Old News: 2022-2023

It would really be a shame to only have two translation releases for the entire year, so here's one more for you: the inexplicably forgotten PC-Engine CD masterpiece Private Eye Dol!

This was another solo project, and a much larger effort than Yuna 2 or even Yumimi Mix in terms of sheer amount of labor required, so I'm glad I was able to manage it. It's not a very famous game even in its home country, but I hope this translation will give it at least a little more visibility. It's a pretty incredible production and definitely one of the best PC-Engine adventure games out there.

I know the massive worldwide LIPEMCO! Translations fanbase has been frantic with anxiety over our inactivity over the last year. Well, fret no more: after the many delays which are apparently required for any English translation related to the series, LIPEMCO! Translations finally presents Magic Knight Rayearth for the Game Boy!

This should have been out a lot sooner, but I held it up for a long time with my foot-dragging. My apologies to anybody who might have been looking forward to it...which probably wasn't much of anyone, considering we never actually announced it. Still, my bad.

Does anyone remember four and a half years ago, when I made a post on the Romhacking.net forums about how I was working on a subtitling system for this nice little adventure game by Game Arts and wouldn't someone please translate two hours of audio-only dialogue for me? Remember how shockingly, I couldn't get any takers? Well, years of Japanese study later, problem solved. New release: Yumimi Mix Remix for the Sega Saturn!

This was the oldest unfinished project I'd started (it's older than this web site), and one I'd wanted to see completed for a very long time. In the years since I started on it, I've done translation hacks for more games than I can keep count of and worked with all sorts of different people, but could never find anyone willing to take this game on due to its total absence of a written script. And you know, I get that now: you really have to love the game to be willing to burn the hours it takes to make something like this happen, whether it's the hacking or the translation. Or both.

But hey, if you've been paying any attention at all to my output over the years, I think you've probably figured out that when it comes to me and games of a certain type, no price is too high. So here you go, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

According to my rather spotty records, it was ten years ago today (well, yesterday -- I'm up pretty late tonight) that I finished creating a song I decided to call "Suppressor". It wasn't very good by any measure, but I was blissfully ignorant of the fact and proudly decided I would post it on...Uboachan? Well, okay. (Apparently, Uboachan still exists. Wow.)

Anyway, it was far from the first time that I wrote music, but it was the first time I publicly released an original composition, and for that reason it's always felt to me like the point where I really got started musically. So in commemoration of this unmomentous non-event, I've added a page with all my music, including a bunch of previously unreleased tracks that I've had lying around on my hard drive for years, to the site. Think of it like the world's worst box set, complete with track commentary (consisting mostly of "wow, this sucks, what was I thinking?").

Even with the unreleased stuff, it's a depressingly short list for a decade's worth of musical output...though it's not like I've done anything for the last three of those, huh? Oh well, guess I'm just not the person I used to be. In the end, maybe that's not such a bad thing.

At any rate, thanks to everyone who's taken the time to listen to my amateur efforts over the years. It's been fun, even if I never had the slightest idea what I was doing.

Also, I actually made this page almost a year ago, and it's been sitting on the server live but unlinked since at least last June. This was just an excuse to make myself publish it. Shh, don't tell.

The Galaxy Fraulein Yuna translation has been updated to v1.1, consisting mostly of minor translation corrections and a few tiny formatting changes for consistency with the Yuna 2 translation.

Spurred by Mafoo343 uncovering the strangely obscure official lyrics to the game's songs, the translation now uses the actual lyrics instead of a mostly-correct fan transcription. Since I had the opportunity, I also revised a handful of lines throughout the game, many of which had been translated correctly to begin with but I screwed up during editing (that's generally my role here). See the readme for a detailed list of what was changed, though it's all pretty mundane stuff.

stargood.org has somehow managed to continue existing for a fourth consecutive year, which means it's time for the annual cleanout of old news to the Old News page. And see, the nice thing about not having any kind of actual content management system is that this is a completely manual operation, so I have an excuse to update the site even though nothing new has actually happened. It's all very carefully calculated, yeah?

So as always, I'd like to take the opportunity to thank and/or apologize to everyone I've worked with over the last year. First, of course, the usual LIPEMCO! crowd: TheMajinZenki, cccmar, Xanathis, and Oddeye. We may have only put out one project under our banner this year, but somehow I ended up dragging everyone along for the Yuna ride (sorry!). Speaking of which, thanks to Mafoo343 for instigating that particular bit of chaos; I think you probably got much more than you bargained for (sorry, sorry!!), but I wound up enjoying it far more than I ever expected. And I can't forget Phantom, who blindsided me in the best way with the full translation for the Chou Soujuu Mecha MG manga. We seem to mostly move in different circles these days, but I hope we'll get to work together again sometime!

Finally, thanks in general to whoever it is that actually reads this very obscure and niche site, and my apologies for probably not answering your e-mail (sorry, sorry, sorry!!!). I'm not sure what it says about me that I find it easier to subtitle a PC Engine game than to jot down a one-paragraph reply to a simple query, but, well, here we are. I'll try to work on it...

I have no idea what the next year's going to look like, but let's hope for the best!