A Return to Bloggin' - SRWJ

Well, hello again! It's been a while, so lemme tell you what I've been up to over the past six months or so, vidja-game wise.

Mostly, I've been working on editing (read: rewriting) the script for an English-language romhack of Super Robot Wars Judgment for the Game Boy Advance, a ridiculously awesome game about robots punching other robots in half, as demonstrated by the following screenshot:
Super Robot Wars is a really, really long-running franchise of strategical role-playin'-game-a-ma-phones that smush the characters and plotlines of a whole bunch of different robot anime together. This means hundreds of characters, most of the plotlines from their respective shows, and a lot of dialogue.

In the case of this romhack, said dialogue was translated by a non-native English speaker, and needed a lot of rewriting. I saw the project page for the game over at romhacking.net back in January, shot the project lead a PM asking if he needed any editing help, and got sent the dialogue for the game's first scenario. I spent a couple of hours polishing the thing up, sent it back to the project lead, and got a whole bunch of new scenario scripts in return. And so it went for about 5 months. Working on this thing was, I found, a lot of fun. I ended up skipping on Persona 4 in favor of rewriting goofy Super Robot Wars dialogue. Plus, y'know, last semester in college. Priorities (sorta).

For the record, I'm not a member of any kind of fan community devoted to these games, and I'd never even seen half of the shows featured in the game prior to starting work on the project. The franchise in its modern form is consistently breezy, silly fun that generally treats the player's time with respect, and I really dug working on it. When the translation patch gets released in a few months, I suspect you'll dig it too.

Still, I'm not quite done yet. The massive script has been edited, sure, but I still need to go back and see everything in context, proofread, find stuff I missed, and rewrite some more. I was originally thinking about turning this into a kind of "Let's Play" thing, akin to David Cabrera's old blog playthrough of the Super Robot Wars 2 remake from a few years ago, but decided against it at the last second. People are waiting for this dang translation patch, y'know? If I started talking about this game you can't play every day for a month or two, I would eventually start feeling like a pretty legit asshole, as opposed to a guy who was merely accused of being one by crazy robot fans.

So instead, I'm changing this thing from a vidja-game blog to an all-purpose one. I've been meaning to do it for a while, but this time it's fo' real. Consider this fair warning.