This is the first time Dreamcast owners can play it in a more understandable way (and I don't understand why some users are boycotting the translation due to the AI used in the translation work, but that's beside the point). Playing SGGG, we can all see how brave Sega was at the time. I'm still shocked that Sony had such good marketing around the PS2 launch, so users could trust them to wait - and NOT buy - a Dreamcast. The Dreamcast had already great games (Jet Set Radio! MSR! Shenmue! RECV! and many more!), great online features, and its architecture was so well thought out.
> and I don't understand why some users are boycotting the translation due to the AI used in the translation work, but that's beside the point
Segagaga has a ton of obscure, referential, meta humor that isn't easily translated to English. The "cleaned up machine translation" approach means that a lot of this is lost. Looking at some screenshots of the game, the script seems stiff and overly formal, much like how direct machine translation of Japanese text reads. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2jjromh55tf7pp7s4hsvurf4/po... Obviously it's better than nothing, but people are pissed off because the "edited machine translation" workflow leads to poor results, not because of some reflexive anti-AI bias or whatever.
It was much easier to pirate games on the Dreamcast - the copy protection was broken to the degree that you could just burn a game to a CD-R and play it without any speciality hardware mods. It being both a piracy free-for-all and also a catastrophic commercial failure doesn't seem to fit what you're saying.
Lol what? You got it the other way around. Also out of the dozen or so friends in my friend group who had a PS2, none of us had a modded PS2 or pirated games.
The PS2 was popular on its own and it wasn't related to piracy.
What are you talking about? The Dreamcast didn't even have adequate copy protection. I switched my entire collection to backups at some point to preserve the integrity of the original discs.
On one hand, I'm happy this got translated and love the dreamcast. On the other, this game is so weird I doubt the translation holds a candle to the original
> this really was the white whale translation of the Dreamcast library, there was a lot riding on this project
I don't understand... what is riding on this?
I have never heard of this game, but based on this blog post I can see why it's a "white whale". It's precisely why I don't think this was a good use of AI at all.
Amazing technical achievement, and also a very unfortunate situation with the reliance on AI translation. I'm not privy to the details of the actual translation process (whether AI translation was really just a technical placeholder or actually the draft for the real translation), but the criticism online has been scathing.
The article says "Something important that should be clarified before we move on is that machine translation (specifically a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT 4o/4.5) was used during the initial hacking phase for testing purposes. Once it was time to translate the game proper, multiple human translators then took over."
Fan translations have used Babel Fish or similar during the development process for decades. If the final script isn't AI translated I don't see any issue with that.
This statement still, unfortunately, doesn't clarify whether the final translation was MTPE (machine translation post-editing) or translated from scratch by humans. I'm not a professional translator, but according to those of them I've seen on Bsky and the likes, MTPE greatly hurts both the translation quality and, ironically, the translation speed. It also makes it easier to accidentally recruit translators who don't have a decent enough grasp of the source language.
Screenshots of the translated game do give an impression of edited - or even, at times, unedited - machine translation. What with overly direct word-by-word translations, as well as reasonably obvious references (which the game is chock full of) getting mistranslated as something else entirely. Although those screenshots, of course, are not necessarily representative of the whole script, which was a collaborative effort by many translators.
This is the first time Dreamcast owners can play it in a more understandable way (and I don't understand why some users are boycotting the translation due to the AI used in the translation work, but that's beside the point). Playing SGGG, we can all see how brave Sega was at the time. I'm still shocked that Sony had such good marketing around the PS2 launch, so users could trust them to wait - and NOT buy - a Dreamcast. The Dreamcast had already great games (Jet Set Radio! MSR! Shenmue! RECV! and many more!), great online features, and its architecture was so well thought out.
> and I don't understand why some users are boycotting the translation due to the AI used in the translation work, but that's beside the point
Segagaga has a ton of obscure, referential, meta humor that isn't easily translated to English. The "cleaned up machine translation" approach means that a lot of this is lost. Looking at some screenshots of the game, the script seems stiff and overly formal, much like how direct machine translation of Japanese text reads. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2jjromh55tf7pp7s4hsvurf4/po... Obviously it's better than nothing, but people are pissed off because the "edited machine translation" workflow leads to poor results, not because of some reflexive anti-AI bias or whatever.
The reason the PS2 was successful it was because it was very easy to unblock it and use pirated games.
The Dreamcast wasn't as easy as I can remember.
It was much easier to pirate games on the Dreamcast - the copy protection was broken to the degree that you could just burn a game to a CD-R and play it without any speciality hardware mods. It being both a piracy free-for-all and also a catastrophic commercial failure doesn't seem to fit what you're saying.
Lol what? You got it the other way around. Also out of the dozen or so friends in my friend group who had a PS2, none of us had a modded PS2 or pirated games.
The PS2 was popular on its own and it wasn't related to piracy.
What are you talking about? The Dreamcast didn't even have adequate copy protection. I switched my entire collection to backups at some point to preserve the integrity of the original discs.
On one hand, I'm happy this got translated and love the dreamcast. On the other, this game is so weird I doubt the translation holds a candle to the original
> this really was the white whale translation of the Dreamcast library, there was a lot riding on this project
I don't understand... what is riding on this?
I have never heard of this game, but based on this blog post I can see why it's a "white whale". It's precisely why I don't think this was a good use of AI at all.
Amazing technical achievement, and also a very unfortunate situation with the reliance on AI translation. I'm not privy to the details of the actual translation process (whether AI translation was really just a technical placeholder or actually the draft for the real translation), but the criticism online has been scathing.
The article says "Something important that should be clarified before we move on is that machine translation (specifically a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT 4o/4.5) was used during the initial hacking phase for testing purposes. Once it was time to translate the game proper, multiple human translators then took over."
Fan translations have used Babel Fish or similar during the development process for decades. If the final script isn't AI translated I don't see any issue with that.
This statement still, unfortunately, doesn't clarify whether the final translation was MTPE (machine translation post-editing) or translated from scratch by humans. I'm not a professional translator, but according to those of them I've seen on Bsky and the likes, MTPE greatly hurts both the translation quality and, ironically, the translation speed. It also makes it easier to accidentally recruit translators who don't have a decent enough grasp of the source language.
Screenshots of the translated game do give an impression of edited - or even, at times, unedited - machine translation. What with overly direct word-by-word translations, as well as reasonably obvious references (which the game is chock full of) getting mistranslated as something else entirely. Although those screenshots, of course, are not necessarily representative of the whole script, which was a collaborative effort by many translators.