February 2001
I wrote an original February
big huge update back before I came to Minnesota again, but I didn't bring
it over here to put on the server. "Oops, too bad for you" is what
you might be thinking if you didn't know that I got rid of it on purpose,
because it was so bland and usual, and it even incorporated the overplayed
"All your base are belong to us" joke that's spreading around the Internet
like a curse these days. That line is from the badly translated intro
of the Genesis game Zero Wing, and it became popular because people started
editing pictures so that signs looked like they had lines from Zero Wing
on them. If you look in Yahoo for "all your base," you'll find an
entire category dedicated to it. Now, while Zero Wing has a badly
translated intro, at least the whole game isn't filled with badly translated
dialogue. I know of one game that is. It's the arcade version
of an old side-scrolling action RPG called Cadash. Every translation
gaffe is in there, including misspelled words like "aweful," the stereotypical
Japanese-translation L and R confusion ("Baarogue" vs "Baalogue"), and
most humorous of all, idiomatic errors. The most common of these
in Cadash was the all-purpose greeting "How well you came!" but the most
jarring was at the very end of the game. You had just defeated Baarogue
and saved the kingdom, and the princess must stay and rebuild the kingdom,
but your character has to move on. As you are saying farewell to
the princess, she turns to you and says "Hi" as if you had just met for
the first time. Then she looks right at you and says,
Then the game ends. "Thank you for the important thing!" I don't know why that sounds so funny, but it does. It's as if the princess knows you did something really good, but she doesn't remember what it was. It also kind of sounds like she's thanking you for giving her some kind of object, like a treasure.
It wouldn't be a Sine Wave update
if I didn't mention Drakan somewhere on here, so here it is: my new level!
It's a big multiplayer project I've been working on for a while, which
is technically a level made by "Shanvar" the intrepid delusional explorer
for the Golden Guardians clan, but which everyone should get to play on
because it might be used for clan wars and stuff. The latest version
is 0.04, which is not quite finished yet but has most of the important
places and objects included. The level is called Auropolis,
Fortress of Gold, and one screenshot just doesn't do it justice.
The character in the third screenshot is a special Rynn/Goblin hybrid I made just for Auropolis. I have the original model and texture file available for download too here.
I didn't include a text file
with my goblin armor model because it's not really necessary. People
know what it's supposed to be, and you put it into the level just like
any modified Rynn model. If I had to include a text file, though,
I would choose a worthy source. Let's take a look at the front of
Surreal-News for our inspiration. It's the description of a new skin
called Winter, by Lady Alani:
"Her name is Winter. And yep, she’s eeeeeeevil. >:)
I guess you might be able to spot that it’s a woman designed the
skin…not my fault if I want my characters to go around wearing a little
more than a thong and a couple of carefully-trained butterflies…:P"
That is just so perfect a description of any kind of player model, I decided to use it as the basis for the description of my Rynn/Goblin hybrid, Gobrynn:
"Her name is Gobrynn. And yep, she’s greeeeeeen. <8o()
I guess you might not be able to spot that it’s a man designed
the skin…not my fault if you believe Lady Alani's idea that all men want
their characters to go around wearing a little more than a thong and a
couple of carefully-trained butterflies…:P"
Okay, maybe that was a bit too sarcastic, but you get the idea. Generalizations are never a good thing to make because there are always exceptions. Things like this always remind me of lowlight's supposed crusade against me, Salix, the great censorship advocate. Yeah right. I kept making the point that it wasn't an issue of censorship but one of respect, and that my point wasn't to censor anything for purposes of decency but to keep Rynn from becoming nothing more than a sex symbol, but my words fell on deaf ears. Now we have people like Lady Alani feeling like their work won't be accepted because it's not scantily-clad enough. Oh, well.
All the Drakan forums are changing
in some way or another! The ActionXtreme forums have moved because
the old ones were full, or something like that, and Surreal is switching
over to VBulletin! Hooray! My other favorite forums, Ars Technica
and the Straight Dope, are already using VB, and it seems to be able to
handle much larger volumes of posts than UBB. The Straight Dope would
go down in flames in two months if it were on UBB. The best part
of this is that I can put whatever text I want under my name. I'm
thinking Ninja of Drakan, with a picture of the Cadash ninja under my name
and the "Thank you for the important thing!" screen as my signature! 