News

Been a while, hasn't it? Well, the wait is over. After well over a year of no releases, at last, here's the project I know you've all been awaiting with bated breath. That's right, it's...

...a translation of The Blue Crystal Rod for the Super Famicom!

What, you've never heard of it? You were expecting Tengai Makyou II or something, some big-name game people actually want to play? Ha! You must be new here.

Anyway, despite enjoying relative obscurity in Japan and total obscurity everywhere else, this actually is a "big-name game" in a way: it's the fourth and "final" (sort of) title in the famous – or perhaps infamous – Tower of Druaga series. This entry inexplicably did away with the action gameplay of all previous titles in favor of being a pure adventure game, resulting in what could perhaps be described as a CYOA book pretending to be a dungeon crawler. With 48 endings, not a one of them officially the "true ending", you're sure to find a conclusion to Gil and Ki's quest that suits your fancy!

...Assuming you can make it past the many silent checks of your invisible stats that block your progress. The genre may have changed, but you'd better believe it's still a Druaga game.

But I added an in-game help menu with exact directions to reach all the endings, so you've got no excuses! I even put in an ending checklist to give the completionist types something to obsess over! Plus, it's on your favorite, the SNES! Just one simple IPS or BPS file, no cumbersome CD patching process to complain about! C'mon, give it a try! There's more to life than just the million-sellers!

And if you run into any issues, well...

Somehow or another, seven years have passed since this site first launched. This time, aside from the usual news cleanout, I've chosen to celebrate by finally adding HTTPS support, which is largely meaningless but will have such beneficial effects as un-breaking all the links to this site from YouTube that suddenly stopped working last year. Real nice of them to do that.

Seven years is a pretty good while, isn't it? That's the point, maybe, where you can't really deny that been doing something for "a long time." Over the years, I've largely tried to keep this site what it's been from the beginning: a source for game translations, ROM hacks, and whatever random video game-adjacent bits have caught my interest. While I'm disappointed that this last year was the first time I didn't release any fan translation projects at all (sorry, we were all pretty busy!), I did get the opportunity to apply my skills to several officially licensed translations, an experience I never expected to have but am immensely grateful for.

I hope that we'll have more releases coming before too long, so don't give up on us just yet. Thank you to all of you, whether you've just found this place or stuck it out for all seven years (uh, anybody?), for being a weirdo who actually reads the news page. I believe that statistically, this puts you in the 99th percentile of web users by intelligence.

Oh, and in yet another one of those periodic fits of pique, I changed the site intro again. Gotta keep my image classy.