J.B. Harold: Blue Chicago Blues - a game that was ported to everything, but is only available in English on Laseractive/Windows, an excellent fmv-swapparoo-translation candidate.

Riverhill Softs most successful franchise before they went bankrupt in 2004 was J.B. Harold, which was controversial on the Turbografx/Pc-Engine cause it features a rape incident that you have to solve. Now the PCE entry was localized in English, but for some reason when they decided to make the new fully fmv game shot with a american actors in the US of A they first released it on Laseractive in English, but then decided to only release it Japanese dubbed on all other consoles! but luckily not on Windows!.

So here we have a title that could potentially be easily fan translated just like DeathMask on Sega Saturn is currently being done by Segaxtreme/Sega Saturn Shiro people just by swapping out the fmvs from the English PC version, so if you take the Windows version (or uh Laseractive version but I don't think you wanna go that route) you could use it to translate the following ports:

Sega Saturn,Pc-Fx,3DO,Playstation and Macintosh versions now that is a great low effort/catch many fishes at the same time reward!, of course you'd have to find a fmv encoder for every system, Saturn and Psx is easy cakes, but the PC-FX on the other hand (but maybe the PC-FX SDK has one).

Ok the topic title is a bit of a lie, peculiar enough the IOS version retains the English dubbing so that version could also be used, and may actually be easier to transcode than the dated Windows version, just one problem, it appears to have burnt in Japanese subtitles, outch!.

 

                                 Laseractive playthrough. 

Main source and information about this game over at fullmotionvideo: http://fullmotionvideo.free.fr/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=1458

Macaw writes:

"The Windows version of Blue Chicago Blues is the only complete version of the games, heres an overview:

- Despite being a Japanese developed game, Riverhill assembled an American team for producing the video, with all American actors, director and production staff. The script was localized into english and the whole production was carried out while a few of the Japanese people from Riverhill supervised. Obviously the game was originally shot with all the characters speaking english.

- The Windows and Laseractive versions of the games are the ONLY ones that retain the original English voices (along with Japanese subtitles), all other versions (Playstation, saturn, 3do etc) have Japanese dubbing. It's amazing Riverhill went to the effort of creating a proper english script acted out by decent actors but then replacing it with Japanese dubbing for all the mainstream console versions.

- The Windows and Laseractive versions retaining the english voices and having Japanese subtitles is probably because consumers on those systems would have mainly been adults in Japan, and the adults would have appreciated the authenticity of the original English voices given the theme of the game.

- Another MAJOR DIFFERENCE is the fact that the Windows version is the only one with all the original footage, and footage for ALL of the conversations. All the other versions, because of space restrictions, only have video footage for main scenes, and then still images with voice during most of the conversations.

So yeah, the Windows version is the definitive version of the game. Original English voices as well as all the original video footage during all the conversations"˰

Just my thoughts on this specific game, have a nice dayyyy!. /Mr^Burns