Tuesday, June 10, 2025

This is the fifty-fourth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

Farm Together 2 is a pretty standard farming game where you start off with nothing and build your way up to having lots of something. Its unique features include constant time progression, like a social game (though you play it on your desktop), multiplayer from the start, and a very relaxing soundtrack. I do love listening to accordions during my nap time!

I have always been into the Mega Man series. After playing Mega Man 2 on the NES at a friend’s house, I knew it was for me. Despite not owning any of the games until I was in high school, I somehow learned the names and weapons of all the Robot Masters in the first six games, dressed up as the Blue Bomber himself for Halloween one year, and obsessed over every detail I could learn from gaming magazines (the internet hadn’t been invented yet).

I started collecting the X (on PS1), Zero, and Battle Network series once I had those systems, but one game that remained elusive was Mega Man & Bass.

Also known as Mega Man 8-2, it was a rare instance of a follow-up game being released on an older system, rather than a newer one. MM8 came out on the PS1, while MM&B was only released in Japan on the Super Famicom (Super NES in the US), which had already reached the end of its life. This meant it was only in Japanese, and while the series is not known for its deep storyline and clever dialogue, it is still nice to know what you’re selecting in a menu.

While it only took four years for the game to be re-released on Game Boy Advance in English, there are many other games of that era that never received translations at all. Conversely, many games, especially indies, are only written for English speakers, so that cuts off a large portion of people from enjoying them. Is there a solution? Maybe.

Anbernic, the company that made the handheld gaming device my family uses, recently announced a new AI app for their newer Android-based devices. Among other things, they claim it will provide real-time translation for games not in the player’s language, just by overlaying the translated text on the screen while they’re playing. I know I rail against AI a bit around here, but this seems like a legitimate use of the technology.

I mean, we’ve already been using it like this for years already. Translation software doesn’t just work like a dictionary, looking up a word in the target language one for one. It takes whole sentences and attempts to reconstruct their meaning given a wide range of linguistic rules. Whether that input is text based or from optical character recognition of each frame in a video game, the effect is the same. I don’t like AI when it replaces something a human could do on their own, given time, but a human would be hard-pressed to read out every word on a screen when it flashes by during an action-packed robot battle. Maybe there’s a market there, I don’t know.