's rise and fall, of the Hanshin Earthquake, of this pandemic, and of other watershed moments in Japanese society the past 35 years – and tells it in real time.

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  7. May 24

    I kind of want to read Kōsaku Shima – an evergreen, ever-topical manga depicting salaryman life. It's been going for *80 volumes* since *1983*. In the latest volume, Shima catches COVID!? …Also there's a crossover spinoff called “That Time I Got Reincarnated as Kōsaku Shima”.

    Two covers of Kōsaku Shima volumes – on volume 6 of the 1980s Section Chief Kōsaku Shima, he's hugged from behind by a lady with a loving look in front of a Japanese nighttime cityscape. The other cover is volume 1 of the 2020s series Senior Advisor Kōsaku Shima, and depicts a septuagenarian version of Shima leaning over the Earth itself – an Earth glowing with an interconnected net of nodes, likely representing… the internet, perhaps?
    Kōsaku Shima at a restaurant: “Yes… Now that you mention it… I always have this curry, but today I can't taste it. Could it be COVID…?”
Walking out of the place, he talks to his wife on the phone: “I suspect I may have contracted the coronavirus. We need to self-quarantine.” His wife replies, “Oh my, poor thing! Head straight to your room when you come home, then, won't you? I'll leave food and water by your door.”
    On the cover of “That Time I Got Reincarnated… as Kōsaku Shima”, a young, dashing Shima is holding the slime from “That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime”.
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  8. May 23

    No longer an innocent robot boy, Mega Man puts his helmet on the shelf and lives life as a bishie office worker. That's Mr. Mega Man to you, kid.

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  9. May 23

    Oh… my lord. There's a new set of two Mega Man manga: a childhood comedy, and “a melancholic drama about Mega Man grown up, disillusioned with the corporate world”… And I kid you not: they're called “Li'l Mega Man” & “Mr. Mega Man” (Rockman-chan & -san).

    The kid side of things has Mega Man looking like a cheeky li'l '80s manga protagonist, and the adult side has him as a tragic bishōnen salaryman.
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  10. May 17

    Oh my lord, Tokyo Revengers gets so bad… It has a lot of unique facets to love, and I *want* to like it… but it totally bungles it. Y'all ever have that? When you're so into parts of something, to the point where it feels special, but the *whole* keeps you from going all in?

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  11. May 16

    To clarify, I'm talkin' 'bout English onomatopoeia – even if you've got the Japanese one down pat, trying to find a good English equivalent can be a curse upon you and all that you stand for. (Especially for those darn ideophones.)

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  12. May 16

    I need an onomatopoetic encyclopedia… Fellow translators – especially of manga – do y'all have any resources for onomatopoeia?

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  13. May 13

    日本のフォロワーの方が起きている可能性の非常に低い時間につぶやいてしまったな……お知らせツイートでこの不当を正しとこっ。

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  14. May 12

    Hey it's cool and all that you used mGBA in the Medarots Classic port for Switch but whoever Dmitriy Gorbashevskiy is didn't seem to tell you that he used my code, since I'm not credited anywhere, even in the open source disclosures.

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  15. May 13
    Replying to

    Woe Craftsman, The Ragemeister, The Wretched Denizen, That One Unfriendly Chap, Supreme Unpleasantry, Concentrate of Ill Will, "That Guy, Satan", "Needed A Friend Several Millenia Ago", Curator of Fiery Locale.

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  16. May 13

    (Whoops, ya boy tweeted this earlier with a brain typo that rendered the whole thing utterly incomprehensible. Sometimes, you just accidentally use the wrong language, y'know?)

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  17. May 13

    The stereotypical “大魔王” (“Daimaō”) is always translated as “Demon Lord”, so let's do something about it. “Dark Lord” conveys the genericity even better. Then we've got… Archfiend. Master of Misery. Beastly Potentate. His Transcendent Execrability. The Big Bad News. Big Satan.

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  18. This , it's time for PC-98 recommendations charts! It's been forever since I promised these, but they're finally happening. 5 infographics, 84 selections, 12700069420 hours in MS Paint. So many games you can pick up & try right now, listed with icons & quick info!

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  19. May 10

    Stockholm AIN'T SO BAD sometimes. まさか、スウェーデンでも桜が……!?早く日本に戻りたくなるのもあるけど、大和の小さな一部が感じてきてそれもそれでいいな〜

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  20. May 8

    I picked the podcast and was gonna rest by my brain decided to have a pseudo synesthesia and demanded that I doodle things that I saw when I was closing my eyes and listening to the audio sketch comedy. so, I obeyed and doodled. now I can sleep. gn world.

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  21. May 6

    Translator's note: like most everything in translation (especially between tenuously related languages), the English meaning of "nakama" varies depending on context. Calling someone your nakama can be a powerful declaration – and sometimes it's just "uhh he's my coworker".

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