Category: spotlight

  • Final Fantasy Tactics Omega

    Robby’s Challenge Run on Hardest Difficulty

    Rob enjoys playing video games. Doing so allows him to show his love, experience, and individuality as a unique human being to express his love for those games. Rob’s video archive boasts an impressive selection of Let’s Plays of modded and unmodded games across multiple platforms. You can follow Rob’s work via his YouTube channel here.

    Writes Robby to the readers of FFV Central following his playthrough:

    [Because I ran into technical issues tracking down a copy of the mod, one of my viewers as a prank] sent me the highest difficulty mod version of Omega[, and I didn’t even know about this until later in my playthrough], and well, this is the punishment I was put through.

    The Omega mod is an alternate version of War of the Lions, rebalancing classes, skills, and items in the game.

    To his credit, Robby, who does not normally engage in challenge runs, managed to overcome the mod even on the highest difficulty, albeit not without trials and tribulations. (Who knew that that was even possible?) When asked about tips for fellow players, Robby had this to say:

    [Do] not underestimate the mod’s difficulty. Please make sure to take your time and not rush. Read and understand as much as you can about the abilities that are available to you after unlocking them. That’s what I should have done I gravely underestimated myself and my ability to fully utilize the abilities I have unlocked.

    Take your time in battles no matter how long it takes, ensuring your survival and keeping all your members alive is a must. My biggest problem is I didn’t use potions when I should have.

    When you’re able to get to Finnah River? There is a Mindflayer there. You can use him to lower your heroes levels and make sure to boost your speed as high as you can. Use Bards and Dancers having Mindflayers lower their level so you lose the least amount of stats.

    Use Ninjas for speed. Speed is your best friend! I cannot stress the speed stat enough. Speed is your best friend!

    You can find Robby’s inadvertent challenge run of the mod below. Players wanting to put their own tech-savviness to the test can get the mod here.

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  • Machinima

    How a Hacker Plays Super Mario Kart

    For clymax’s projects, click here. You can also follow him on YouTube or Twitter.

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  • Spotlight: Jonko the ROM Hacker

    Project Highlights in Fan Translation and More

    Jonko is a ROM hacker and YouTuber whose primary work is with the Haroohie Translation Club, where he serves as project lead and main ROM hacker. He also dabbles with homebrew and emulator development.

    You can follow Jonko via YouTube or website blog explaining how ROM hacking works.

    Jonko sits down with FFV Central to give an exclusive overview of project highlights.

    Subheadings, screenshots, and trailers added during the editorial process.

    0. Intro

    FFV Central: How did you get into romhacking and translating?

    Jonko: Kinda random. I picked up fansubbing (as a script editor) as a hobby at the beginning of covid lockdown. one of our shows was onegai my melody, and i found out there was a DS game for it. I’m a programmer by trade, so I thought I’d give trying to translate it a go. Cracked it open and found out that I just absolutely loved the work involved in figuring out how a game works and building little tools to edit them. I ended up doing a full translation of Sailor Moon: La Luna Splende with a graphics guy and one of my Italian friends, and then eventually founded this project because of a random gbatemp thread

    It just sorta spiraled into a massive effort with a bunch of people involved. Learned a lot as a result of working on it and I’ve developed all sorts of stuff since then. Honestly, pretty life-changing

    You might have seen on the site already, but Will and I developed a full editing suite for Choku based on my reverse-engineering work, which is something I’m very proud of haha

    FFV Central: Can you share some highlights of your projects?

    Jonko: yeah, my credentials are basically:

    1. Sailor Moon: La Luna Splende (DS) Translation

    Released: 2011 (game); 2021 (fan translation from Italian)

    RHDN translation entry here

    2. Suzumiya Haruhi no Chokuretsu (DS) Translation

    Released: 2009 (game); 2026 (fan translation completed)

    Japanese: 涼宮ハルヒの直列

    Original announcement post here

    In flight: other Haruhi games, next up is Heiretsu and Gekidou (wii games)

    3. “Serial Loops” – Chokuretsu Editing Suite

    Available for Windows, macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon) and Linux

    Project webpage here

    For a video explainer on how this editing suite was made, click here.

    In flight: Loopy Suite (hacking tools for the other Haruhi games)

    4. Into the Dream Spring (DS)

    Unannounced commercial DS homebrew game Jonko is developing with a friend (William278 of Breaking Bad DS fame) and a team of talented artists

    FFV Central: Awesome! Thank you for this overview and for the scoop on the unannounced homebrew game. We wish you all the best on these and future projects.

    So, what do you think? Have you played Jonko’s translations, and if so, which is your favorite? Comment below, or come check us out on Discord.

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  • Departure of Developer UnsolidSnake of Retro Achievements [Mirror]

    To see UnsolidSnake’s developed sets on RA, click here.

    Related Post:

    Response of Departed Developer UnsolidSnake of Retro Achievements [Mirror]

    Original Link: https://retroachievements.org/forums/topic/24374?comment=251761#251761

    December 3, 2024

    Fact is, I spent the better part of 3 months busting my ass off making this set, only for my work to be invalidated at the last minute. This is just about the most disrespectful thing you could possibly do to a dev. I have no desire to come back until I can be certain that I’ll be allowed to work on whatever I want without having shit like this happen whenever a mod or DevComp member gets too antsy about my contrarian stances or if my tongue is too sharp for their liking (I did word some of my arguments harshly, but there were no instances of me outright insulting another person on this site).

    All this and then I find out you already had a proper way of handling this back in the old days. You have no excuse.

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