there's a lot of cool stuff i want to write about the history and production of the land maker translation eventually, but tonight i just have this event from right at the end: romhacking.net rejected it. all the email had to say as reasoning:
We are not accepting submissions for Arcade games at this time.update, per Lariria:
chances are some staffer is not up to date on the arcade rules and probably is under the honest impression that arcade games aren't allowed because they weren't for a solid decade.y didn't know there was a previous ban, and this is a totally reasonable explanation. i have left the remainder of the post untouched under the break, but please note that most of the parts trying to understand the rhdn decision amount to wild conjecture from a perspective with no insight into the review process, and should not be taken as accusation against the site or its moderators.
...huh? i had been watching the queue all day - edits and reviews were accepted periodically, (understandable, being easier to moderate). around 9:00 PM PST, the new submissions started clearing the queue in waves: the new document submissions, then the new hack submissions, then the new translation before mine, and then the land maker translation a moment later.
but it didn't appear in the "newest translations" sidebar.
We are not accepting submissions for Arcade games at this time.
this is either nonsense or a recent policy change.
was i supposed to be aware of this? searching the site and forums doesn't seem to bring up anything. rodrick submitted a colorblind palette mod for the same game that was accepted just last year.
other possibilities come to mind.
the patch distribution includes an optional extra patch to use they/them pronouns for youen.
we had opted not to advertise this inclusion in the rhdn description -- to avoid suggesting canonicity, yes, but also to avoid attracting attention from Gamers who might respond... poorly. (while judging whether to mention it or not we had found a minish cap patch that changed gendered references to link to be neutral that had been swarmed with negative reviews.)
the readme, of course, discloses this extra patch. was that enough to be rejected by a reviewer? i want to believe this is just paranoia. i mean, it probably is, right? but it wouldn't be the first time something like this happened, either: Kotaku - ROM Hacking Website Removes Volunteer Staffer Who Took Down LGBT-Friendly Pokémon Hack (2019)
iunno. maybe it really is a policy change that just hadn't been communicated well. maybe that information is hidden in a discord server somewhere like PalMod's "no puzzle games" policy. (though, i have no idea why, as a romhack archive, you would make this choice??)
in the end i rushed to make the page at https://qcs.shsbs.xyz/share/ywy/land-maker-english-translation, collected with the rest of my research pages, but there's a discoverability loss in doing that...
searching "land maker translation" gives me, insultingly, the romhacking.net overview page for land maker, simply because "translations" is in the site description and sidebars.
https://www.arcade-projects.com/threads/solved-a-new-work-to-do-landmaker-in-english.9853/ also comes up, which is also pretty sore for y because arcade-projects.com rejected her account (for setting the 'location' field to 'antarctica,' probably, w)
this got a bit venty, i thought it might be a useful story to tell for someone out there. i'll end with:
- what other arcade mods have gone unknown because of the de facto . place to look for e.g. translation patches rejecting them?
- y does not live on a lot of webs sites! if there are other places with possible land maker translation enjoyers please feel free to share her stuff there because google sure wont,
