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EarthBound Fans Take Matters Into Their Own Hands
Reid Young writes "EarthBound fans have waited 11 years for Nintendo to release the game's sequel, Mother 3, which came out in Japan in April 2006. However, following a recent announcement by a Nintendo employee that it almost certainly won't happen, the fans are taking it upon themselves to get the job done by organizing a fan translation with some of the finest names in ROM hacking. Is it ethical? Does Nintendo even care?"
In response to the post asking if people would enjoy the original Earthbound today, I have to give an emphatic yes. The graphics are old, yes, and the inventory management is a tad clunky, but other than that, it's still a great game. Just one piece of advice: read everything. There are TONS of great jokes hidden throughout the series.
If you have an old SNES, you might be able to get an Earthbound cart on eBay (try to get one with the player's guide still intact, if you can!). Otherwise, the zSNES emulator and an Earthbound ROM (it's easy to find with Google... ROMnation or someone will probably have a copy) are your best bets.
Man, I still remember when I first played that game. I read Nintendo Power slavishly, waiting eagerly for any hints of when we'd see the game (same for FF II and III). A local video store did me a personal favor and pre-ordered the game for me so that I could get it ASAP. It wasn't more than a few months after mom was killed that I got to play it, and its quirky humour really gave me some much-needed cheering up.
Yeah, as one might guess from my screenname, I'm a pretty big fan of the game. I played it on an emulator my senior year of high school, and it blew my mind. After that, I just so happened to end up learning Japanese, so I've been able to play Mother1+2 for the GBA and the new Mother3 in the original language and mostly follow the plot. (Well, sometimes I have to look stuff up, but I get the gist for the most part...) Still, I'll be pretty disappointed if Nintendo never releases at least EarthBound 0 and EarthBound for the Virtual Console of the Wii. It's always more fun to play a text heavy game in your native language. I've already bought the games once for GBA but I'd be willing to buy them again for the Wii. In other words, I'm willing to shovel money into Nintendo for basically nothing. And I'm not the only one either. Starmen.net have gotten 30,000 people to sign a petition for the various games. Not to release them in English is just foolishness on Nintendo's part.
So, my hope is that by threatening to put out a patched ROM, Starmen.net will scare Nintendo into actually releasing a translation themselves, but my worry is that Nintendo will just sue Starmen, kill off a really great fansite, then continue not picking up the freaking free money all of us fans are trying unsuccessfully to shove into their faces. Ugh! C'mon Nintendo, get it together!