Our expectations on the response to CRW Metal Jacket were exceeded! (+Pachy98 Stuff)

So it’s been over 2 weeks since we released our English translation patch for CRW Metal Jacket, and let me tell you, the response has been well beyond what we were expecting. As the project page states, we were expecting the game to be a “weekend project” (which turned into about a month of real work after Rusty was completed) and just something that we did to kind of improve our general abilities with games on the PC-98 platform. The game itself is relatively obscure, not too long, and has a lot of little bugs and other things that feel unfinished or cut out. That doesn’t detract too much from it being a fun game with some solid gameplay, but it forced us to kind of moderate our expectations with how it’d be received when we released the translation patch.

Before we get too much into the response to CRW Metal Jacket, we thought it’d be fun and slightly topical to mention that Pachy98 has just been used to release an updated patch for Die Bahnwelt, a game developed by Glodia and released on Sharp x68000 computers! It’s a really great looking top-down action game set in a pretty neat science fiction world. Also, you’ll notice that I said Glodia developed the game, which is why I called this a sort of topical announcement as we just recently announced we were going to begin work on translating Different Realm: The Eternal Sage, also developed by Glodia. This is the first patch to use Pachy98 that wasn’t released by us here at 46 OkuMen, so it’s a neat thing for us to see. Find out more about it over at RadicalR and Non-Directional Translations’ site!

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Rusty around the web! Also a small update to the patcher

It’s been a few days since we released Rusty, and the response has been pretty great! You never really know what to expect while you work on these sorts of projects, but suffice to say all of our expectations were pretty much shattered by all of the positive reactions we’ve seen from press and individuals alike. Before we talk about that, let’s talk a bit about a few of the issues people faced while trying to use our patching process for Rusty.

First up, we accidentally included the x64 version of xdelta in our executable so anyone running the patcher on a 32-bit machine was unable to patch any of the files our patcher extracted from the Rusty disk images. Our bad. That’s been fixed. Another issue that we got a bunch of reports on was a bit more difficult for us to track down, but we did end up figuring out that a common build of the game is set to read-only. Whoops! We’ve included a better error message for that. Finally, we made the GDC Clock error message a little more clear (it’s translated in the game’s files now) so that people would know exactly what to check and where to look to get the game running. Not a huge amount for us to fix for this release, thankfully. Hopefully with this newer update to the patcher and the game’s files it’ll be even easier for you guys to patch and get the English version of Rusty up and running. You can get your hands on the new version over at the Rusty project page, or here:

Rusty Lite (Patcher Only) v1.0.1 – zip – 1050 download(s) – 9 MB

Onto the fun part of this post, let’s take a look at all of the things people have been saying around the web. The first responses to the release are usually found on Twitter, and there were certainly a bunch of people who retweeted our initial tweet about the release, and it was picked up soon after by @RPGSite and @Suprise_News. After that, a number of articles started popping up starting off with Indie Retro News, Siliconera, and even our friends down under at Kotaku AU wrote a nice article about it. Those are just the English publications. There were also a number of foreign articles written by Otaku Freaks (Spanish), RetroGaming History (Italian), and RetroVillage (Italian). There have also been a few videos posted on YouTube that have the patch applied already as well (Svati and Hengki).

All in all, it’s been a fun release and we’re glad that you guys seem to have been enjoying it as well. We’ll hopefully have some more things for you guys to mess with coming soon!

Our E.V.O. (PC-98) translation gets an update and an easier patching process!

We’ve updated our translation of E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution! If you had trouble patching your copy of the game before, try it again with our new patching program, which works on many more builds of the game.

E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution Complete (incl. Translation Patch & Manual) v1.1.0 – zip – 1497 download(s) – 25 MB
E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution Lite (Patcher Only) v1.1.0 – zip – 1011 download(s) – 6 MB
E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution Mac/Linux Patches v1.1.0 – zip – 709 download(s) – 507 KB
E.V.O.: The Theory of Evolution Manual v1.0.0 – zip – 3072 download(s) – 16 MB
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