Old News: 2020-2021

Every once in a while, I feel compelled to make sort of minor upgrade to this site just to prove I am in fact capable of such, and apparently this is one of those times. So welcome to what is technically the most significant change to the site's style, if not substance, in its history! Which isn't saying much, considering I've barely touched it since I started it.

• Reorganized the "Translation" section, since at this point it makes up the bulk of the site's content:
• Added the "LIPEMCO!" button, which leads to a random project page.
• Split off projects done as LIPEMCO! Translations into a separate section, and added a short page about the group.
• Projects that were previously only listed on the "Other" page now have their own entries in the game list.
• Rearranged the game list to be alphabetical, as the number of projects had gotten large enough that reverse chronological order was starting to look very chaotic.
• Added a subtle background, and made a few other almost unnoticeable tweaks to margins, colors, transparency effects, etc., to hopefully improve overall feel and provide good color contrast for text elements.
• Moved navbar from left to right side of page, mostly to create the illusion that I put more work into this than I actually did.
• It finally occurred to me that, since I removed the intro text that used to grace the front page in a fit of pique a long time ago, there was no longer an explanation of what the hell this site actually is anywhere, and if some very lost person discovered it exists, they might be confused. So, I've re-re-re-instated the site intro. May it fare better this time.

Well, we picked our name for a reason…LIPEMCO! Translations presents: Madou Monogatari I: Honoo no Sotsuenji for the PC-Engine Super CD-ROM² system! Or just "PC-Engine CD", if you want to be lame like that. We even managed to get it out just in time for the game's 24th anniversary, entirely by accident.

The name may sound familiar, and indeed, we also translated Madou Monogatari I for the Mega Drive this very year…but this is, in the grand tradition of the series, a different port and therefore an almost completely different game. Unlike the Mega Drive port, which was essentially a ground-up reimagining, this version is more closely based on the original home computer editions, but with lots of enhancements and additions, such as new monsters and near-full voice acting. (With Kotono Mitsuishi a.k.a. Sailor Moon as the voice of Arle…hmmmm, somehow I'm reminded of something…)

But more importantly than anything, this game has a vital life lesson:

So it's been a while since the last post, but there's a good reason for that: our latest release, Remote Control Dandy for the PlayStation!

Like Chou Soujuu Mecha MG, this is another Sandlot game that never made it out of Japan. (Well, technically it's by Human Entertainment, made shortly before they went bankrupt and this game's staff left to form Sandlot, but play it for a few minutes and I think you'll be convinced it's a Sandlot game.) As the first PlayStation translation I've worked on, it took considerably more effort than anything else I've done to date, but I think it was well worth the trouble.

Also, since TheMajinZenki, cccmar, Xanathis, Oddoai-sama and I keep on doing projects together, and people keep getting confused that we aren't operating under a group name (I saw one site refer to "a group called stargood"), we've caved to pressure and basic sense, and from now on will be releasing our collaborations as LIPEMCO! Translations. If you don't get the name, you haven't played enough of our translations!

New release: Bahamut Senki for the Mega Drive!

So, anyone remember that page I put up a long time ago about how I was working on this game, and how it's been sitting in a section labeled "In Progress" for almost two years? No? Well, it's now finished and released. And boy, what a release it is...

A while back, filler bowed out of the translation and TheMajinZenki picked it up instead. He determined that the game was pretty much incomprehensible without the instruction manual, and so, to my awe and horror, he translated the entire manual. Manuals, actually, because there are two of them, and they total 112 pages combined.

Well, that was setting the bar pretty high, and just shoving the translation into a text file clearly wasn't going to cut it this time, so I grit my teeth and converted the whole thing into a web page. It took 206 images, 1,207 lines of CSS, and too many hours of cleaning and typesetting the world map, but the whole thing has been translated, digitized, formatted, and probably made prettier than my actual web site, all for your enjoyment. So here it is!

Read User Manual

Read Character Catalog

All this for a game I picked specifically because it didn't have much text and I figured it'd be over with in a few weeks. Oh well. Turns out it's also really fun, so I'm satisfied with this outcome.

New release: Eternal Legend for the Game Gear!

Updated the Sailor Moon PC-Engine translation to v1.1. This adds support for the commonly available "split BIN" disc format to the patching process, fixes a few minor translation goofs, and tweaks some text. Big thanks to vivify93 and mzlab for giving the patch a thorough look-over; be sure to check out their improvement to the old Sailor Moon: Another Story translation!

Also updated the Madou Monogatari I Mega Drive translation to v1.1 (which really should have come out months ago but got delayed due to this and that). This fixes yet more bugs in the original game and makes some minor text changes.

If you thought there couldn't possibly be any more Sailor Moon games left to translate, you were wrong: here's Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon for the PC-Engine CD!

Despite being very little known, this is actually one of the most interesting Sailor Moon games. While most of them were action games with little in the way of plot, this one is a full-on visual novel – or to quote the box, "adventure-style digital comic" – featuring an original story set after the Makai Tree arc of the anime. All five Inner Senshi are playable, and the game takes full advantage of CD-ROM capabilities to include extensive voice acting from the anime's cast and two original vocal songs.

We translated everything, right down to adding subtitles for the voice-only scenes and songs, and I even threw in a massive gallery of unused content I found while working on the game as a bonus. If you're willing to brave a slightly obscure console, check it out!

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone! To celebrate with something completely unrelated, here's a release we've been looking forward to (and bugfixing) for a long time: Madou Monogatari I (Sorcery Saga I) for the Mega Drive!

Oh, but that's not all! Novyal has come through for us with another beautifully crafted manual scanslation, this time for Madou Monogatari III. Check it out!

New release: Madou Monogatari A (Sorcery Saga A) for the Game Gear!

To coincide, we've also updated the Madou Monogatari II patch to version 1.2 (a minor fix to a few item descriptions), and the Madou Monogatari III patch to version 1.1 (fixing a minor visual error caused by a stray character in the script, and a bug in the original game that could cause the screen to get stuck at an offset position whenever the "earthquake" effect ended). And I apparently never added the link to the Git repository for Madou III to its page, so that's been rectified.