kkzero

A curious little bunny

  • he/they, 20s

I like to create things.

Perhaps most known for romhacks: Game Boy colorizations, Samus Goes to the Fridge, etc.

I also do OC art from time to time.



Metroid Fusion: Google Translate Edition.

The exact same game with one difference: all story/item text thrown through multiple languages in Google Translate, for one purpose--laughs.

Buckle up for a lil retrospective on this strange yet significant milestone in my hacking history.


It all started at the end of my spring break, blowing off steam in the evening by watching Vargskelethor, aka Vinesauce Joel, play Leurak's Google-Translated Pokemon Yellow. I'd heard of something like it before, but didn't see it full-on until this moment.

It astounded me. The act of producing what had seemed to me like top-tier humor (keep in mind I was in highschool at this time) through as little an effort as just putting text through Google Translate. I was sure to stop by for any subsequent stream of the hack, and even did art for it one time, though the piece got banned from the booru for a lack of polish.

Sometime soon afterward, I gave CoilSnake a run, intending to apply this treatment to Earthbound. The output was there, but it seemed like a pretty hefty task to me, with the large amount of text to do, the control codes and formatting in the way, and to top it all off, I soon found out a Google Translate Earthbound hack already existed.

Not too long after this, my thoughts turned to Metroid Fusion. I was already in the Discord for this game and Zero Mission's hacking community, MAGconst, which was private at the time, and I only got the invite because I replied to the Metconst forum thread for MAGE, the editor. To step out of the shadows for once, I began to envision using MAGE's text editor to apply the output of Google-Translating the game's text back to the ROM. And there didn't seem to be any other attempts at this particular game, so after a test run of some of the later game texts, I began work on everything else.

The translation process was simple--take the original, place it into the input side, switch the sides around while changing the output language, fix the control codes (which I didn't bother removing before translating), profit. Every text I could find was done this way, aside from some unused strings. This took about a day or so, then two nights were spent on a playtest run to snuff out any issues.

Thursday the 31st, in the afternoon, I released the hack onto Metconst. In the days that followed, it got some attention, some people playing/streaming. It was lauded for the nonsensically humorous script. This was a new experience to me, seeing people have such genuine enjoyment for something I made. Other than a quick update where I learned some graphics editing to do the status screen's text and some other minor tweaks, this was the hack.

And...that's it. The story of how I made a text hack, really. Not the most interesting thing I can talk about considering more recent ventures. Like...it's a Google Translate hack. Where I didn't even remove the line breaks before translating. Hell, it's not even technically my own sense of humor that's being presented, anyway.

What is more interesting is where the experience I gained making this hack subsequently took me:

  • I looked more into Metroid hacking stuff that year, mainly getting into GBAtroid music hacking. But I also started looking at disassembled bank logs for Metroid II, and, noticing the lack of info for this game at the time, made some hex tweaks based off my findings there. This trained me in debugging ROMs with BGB and making sense of binary data.
  • I also spent a good portion of the next year or so giving the Google Translate treatment to the Prime series, with Prime 1's being an even bigger hit especially. The one I did for Prime 3 was particularly beneficial to my skills, as I dealt with a custom audio format editable with a fork of Audacity, which I also needed to fix with my own quick program to make the files play in-game.
  • The Prime 3 experience helped me with a quick detour to the then-untranslated Pokemon Mystery Dungeon WiiWare games, where I spent several weeks making sense of the custom compression format and writing a tool to unpack it. I also spent a bit of time familiarizing myself with Ghidra, then just a few months old in the public space, to research the game's inner workings, doing it on my own this time, without the resources I had for the Metroid stuff.
  • This eventually caught the eye of Specialagentape, who already had a team working on a translation patch in near-total secrecy, and some contact with him and another team member ultimately led me to helping out with something they were missing--increasing the team name and nickname character limit. I found hex tweaks for this based on my Ghidra research, and the patch launched with almost everything implemented, with some hotfixes filling in the gaps. It felt quite great to contribute to something serious for a change of pace.
  • Back to Metroid II, I also developed a little toolkit to export/import music data via assembly code, exporting with a Python script, importing with a batch script using RGBDS's overlay feature to inject right into the ROM. This helped me with the second entry in the Samus Goes to the Fridge series, among the other things I learned from researching Metroid II.
  • Further assistance with Specialagentape's ventures eventually led him to showing me a WIP colorization hack of Donkey Kong Land. It amazed me he was already tackling something bigger than I'd ever done at that point, so I got inspired to try this myself. I retooled my batch script from the Metroid II music thing for a colorization of Kirby's Pinball Land, which I pumped out after a few weeks, then did Faceball 2000. Again, taking from an earlier venture to produce something new.
  • And then...Dream Land 2. I thought it was a natural way to branch out coming from Pinball Land, so I began research on the game, got sidetracked by others, eventually started code for the game, got sidetracked by others, backburner'd work for this big project and spent my free time on smaller things, then began to seriously look at it again and work through it, and get it out to much applause.

And to think it's all pretty much cumulative of the path I began from a Google Translate hack.

Here's to five years of me starting down that path.


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